Why “Stranger Things” isn’t Strange Enough

CAUTION: Spoilers ahead.

Stranger Things used to be an entertaining novelty. At first capturing the essence of The Goonies with a more compelling villain, they understandably attempted to jump on the misfit antihero bandwagon but landed on a formulaic plot and superficial characters.

With millions of people watching, the writers have a certain responsibility, a duty to perform. Though entertaining at points, they failed their audience. Stranger Things is built on tired tropes with stunted writing and a glaring psychological irresponsibility.

Stranger Things is built on tired tropes

The use of the Red Scare for this season’s human corollary of villain is understandable and plays nicely with the 80’s hits the soundtrack boasts. Sure, the 80s loved making Russians the villains, and yes there is one brief scene in season 1 in which we see Eleven being used while in captivity to spy on a Russian spy, but the sudden expansion in this season feels like a contrived villain to drive the plot, a sort of Diabolus ex machina. The Russians were the driver of the entire season: cause (Mind Flayer’s re-entry) and content (the Starcourt Mall Russian military operation) without any depth.

The use of Russians also gives us the most lovable character on the show, Alexei, aka Smirnoff. Alexei, unfortunately, is himself a typical 80s satirization of Russians: easily turned to treason through his love of American culture when offered ICEEs, Looney Tunes, and a local fair. Whether intentional or not, this trope plays into a toxic form of nationalism that reduces all other cultures to potential converts to Americanism. A problematic outcome of a tongue-in-cheek characterization.

Beyond the Russians, the main characters are themselves incarnations of tropes: Hopper is [spoiler: was?] an angry, yelling, brutish man. The nuances of his character are shades of aggressive. Joyce is an irrational, yelling, helpless woman. She can’t throw and ruins the car. Their relationship: shouting because of the sexual tension. This is poor writing. 1980s gender roles or not, men don’t have to be portrayed as emotionally inept, and women don’t have to be portrayed as irrational and helpless.

The feeble depiction of relationships extended to the kids. Too much time was spent dealing with the trivialities of young love. It felt as though the storyboard just said, “men are from Mars; women are from Venus” and they pounded out the script from that in about an hour.

Separately, if these pre-teen relationships were written to be relatable to that audience, I have trouble negotiating the sudden increase in gore depicted in this season versus the previous seasons. It felt like the anticipated audience was older than those relationship dynamics appeal to. Perhaps this is just my naiveté when it comes to the sophistication of most adult relationships. Either way, the gore with the amateurish writing of teenage relationship dynamics seemed misaligned.

While tropes can be entertaining to use, and even a compelling meta-critique of genre and medium, they were unsupported by any depiction of expertise. Instead, they came across as tired tropes for an uncritical audience.

Stranger Things didn’t mature even as much as the adolescents it depicts

I obviously feel strongly that the novelty of the first season has by now worn off and the trope-filled formula is all that remains. I do try to give the writers credit for the first season, but it feels redundant at this point. Indeed, it is specifically the decline into season three that reveals season one was novelty not quality.

As I have already said, it is entertaining enough to get through, and the novelty of the villain and the Upside Down are still a curiosity. There’s a simplicity to telling the story through children as well that adds a lightheartedness to the darkness of the show, but everybody knows that showing the monster can ruin a horror movie. We saw the monster. We needed more.

The monster needed to offer more to the story. It could cast some sort of relief upon the other characters; a la Guillermo del Toro, we could look straight at the monster and understand just how different and yet somehow so similar it is to humanity. Or, the writers could further develop the Upside Down and the Mind Flayer to make them more compelling variables rather than just the source of the conflict.

I suspect that this season was disappointing for the same reasons some people don’t like The Goonies: the novelty of children’s adventure wears off quickly if not combined with meaningful exploration of the variables at play. Plumb the depths of the fears incarnated in the monster and its world. Examine the universally relatable liminal stages between childhood and adulthood of the main characters. Do literally anything meaningful. If you don’t explore in a substantive way the experiences these children are having during one of the most formative times of their lives, it flattens the experience, the story, and the characters themselves.

Stranger Things is psychologically irresponsible

Almost all of the characters are going through formative experiences as part of their regular life, not least of which are the adolescents at the forefront. Navigating the social and physical developments during this time is challenging enough. Add to this the physical and psychological trauma of veritable war with both this- and other-worldly evil forces, and you have the makings of profound trauma.

If someone goes through something profound and it is summarized by a shallow retelling, the profundity is lost and the person appears superficial.

We see some tension amongst the kids — between the boys and girls, most notably, and also between Will and the others. The boys vs. girls is an expectedly silly relationship issue kids might face, with a brief female empowerment shtick (unfortunately typified by a consumer performance of empowerment, spying, and a lack of communication). Will’s issues, while potentially symptomatic of PTSD and arrested development, more overtly manifest as concerns over no longer being children as he is not ready to join Mike, Lucas, and Dustin in their more adult interests.

These frustrations are a problem with growing up, but they do not exhibit an appropriate response to the trauma they have faced. Perhaps that is the much darker and more sinister issue: the symptoms are not obvious and no one is in counseling or processing their trauma in any meaningful way.

I realize counseling may not have been a common option at that time. I certainly understand the distance psychology has come in even 30 years, both in its science and its social acceptance. It’s also the case, though, that Stranger Things had an opportunity to rewrite our history a bit, and to hold up the weight it carries as a massively popular show: demonstrating the effects of trauma on individuals and a community, and exploring the many ways people seek to cope (healthy and unhealthy).

There is such a tremendous amount of psychological development of these characters that they are missing. Sure, have the preteen heartache and love story, but don’t spend so much time playing it out. It is not significant character development like the writers seem to think, and it’s only relatable to a small fraction of the audience (to whom it is probably irresponsible to appeal only to have them traumatized by grotesque images and gore). This sub-plot only ended up offering sad examples of gendered stereotypes for relating, and even depicted Max overtly socializing Eleven into gendered expectations of response.

Perhaps we could offer more complex characters who move beyond these backward social expectations. Perhaps it’s accurate to the era, but we should provide healthier examples of options rather than just writing the stereotypes because it’s easier. Perhaps the writers don’t know any better.

In reality, the psychological development they should be working through has far less to do with the normal awkward transition from child to teen. The more important piece to explore is the profound traumas these kids were exposed to in seasons 1 and 2. They should all be in counseling. Mike would probably be overly explosive and aggressive toward Eleven in having seen so much violence and in needing her to be his protection in a culture of toxic masculinity (especially if we’re allowing the tropes to direct character development). The fear and turbulence of realizing another reality exists with powerful, violent creatures is enough to destabilize anyone. Seeing friends and loved ones die at the hands of this should engender some grief (which we only see in Wynona Ryder, the woman, sometimes). And knowing there are secret government agencies working to harness terrifying power should create some suspicion and conspiratorial tendencies. Yet none of this is addressed.

It’s only in the last episode that we finally see some processing. The goodbyes to friends and the sad letter from Hopper. Yet again, a superficial response to profound circumstances only stunting the development of the characters depicted.

While Stranger Things was entertaining, entertaining is insufficient. It was built on tropes reflecting its stunted writing, and did a disservice to the millions of people watching in failing to account for the psychological realities of the narrative. In season 3, the writers rested on the laurels we found out they never had.