I would say how hard it is to believe that Stranger Things started 10 years ago but honestly it does feel like a while. It was never my favorite show out there and it took me months to finally check out the final episode. Still, I have completed the journey…and I found it lacking. This is one of those shows that was going the wrong way for a very long time and basically ended on a whimper. I’d say part of the problem is that the issues just tend to snowball and at the end of the day this is a show that is very character driven. So if you don’t like the characters then that’s going to hurt the show immensely.

The show begins with a few kids playing Dungeons & Dragons. For the most part they aren’t very popular at school but at least they have each other. Unfortunately one of them goes missing one day. He has been taken to the other side by some kind of a demonic presence. The adults aren’t going to be helpful in this case and can’t really be trusted. The kids will have to find a way to save him along with their friend El who has psychic powers. The kid who went missing is named Will and so his mother decides to go and find him as well. It won’t be easy without any real leads though. The small town of Hawkins is about to go through some real turmoil.

Now this is a show with 5 seasons so you can bet that a whole lot happens in between. At its core you could say this is like a slow burn alien invasion as the creatures keep trying to get to the surface world. The kids are determined to stop them but at the end of the day….they are just kids. There are limits to what they can really do here. Make no mistake, they are the underdogs. Since psychic powers are real, at least they have that as a trump card. Unfortunately the government is always at the ready to get these powers back so that’s another thing to watch out for. In some ways the government are the most powerful villains here.

There is a whole lot that went wrong with the series so lets start with some of the positives. I will say that the theme song jingle is pretty good. It has that spooky atmosphere to it and is very memorable. I’ll probably still recall the jingle many years from now after hearing it so many times. Even the Netflix sound is something that I automatically connect with Stranger Things at this point. The two are absolutely linked. The special effects aren’t as impressive. The series is often trying to go for realism which often means making everything look grotesque.

The villains tend to look more weird than intimidating. The characters constantly just have their eyes go white when they focus. The series is at its best with the landscapes. The other world looks very apocalyptic in a good way. I’ll also say that the series tends to have some pretty spooky visuals as it goes on. The series noticeably got darker and more violent for the last two seasons. It was definitely trying to grow up with the cast but I’d say it felt more forced than anything.

We did get some pretty good songs though. While not all of them may have been winners, it was fun hearing some retro tunes. One of them in particular got played a lot as it became the main song used to counter the villain’s mind control. Now we’re approaching the end of the positives for the show but it was nice seeing Dungeons & Dragons getting some hype. It’s not a game that I’ve ever been really into but I definitely get the appeal. You just need to really have a lot of time to devote to it.

Now lets get into some of the core issues. First off we have the fact that the story is an absolute mess. The power levels are all over the place with a few demo demons taking on a squad of hardened soldiers with their guns, then going down to kids and noncombatants. It seems rather easy to defeat them and this is a problem that never goes away. The army really should not be having any kind of trouble with them. These guys are absolutely weak. At est you could say that the most powerful demons at the top should be strong but the minions aren’t serious threats.

Then we have the writing which is absolutely abysmal most of the time. All of the characters are rebounding, cheating, acting like jerks, etc. You really can’t trust anyone here. A very fitting moment is in the final episode when the town is trying to recover after all of the craziness. One of the kids is told to make a speech and instead of unifying the town, he decides to give everyone the birdie, make fun of the teachers, and basically just be a general nuisance once again. A lot of these issues all come down to the fact that the kids are not likable at all.

The show also couldn’t resist making a bunch of their characters decide to get ultra modern so you can expect quite a few gay plots. They are around quite a lot in the final season and take up time that could have been used to move the plot forward or give the villains some more fights. Each scene just gets more degenerate and in the time skip ending we have to give characters very specific jobs that didn’t really need to be around. One guy’s going to have to be teaching people about the birds and the bees. After a while it just seems like the show had other priorities above that of the main story and this came at the expense of most of the characters. These subplots are very preachy and are in your face throughout.

Then we have the fact that this is one of those shows which really can’t bear to just have a villain be evil. Vecna is one of the ultimate evils as he tortures children, murders a bunch of people, etc. Suddenly in the final season they try to play the “he’s just misunderstood” card. I also don’t think this was intentional but Will has the absolutely worst strategy in trying to convert him. It almost sounds like he’s rubbing it in as he explains how Vecna was manipulated and used while Vecna is begging him to cut it out. If there’s one good way to make a villain lose all credibility, it’s to make him beg.

I’d say it’s also just another example of how weak the writing is. The characters can be almost unbearable with how annoying and cringe they are the whole time. They just seem like people you would not want to be around and their dialogue gets more juvenile with each season. By the final season you have characters not giving others guns just to be petty, one kid shows up where his whole gimmick is that he’s really crude, etc.

The biggest story issue has to be the cliffhanger before the final season though. The ultimate evil was finally arriving and we had every character squaring up to fight him. It was going to be absolutely epic and intense. Then the next season starts with a big timeskip as the heroes have scattered and have to fight while undercover. Against the monsters right? Wrong! The government somehow plugged the hole and kept the monsters at bay. The whole thing made absolutely no sense and I’d basically consider the cliffhanger to be a plot hole.

Okay lets go into the characters here. First up is Joyce who is definitely all over the place. She is getting over a divorce which hasn’t been easy and then her kid is kidnapped by demons. So I cut her a little slack with how she gets a bit crazier throughout the series. She wants to help but often times the kids leave her out of the plans. Of course it makes sense why they would because she is always panicking about their plans. Then she gets close to Hopper, rebounds with some random guy, then goes back to Hopper after her boyfriend is brutally murdered by demons. I’m already not big on rebounds but when your boyfriend is brutally murdered?? That should make a rebound even more unlikely.

Of course if I go after every rebound then we’d be here all day. The long and short of it is that Joyce is okay but often doesn’t seem to understand the gravity of the situation. She keeps on holding the kids back and doesn’t want them to get into danger but they are in too deep for any of that. There is no way to turn back at this point and so she just needed to be more supportive at this point. At least she is able to use a gun and everything by the end of the series.

Hopper is one of the only other adults who helps out a lot throughout the series. For the most part he tends to be the standout character. At least he can fight and he takes out a bunch of demons, Russian agents, etc. Hopper is also in charge of looking after El and tries to keep her from being too crazy. She tends to go into self sacrifice mode at the drop of a hat. If not for Hopper then she would have been gone pretty early into the series.

If anything it can be annoying seeing the kids try to order him around all the time. He’s the one with actual experience here after all and if anything he still has to bail them out by the end. Considering that he has no powers, Hopper does really well here. Even when he was captured behind enemy lines, Hopper was able to hold his own pretty well. He still needed some help of course but he never cracked.

Then we have Mike who is essentially the main character of the show. You could make a decent case for Joyce or Hopper but I feel like things always end up centering around Mike. Mike does his best to command the group but is still out of his depth the whole time. The romance with El tends to be pretty weak and you could argue that the ending makes it look even worse. Now granted, the show makes it a point to say that the ending is interpretable but in at least one of those he lost out big time. I also think it would have been nice for him to have gotten to fight a bit.

He’s the guy desperately asking for a gun in the final season only to be trolled over it. Not a very nice thing to do when he is legitimately worried and trying to do his best to help out. Mike tends to get a lot of the emotional scenes so you can expect him to cry a whole lot and get upset at other moments. He’s a highly emotional individual and to an extent I suppose that’s true for all of the kids. Mike’s not as bad as most of the others at least. He was mainly able to stay focused on the mission.

Then we have El who had a really tragic backstory. So for that reason I cut her a lot of slack but she could also be pretty annoying in the present. She wants Hopper to trust her more but always gives him a lot of reasons not to trust her. She tends to be gone on training trips a lot so she misses out on the fights. Even by the end of the series she is still having trouble with the villains. A large part of the series would not change at all if she was a normal human with how rarely she is able to win fights. It just felt like a missed opportunity and the other kids always looked dumb for not including her in the offense teams.

The logic was that they wanted to keep her as a trump card but sometimes it’s better to just get someone ready for the fights. The heroes essentially outthought themselves by coming up with these convoluted plans. It was also rather brutal how El forced her final opponent to shoot himself with her powers. I know that she’s not a hero and works as an anti-hero the whole time but it was definitely still a brutal moment. El’s self sacrifice personality is also a problem but at the end of the day I think it all just stems from me not understanding why she wasn’t out there fighting. That was a big missed opportunity if you ask me.

Will suffers from the same power level issues. He ended up absorbing some psychic ability for the final season but mainly just gets dominated in every interaction. Will sort of feels like he fell behind in the group after being kidnapped for so long and then it gets worse when he finds out how the villains have been manipulated. Will just feels a bit too sorry for himself the whole time. Then like I said he flubs the final speech with Vecna and honestly there’s no time to be feeling sorry for the guy. Vecna made his choices, I’m not going to buy into the whole mind control stuff now. I’d even say that Will stopping everyone to talk about his personal preferences could not have come at a worse time. They were all dealing with the end of the world after all.

Dustin is the main comic relief character of the show which means that he gets put into a tough situation once the show gets more and more serious. He tries to get serious along with it but often times this makes Dustin come across as a jerk. He puts his pride before the safety of the team by picking fights with bullies when everyone was counting on him. Dustin gets into a lot of fights in the final season in order to prove himself as one of the key members of the crew and it just doesn’t serve to make him look any better. I wouldn’t say that Dustin ever really recovered from this. He’s better than some of the other characters but looks particularly bad in the final season which is rough since that is the one that is freshest in the viewer’s memory.

Lucas is a pretty safe character. He’s better than most because he doesn’t start a lot of drama and knows how to get the job done. The only times he tends to get really emotional are when Max is in the hospital which makes sense. At the same time I guess the catch is that he doesn’t get much of a character arc. For the most part he is just around for the ride. Nothing wrong with that though. He contributes and gets one of the happier endings in the show. He also got to have one of the smoothest rides as he got beat up and tormented way less than the others. That’s definitely my kind of path if I was a character in the show.

Nancy is a character who is simply too indecisive. She goes through her relationships too quickly and then ultimately decides to ditch them all to be a girl boss. In that form she at least gets to fight giant monsters and talk tough but you never know what stage she will be in. I thought they made her too arrogant past a point like when she kept threatening Steve, Jonathan, and even the conspiracy nut. She’s just too violent I guess but hey at least she fought a giant monster with a shotgun. The guns only really work when the kids are using them. Man….as a sidebar I will say that the various gun/war fight scenes don’t work at all. The constant plot armor will make you dizzy as the villains miss every shot and the heroes make each one.

Jonathan is one of those characters who fell off a cliff in terms of character development. He was always wimpy and whiny but it just kept getting worse. Now he started off by peeping through windows so I guess it was always going to be a rocky road for him but then he went off on a business trip and came back depressed. He sounds half drunk during all of his lines and is constantly starting drama. He easily became one of the worst characters by the end and just never really improved. It’s easy to see why the relationships didn’t work out for him.

Dr. Martin is one of those crazy scientist villains so you can’t expect much out of him. He’s mostly just here to check off that box and we get more scientists later on anyway. They try for a halfhearted redemption arc for him too. Maybe redemption’s the wrong word, but humanizing at the very least. It didn’t work so I consider this guy to still be a 2 dimensional villain in the end.

I already talked about how pathetic Vecna is so we don’t have to get back into it. Needless to say, he’s a great example of how to ruin a villain. He just got less and less intimidating the more that he appeared. Unfortunately his boss, the Mind Fray guy never got to really do anything either. In the end he appears more as a mindless monster. It all comes back down to the heroes being too weak so as a result the villains have to be weak too. It’s a negative spiral that hurts all of the parties involved.

Max is one of the younger main characters and the heroes are already fairly young. She had to go through a lot growing up and it’s molded her into a very tough figure. Lucas helps her come out of this shell and then she has a real trial by fire with how the demons go after her. I appreciate that Max talks a tough game so she does beat most of the other kids. She also had to take a commanding lead in the final season with most of the other kids being busy.

Steve is one of those messy characters who has one too many crushes throughout the show. His whole rivalry with Jonathan honestly just made them both look bad. It’s always going to be hard to become friend with your ex and usually I’d say that you shouldn’t even try. Of course it kind of works out here but I’d argue that all of the relationships would be cooked at that point. Steve is meant to be the tough guy of the group. He’s the only jock surrounded by a bunch of nerds.

So there is some fun potential there but the characters all just take everything way too personally. When he’s not fighting with Jonathan, he’s fighting with Dustin. I think this is supposed to be relatable and all but it would be nice if the characters could have had some more unity. The in fighting is fun as long as the characters don’t take it too far but they all take it super personally throughout.

Robin didn’t join the gang until later on but was a nice foil to Steve. For a while there was nobody to really mess with him so she fills that role in well. Of course she is also used to squeeze in another gay plot which was always the real intention for her character. I appreciate how she always makes every conversation more awkward than the last and that’s saying something with this group. She had more personality than the others and was a bit older so she could hold her own more. I’d at least give her those props.

Murray is one of those crazy conspiracy guys who tends to be fun. They maybe try a bit too hard to make him funny at times but he works better than 90% of the case. He doesn’t become a main character until we’re pretty deep into the show but still makes his scenes count. The heroes definitely would have been doomed without him and he does try to keep them focused which is a really difficult job for anyone.

I don’t really understand why we needed to add Dr. Kay as a character. We already had 4 different mad scientist characters in the series, what’s the point of another one? Her role isn’t even anything unique. She’s another character who wants El and loves talking down to all of her colleagues. Kay gets a ton of hype but she’s just an old lady who gives out a lot of orders. There really isn’t anything for the characters to fear about her. She barely even gets closure by the end so I’d say the character was absolutely filler all the way through.

Of course the biggest filler characters were the psychic runaways from one of the earlier seasons. We had a long subplot about all of them having powers like El. It seemed like this was supposed to go somewhere but the whole storyline dropped off. One of them shows up in the final season to cause some drama but doesn’t ultimately do a whole lot. I feel like the series was tempted to go in a more supernatural direction but then decided it would take away from the horror so they decided to keep El as the only main hero with powers.

I was glad to see those guys go because it just led to more flashbacks of the lab with the kids being experimented on. I definitely didn’t need to see all of that but then that also means the whole subplot was just a waste of time. We were always going to see El’s origin story so we didn’t need to see the parts around that. The show ultimately just gets gritty and violent for no real reason.

I’d also say as a closing note that a big problem with the series is how jaded it is. On the surface this may seem like a classic coming of age story for the kids but on deeper scrutiny I don’t think this is the case. Most of the side characters are bullies and antagonists. The school never makes a move to stop the excessive bullying. You have abusive characters like Max’s brother and then a whole gang that tries to murder Lucas. The whole government is almost explicitly evil in this one and Vecna’s whole point about humanity being easily manipulated is proven right many times over. As the series ends, none of the characters have really learned their lessons either. There just isn’t a lot of sincerity in any the supposed heroes here.

Overall, Stranger Things is definitely not a title that I would recommend. To me the whole thing fell flat. It had a lot of issues like the violence, terrible writing, poor characters, etc. Pretty much every staple of what you’d be worried about in a long running live action title like this one. The good parts were never able to overcome the bad ones. Of course it all does trickle down from the characters so if you like them, then you’d probably like the show. It’s a bit of an oversimplification but that’s really what it boils down to. If you like the characters then by extension you’ll likely appreciate their constant emotional scenes and victory speeches. If you don’t like them, then the scenes feel like empty padding to stretch out the episodes. Multiply those scenes by every episode and that will really determine how good the episodes were. I think you could make a decent video game out of this, but the franchise doesn’t otherwise hold much potential if you ask me.

Overall 2/10