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Notes -
Woke Trappings versus Woke Story
I thought Stranger Things wrapped up nicely and the finale was great. The pre-final episode received the lowest ratings and reception in the entire series, with a lot of commentators claiming the entire series was ruined, but the finale was great television. It's true the pre-final episode was not great due to the fact it was dedicated to setting up the 2 hour finale, but the overreaction to that episode is mostly driven by one of the characters named Will coming out as gay, and making that central to his personal story and character growth needed to win the entire conflict. The surface-level criticisms are true, the scene was terrible, it was LGBT propaganda, sure. And my woke radar is as fine-tuned as anyone, but I find anti-woke observers become too hung up on woke trappings rather than critically analyzing the story itself.
The Stranger Things story itself is not necessarily woke, it's 1980s nostalgia blended with fish-out-of-water, heroes journey, coming-of-age, revenge, fantasy, and all the elements that audiences tend to like and that is carried through the end. I would contrast that with IT: Welcome to Derry in which the story itself is Woke and it ruins the series.
But I think those complaining about Woke elements in Stranger Things - this never would have happened in the 1980s!, the multiple LGBT characters and their acceptance by everyone in the story, the feminism, etc. They miss the point that 1980s culture did lead to these things. Sure, the transition was slower than is symbolically represented in the show; in the show the transition happens rapidly, without resistance, and faster among the characters in the story than it did in American culture. But the fact is American culture did follow the cultural trajectory depicted in Stranger Things which warps up 1989. So the show depicts an accelerated cultural trajectory going out of the 80s into the 90s and 2000s, which are cultural changes that actually happened.
Although I do like a lot of parts of 1980s American culture, the vapidness in that culture which triggers our nostalgia reaction did lead to these things the anti-woke commentators are complaining about being featured in the show. 1980s culture led to 90s culture, and so on until we are right here. The lesson isn't "Great Hollywood will just wokify everything" the lesson is that 1980s nostalgia is not a good source of inspiration for those who oppose the cultural forces that came out of the 80s and further developed since then. Of course that insight can be backpropagated, is a 1960s muscle car a symbol of a pre-woke culture we must retvrn to, or is it a symbol of cultural decay representing vapid status games, siphoning masculine energy into meaningless pursuits, and materialistic national identity that led exactly where we are?
I haven't watched Season 5, I stopped watching midway through Season 3 when I just lost interest and no longer felt like it was going anywhere, and it seemed to run out of steam by the end of Season 2. Season 1 was brilliant, and artistically they should have stuck with the original plan and made the series an anthology with each season running as a different story set in a different place in a different decade. Cash wise, I probably can't argue with what they did, though, the public screams for slop. The show was basically always going to turn to shit once season 2 was put into the works, there was no way to maintain quality.
Season 1 is brilliant because it interweaves three scifi/horror movie genres simultaneously, the kids are doing ET while the teens are doing a slasher film and Joyce is doing a poltergeist movie. They can't know about each other until the end, because if they did, the parents would quite obviously stop the kids from participating. To do otherwise is to ruin the vibe, because at that point the kids aren't normal kids anymore. I can kind of accept that "one big adventure" gets swept under the rug for both the kids and the deep state abandons the project and they go back to more or less normal as the easiest way forward. You can't do that for five years in a row, it just doesn't make sense. At some point the parents are going to move away, or the deep state arrests everyone in the family or send their kid to military school etc to keep them out of danger.
Simultaneously, there's some genuinely good expectation-subverting storytelling in the slasher plot. Nancy, Johnathan, and Steve are framed as the good girl, the maligned nerdy creep with a heart of gold, and the rich jerk/jock. The classic way this plot works is that the girl starts out with the jerk/jock and then realizes that the creep has a heart of gold, and when the creep acts with heroism in the face of the supernatural danger he gets the girl. Season 1 does a great job subverting our expectations: in the climactic fight, it's Steve who shows up out of nowhere and proves that he has the heart of gold and courage to spare, and afterward he buys Johnathan a camera to replace the one he broke. This is genuinely feminist film-making: Nancy isn't a prize to be won by being right about the monster, she isn't obligated to get with Johnathan because he's proven himself, Steve isn't jealous of their friendship and bond, and Johnathan is happy with that status. This is good storytelling!
So of course they have to fuck it up, and get Nancy and Johnathan together, and turn Steve into the butt monkey over seasons 2 and 3. They don't even do the feminist girlpower slop right!
I don't know if you remember, but this exact same thing happened to Heroes twenty years ago. They had intended for each series to follow a different group of newly-empowered people, but the first season was so good and the characters so popular that the public demanded the same characters come back again.
This was a disaster because a) those characters had finished their major arcs and b) they'd been given completely story-breaking powers that were fine for characters who only learned to use them properly in the last couple of episodes but were disastrous when you need to put them into a new plot. All the real game-breakers had to be nerfed, crippled or otherwise taken off the board in some way, which just made them feel lame.
To be fair, Season 2 of Heroes was legitimately pretty good without too many of these contrivances. In general, though, I would say that showrunners have to accept that the 'anthology' style is unlikely ever to work - anything popular enough to get a second season will have an audience that refuses to let go of their favourite characters.
I never watched Heroes when it was on the air.
I think anthologies work in niches, and I'd like to see them done more. American Horror story is on season 1,000,000 or something, and Nero Wolfe was great for the 18 people who watched it on A&E back in the day. But yeah, there's such a different mindset out there that people just want to see their faves on camera over and over. With production costs presumably dropping in the future, we're all going to have to get better at deciding what stories are canon and which aren't.
What I really miss is episodic tv! Law and Order, you never learned shit about Jerry Orbach, Benjamin Bratt, Sam Waterston or Jessie Martin across decades of murders. Every plot was self contained, you never needed to know what happened in yesterday's episode to watch tonight's, every night's another murder. There was no overarching plot or character development. Suddenly everything needs to build to something.
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