Stranger Things 4.2

Honestly a lot of my comments about the first part of this season still apply. Perhaps that’s inevitable when you have a 7-2 split in the number of episodes, roughly a 7-3 split in the number of hours.

What this split really gave us was a reveal that acted as a mini-climax, then a second true climax to the season.

For part two, the story largely abandons good plotting in favour of tugging on our emotions. They do a good job of that, I cared about what happened to the characters individually and, to some extent, in their little groups. But in that last phrase lies the problem I had. In 4.1 we had groups of Hopper, Joyce and Murray, the California kids and the Hawkins kids as four groups, that merged down to three when Hopper, Joyce and Murray merged into a single group. This section really undoes that as all those groups split up again.

I understand the idea that the various groups completing their tasks interact through the Upside Down to help each other in ways they can’t really know (with the exception of Eleven who understands her way around the Upside Down after all). The problem is, I kept shouting to myself an old, old D&D player’s warning “split up, we can do more damage that way.” This might sound like a positive not a warning, but - and this might be a very British thing - it’s a warning; if we split up we’ll have more damage done to us. There’s a military strategy called “defeat your enemy in detail” where you bring bigger numbers against smaller ones so you defeat each “detail” easily and move on to the next one. (Although it’s a tasteless comment, Russia’s recent actions in the invasion of Ukraine is an example of this. They couldn’t cope with the whole of Ukraine, but now they’ve concentrated on Luhansk, and presumably Donbas next, things are going rather better for them and, sadly, worse for Ukraine.) If you split up, in D&D, because the fights are gauged to be a challenge for the party the DM will easily defeat each detail, each subsection of the party, and you’re in trouble… for a group with as many D&D players as they have, this plan sucked. I understand it made the drama work but it felt like they undermined the characters for the drama and that, in turn, undermined the drama for me. The points at which the various groups got into peril made me feel more “I told you so” than “OMG, NO!” I understand I might be in a minority here, but it was my reaction and not what they were going for.

I also have some qualms about the way they handled the two characters who decided to make a sacrifice. One was male and had a clear, clean sacrifice arc. The other was female and had an arc that left her in a coma. I understand that there are other issues here, in TV land, with contracts and so on, but the initial appearance is treating the boys differently to the girls.

We’ve also run into the problems that Covid caused, really hard this time. Every actor has grown from a teen into a young adult. In some of them that’s ok, they were older, so they’ve just left school and got jobs, and that had already happened in season three and it’s fairly organic, because they’ve moved from being 19 to 20 while the actors have moved from 22-ish to 25-ish and it’s not too bad. In others, they’re meant to be a year older, but they’re actually three years older, and that’s a huge difference when the bulk of your actors are this age. Will has basically skipped from a child to a young adult, with nothing in between. Puberty happened for the actor but not the character. Eleven has changed from a girl of 14 to a fairly curvy young woman of 17 and so on. They got round that in part one with clothing choices, in part two she’s in quite tight-fitting clothes and it’s rather harder to ignore. She’s 17 playing 14 but she looks like a 17 year old, not a 14 year old.

I’m pleased to say that Robin got some more quality queer girl time though, although she also had moments when she felt like they’d put her on team older boys which still wasn’t great. But overall better than 4.1.

Bechdel Test: Pass. For all the same reasons as before.

Ko Test: Pass. Erica is back in full force in these two episodes. Although they’re pretty long, even if we judge her by the full five scenes for a film, they pass.

Russo Test: Pass. Both episodes clearly and visibly pass all three stages. There’s no “I know Robin is queer” here, she’s shown to be in both episodes. This is an ensemble show, so she doesn’t dominate the camera in the same way Calliope and Juliet do in First Kiss for example, but she’s clearly on a pretty even footing with everyone else, and has her important moments, she’s not just the gay one. Will might not be canonically gay, but they’ve certainly written him in such a way that he presents as such too.