…the fuck
I knew this was happening and I still didn’t know this was happening
goddddd nooooo blehhhhhh
only a couple of episodes in but definitely not feeling the new stranger things
fwiw i was dragged into watching the series and only enjoyed season 3, where the extreme traumatic horror and melodrama felt appropriately balanced out by the cartoony goofiness of everything else. i liked that more adults were involved, the girls were more assertive and it wasn’t just excessively gloomy for no apparent reason. also the pacing was tight as hell (almost no scene felt wasteful) and the setpieces were pretty clever
this one just seems thin on ideas
3 Likes
me and my partner usually dunk-watch stranger things but i don’t know if i have it in me when the episodes are all between 75 and 150 minutes long
5 Likes
yeah I thought S1 and S3 at least were tight enough to get away with being such aggressive pastiche, even if that made it, like, the Ur-Netflix show in a way that obviously sucks in terms of market dynamics.
this one being so insanely bloated is at least consistent with where Netflix is at
Feels like even with the warning before the first episode, they couldn’t have picked a worse imaginable week to debut this season.
Watching it since I don’t have much else to do right now. It’s…more of this show, with a lot of the same snarky humor jarring hard against the more serious/dour tone they’re trying for.
Honestly can’t believe they’re still gonna do another season! Hell, this is only half of season four, right?
1 Like
two episodes in and this is pretty bad! I would say like fully 2/3 of the subplots don’t work at all (like late season game of thrones), there’s way too many characters and no meaningful remaining character moments that aren’t just fake pathos, a bloated music budget, crappy treatment of the satanic panic aspects… the first season felt actually fresh, the third salvaged enough kitsch fun to work, this feels like someone condescendingly describing the 80s at like a sub-VH1 level of cultural literacy
early judgment is 1 > 3 >> 2 >> 4
I’d like to think they can at least make it fun enough by the time the pacing ramps up that I won’t mind having it on in the background but idk folks
3 Likes
ironically a lot of the characters they introduced in seasons 2 and 3 (Ethan Hawke’s daughter, the Jewish guy from fleabag, the redhead girl) are carrying most of the only good scenes at this point, because the original cast is locked into all these shitty plot arcs
3 Likes
I haven’t watched this new season yet but I can’t believe this is another thing we agree on, season 2 was atrocious
2 Likes
Whaddya mean, was playing Bon Jovi’s “Runaway” as Eleven runs…away, to an extremely Atlanta-looking Chicago, too on the nose?
I don’t know why they’re holding back the last two episodes at this point other than it being some sort of subscription retention plan for quarterly reports.
Everything in this season is just so fucking long and drawn out. Really feels like they coulda done a lot of this in half the time.
I still don’t get how Brenner is still alive, though it’s been a long, long time since I’ve watched the first season. Once it’s clear that he’s not the big bad, and that whatever is plaguing them had to have ties to Robert Englund’s character + Eleven, the shady orderly is really the only possible link, and boy howdy do they hammer that home for like the last half hour of this sorta-last episode.
Also gotta love how the sorta inept mom who can’t keep track of her kids or hold down a job has thwarted the KGB twice now?
thinking about this actually makes me more annoyed because I thought S1 Winona Ryder actually did, like, a shockingly good job of portraying a single mom on a limited income who was worried for her child, and the joy division music cues actually backed up a very good performance! this is poopoo
6 Likes
i feel like the warm feelings i had about season 1 immediately disappeared once season 3 of Twin Peaks happened
2 Likes
Yeah Winona was the best part of s1. I haven’t watched the others but no one ever says anything about her anymore, I just assumed she was no longer on it?
she is, she just doesn’t get to give a real performance anymore
3 Likes
show was shit in season one and it’s only gotten worse 
5 Likes
god this sucks
some real direct-to-video shit
spiders are still scary right? uhhh what about a ticking clock … of doom?
1 Like
Hahaha, they…they explain it, in that seventh episode. Really just beat you over the head with it in the last half hour. It feels like they came up with the visuals and worked backwards from there, to justify them.
I feel like the worst thing about this season is that, for the $270 million budget (!) and excessive run times, it’s still spread way too thin. I don’t really give a shit what’s going on with the California crew, the Byers boys in particular having done jack shit this season, unless Will’s painting is an unforseen deus ex machina that’ll fix everything.
The stoner guy feels way too cliche to be any good, but I do like Eddie. He’s been fun. And Maya Hawke is still doing alright, it just felt like she had more to do last season.
If anything, this season has just made it kinda hard to give a shit about the original core cast. They’ve made too many good Poochies each season, where I’m wondering where they are and what they’re doing whenever they’re not on screen, to the point they even briefly brought back Billy, which I guess was OK, but I was wondering if they would!
2 Likes
I watched the first episode. It was almost forgivable in the first season, but at this point it is downright embarrassing that D&D games are such a central part of the plots of these shows and the duffer brothers have still, obviously, never played D&D
Like, at least they’ve stopped referring to a single session as a ‘campaign’ this time around, but no one has ever tried to gatekeep someone from playing D&D with them by asking ‘what class and level are you?’
7 Likes
I like the absence of imagination that leads one to license elegia for a funeral montage
1 Like
seriously? you could have convinced me it were the cheapest. then again pirates of the caribbean 4 is the most expensive film ever made and i don’t remember one scene
yeah i miss Billy, even if i thought he was too much at first