Spoilery thoughts on the pop-culural phenomenom of Stranger Things season five
The Janice Byers character finally gets to step up and do something. Oh, thamk gods...she's not just worrying anymore, but fighting!
The requisite ginger character, fan-favourite Max (Sadie Sink) gets to go full wild Irish, grow her hair out and talk with more of an Irish lilt. Big fan. Only so much Kate Bush we can hear as a refrain, though.
Turns out Will Byers' constant weeping in often-flabby season four is actually purposeful, as his role is clarified and developed beyond simple abductee.
Supersweet dork Maya Hawke's character Robin gets to show her brainy superpower and have a Big Gay Team-up with Will Byers!
Maya is a fascinating hybrid of her folks, Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman (just learned this). Quirky, awkward, she acts more like a teenager than the whole lot.
The main kids get to all hero up, as mentors, and even all the parents get a moment to show their courage.
Many heroic moments, even for fat bully kids and newer characters.
Full-tilt boogie horror at one plot point. Yowzer!
The antagonist even gets fleshed out. Looks a little like an Alan Moore Swamp Thing, though.
Enjoyable! Bad hair, great action and fine character development. Expected blend of action, mystery, humour, horror. Tighter by far than season four. How about them suburban moms and dads staring down danger? Features adults obviously too big to play kids, but hey—call it the Harry Potter Franchise Effect and move on? Still, quite dug it.
I have always had a complicated relationship with this show, as it occurs in the early eighties and my first horror novel Town & Train is set in summer 1990 but has few nostalgic trappings, being at the end of that decade.
I wrote (and rewrote) my novel long before Stranger Things became the reason to get a new entertainment platform called Netflix.
There are similarities, for sure. Small-town horror. Kids researching microfiche at the library, and also a library with bannisters out front and old staircase leading to the entrance. A teenager lying to the parent of a kid they know won't be coming back. Bullies tormenting high-high school kids (although my bully Christian "Cutter" Hartley is a metalhead. The use of pop music to describe a character's state of mind.
I am fairly certain that unless the Duff brothers read Town & Train, and found inspirations there, that they also grew up in the suburbs, gobbled up Stephen King at formative slage, are about my age, and wanted to make some great horror about small-town life.
What the show lacks that my novel does not lack is including Indigenous characters. My guys, Tommy Two Rivers and Bruck Naticoke, hail from Akwesasne Reserve. As welll my minor players include Francophone characters such as Sergeant Leroux. I infuse the tale with characteristic Canadian feel in terms of the idioms my characters use, and some of their prevailing attitudes refflect living im a down-on-its-luck Canadian town.
