“The end is the end. There are no do-overs”
So typical of me to watch this as a joke and then turn out to actually have things to say about it.
The thing you have to understand is that previous to going to see this in a theater, the extent of my Stranger Things experience was that the pilot was on in the background during a first date makeout session nine years ago. So I though it would be funny to just go in among an entire theater full of rabid fans and experience exactly none of the catharsis of finishing a long running story they’ve been emotionally invested in for years.
And I don’t know if people even realize just how big an event this was. My local AMC had a screening starting roughly every 15 minutes from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., and ALL of them were at about 95% capacity.
Making an estimated $28,000,000 in box office off of a show that, for all intents and purposes, people could already watch at home for “free” is quite the feat.
Point being that this had a certain cultural cache that it’s difficult to imagine any modern show to replicate. In its own way, Stranger Things may have been the last of a dying breed. Certainly, it’s hard to imagine anything quite like this happening again anytime soon.
Just as well, since I’m pretty sure this was actually kind of bad.
Or, to put it in more nuanced terms: I suspect it was probably successful at what it was trying to do. But that’s an entirely different thing from its actual level of quality.
The first thing that became clear to me within minutes of settling in is that this was clearly a show that got way bigger than it was ever intended to be.
Not popularity-wise; I mean, story-wise.
The story starts with Linda Hamilton, whose character basically does nothing in the whole movie. Then it moves to a two minute scene with two characters who don’t show up again except maybe as background characters with no lines at the end. And then another pair of characters at a hospital, one of whom essentially disappears from the narrative the moment the other character is needed for the main plot.
There are so many fucking characters in this thing.
So what I will say is that none of this makes the story hard to follow. Despite never really having seen a single episode of the show, at no point was I confused about what was happening, or why.
Mind you, this could be evidence of the Duffer Brothers grasp of the fundamentals of narrative storytelling; or, alternatively, it could simply be that their pool of ideas is not actually that deep. Hell, could even be both, it’s not like the two concepts are mutually exclusive. The point is, this is not going to be a full-on scorched earth excoriation of the show or its creators; credit where credit is due, there are things they are actually good at.
What they do not have a good handle on, is dialogue.
So the unwieldy structure of the first act essentially involves everyone getting into position to enact their desperate plan. And because there are so many characters/moving parts, there’s this awkward structure to it where there will be reams of exposition to situate the audience in terms of what’s happening right now and what needs to happen next; followed by two of the characters pairing off to have ‘Interpersonal Character Moments’, presumably to pay off subplots or arcs or what-have-you.
It’s staggering in its clunkiness, and occasionally cringe inducing; while the heart to hearts are mostly trite, first draft-ass bullshit. But the attempts at humor are out and out painful. I know these 30-year olds are supposed to be high schoolers, but making them say dialogue that feels like it was actually written by high schoolers is, frankly, a yard too far.
Of course, being an outsider, I was “watching” the audience just as much as I was the movie, and it was hard to tell whether they were laughing with this stuff, or at it.
For the good of the future, I’m kind of hoping it was “at”.
But here’s where things actually get interesting; the point at which things finally started happening is when I actually started to be able to put my reservations aside and actually get into the proceedings.
This is why I’m not quite willing to be dismissive about the Duffer Brothers and their fundamentals. Even without any investment in the characters or the stakes, the action and suspense beats are well-executed enough that they still land regardless. And, yes, there’s a sense in which this is damning with faint praise. But I cannot stress enough how the standards for so-called blockbuster entertainment have dropped to the point where most directors cannot actually manage this. I am no longer in the business of looking gift horses in the mouth.
And yet, there’s still the sense that this massive, effects laden explosion fest with helicopters and giant spiders made of distressed tree bark is miles away from the charms of whatever was going on in that first season that people so loved. I’m watching all this, and my reptile brain is appreciating it, and let the thought lingers that the characters (and, by extension, the actors) weren’t really built to be the leads of this type of story. And not in a subversive way, but in a “the ambitions of the creators scaled up in a way that wasn’t commensurate with the skill set of the actors they started out with”. And bless them, they’re all doing their best. And with no shortage of enthusiasm, even as all the CGI threatens to swallow them up entirely. But even so, it’s difficult to escape the feeling that this isn’t at all what they signed up for.
Mind you, all of this played like gangbusters with the audience. They gasped in all the places they were clearly meant to gasp, and cheered in all the places they were clearly meant to cheer. There are split second rescues, dramatic entrances, and some fat kid named Derek that the audience really went nuts over. Good for him, honestly!
It’s been quite a while since I’ve been in this sort of environment, a full theater of people getting, seemingly, exactly what they wanted. It’s hard not to get caught up in that a little, even if your narrative conscientious brain can never entirely stop pointing out the shoddy, patchwork construction of it all.
To that point: the dramatic conflict of the story actually ends about 2/3rds of the way through the movie. The big bad, Vecna, is impaled by the children and then has his head chopped off with an axe by Winona Ryder who, like everyone else, has somehow been here the whole time.
It is at this point that I must make an aside to point out two things. First. this is not what one would call a clean decapitation; Ryder probably busts out a dozen or so swings of that thing before heads literally roll. It is a disconcerting, though apparently cathartic, degree of violent victory.
And I can say this with at least some authority, because of aside number two, which is that this sequence was accompanied by one of the most blood curdling screams I have ever heard. Some young woman in the audience made a sound that, only after 18 or so hours of contemplation, was I able to recognize as the same sort of scream one would hear at a BTS concert. And I cannot stress to you enough how unsettling it is to hear that sort of sound coming out of one single person instead of a group of 14-year olds at like, Madison Square Garden. Jesus Christ, people, time and a place.
Sorry, where was I…?
Oh, right, third act problems.
I suppose I’m being a little unfair here; yes, the main antagonist is butchered with another 45 minutes of story to go, but for all I keep referring to this as a movie for the sake of convenience (and as clearly that the Duffer Brothers would much rather be making movies than TV shows), this is the end of a long running series. You can’t just resolve the conflict, you have to give the audience a chance to say goodbye to the characters they’ve grown to love. And so there’s an “18 months later” epilogue where we catch up with our heroes and see how they’re doing in the aftermath of all their trials and losses.
We’ll get to how all this played in a moment, but for me this was perhaps the only time during the entire experience that I got an idea of why people might miss this show.
However sloppy the actual execution, it cannot be denied that the first two thirds of this finale barreled through with the paying off of all the threads that had required paying off. And judging from the sporadic yet enthusiastic bursts of applause, the audience rather seemed to appreciate the effort. But the larger point is that the blockbuster spectacle of it all wouldn’t have felt cathartic in the first place if there was no investment in the characters. And, to an outsider such as myself, this was the thing that felt missing up until now.
And… it was fine, I guess.
Again, there was an element of this that was to be expected; I have not been following these characters for the past nine years. I am poorly equipped to gauge how satisfying it is seeing how these characters ultimately wind up from wherever they started. Does that anti-authority speech the nerdy one gives at graduation show how far he’s come? Does the one dude wanting to become a filmmaker resonate backwards from his very first arrival? And, perhaps more importantly, are any of the actors selling me on this stuff so that even if I haven’t been there, I can at least see the shape of it?
Maya Hawke, Winona Ryder, David Harbour? Yeah, sure.
Everyone else…?
Not so much.
Regardless, this is how it ends; forty minutes of closure and a thematic passing of the torch. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one reminded of the final act of Return Of The King, famously roasted in its day for the sense of an endless series of endings. And yet… with hindsight, I think we’ve all done the math and recognized that the story would feel incomplete if the movie just ended five minutes after the ring was destroyed.
In a character based show, which this show clearly was at one point, it is not enough to resolve the main conflict; we must also see how the journey has changed the characters who made it to the other side. Their story may be over, but the world that was created lives on, if only in the hearts of the audience and fan fiction authors of varying degrees of talent.
Again, not being a part of the saga from the beginning, this stuff was only ever going to be so effective on me. But here, more than anywhere else, I could at least respect and appreciate the effort. Where much of the action beats felt like box ticking, there was a genuine (if clumsy) sentiment here; here, at last, was the sense that the creators and the actors were going to miss these characters as much as the audience.
When the lights came up, I was surprised that there was little to no applause. There were scattered claps, but mostly people just filed out of the theater in muffled conversation. At the time, I thought that perhaps this was audiences being worn out by the sheer amount of Getting What They Wanted. But in the days and weeks to come, I would learn of another possibility entirely.
So of course we must now speak of Conformity Gate.
Apologies in advance to those who were previously unaware, but Conformity Gate was a post-finale conspiracy theory, essentially presupposing that… maybe the finale was a trick…?
A certain subset of fans seemingly noticed a series of clues that indicated to them that the reality we were seeing as viewers of the finale was not, in fact, the reality of the show but a false reality implanted by the series villain Vecna.
Now, of course, it is entirely possible that this was just… one of those things. An internet bit that broke containment that was never really intended to be taken seriously.
Regardless of how seriously people did or didn’t take it, I found the entire thing rather surprising. This is not my first time at the series finale rodeo, and whatever my problems with the episode as a piece of entertainment, it could not have been clearer to me that this was an extremely earnest attempt to give the fans what they want. And, judging from the audience I saw it with, it really did seem like they more or less succeeded. But maybe it’s just no longer possible to end this sort of thing satisfyingly. Maybe the way we’ve learned to love our media in this modern age means we can no longer brook having our expectations subverted or validated.
Because say all this was true; say Netflix was doing a nine digit rope-a-dope, and was all set to release a second, real finale.
What would this finale possibly do differently than the fake one?
I don’t know that there’s even any comprehensible answer to that that isn’t just some abstract variation on ‘be better’.
In the end, it’s patently obvious that the show people were so dedicated to is not the same show they were watching the finale of. The show they were watching instead was a thing grown unwieldy with the bloat of a simple tale stretched out beyond its intended size and shape. Because the truth is, we never love anything big. What actually happens is we start by loving something small, and that thing grows to accommodate our love. But a big thing is, inevitably, a harder thing to love. Or, at the very least, it is no longer the thing that we fell in love with.
Stranger Things was, in fact, huge. The kind of huge where millions of people paid good money to see it in a theater despite it already being available completely free at home. I don’t know that any show will ever quite be that big again. It is the last remnant of a time since passed. Hell of a lot to live up to. And such a shame that in the end, it simply couldn’t.
Then again, what do I know?
I never even watched the thing.
