*SPOILERS APLENTY*
This may well be the only time I write about a serial on this website, and I feel inclined to do so because Stranger Things is something that people have assumed I would enjoy, and that's ordinarily a bad omen, it probably says more about other people's perception of me than of the series itself.
Sure, on paper, it's going to tick a lot of my boxes; it's a homage to the 80s, more specifically things like The Goonies, Explorers, Stephen King, etc. It has a John Carpenter-esque soundtrack and Winona Ryder is in it.
My broad complaints with the show have been pretty well articulated elsewhere on the interwebs here, here and here (for starters), though I feel it's worth emphasizing my main points of contetion before getting into what I felt would have made for a compelling change to show's story.
After watching the first two episodes my initial response to the show was "I can see why people like this", it's very easy to watch, and all the information is spoonfed to the audience, so nothing - bar the show's general "mystery" - is unclear. It's clearly a page-turner kind of show, but in a very casual sense, it's simple entertainment.
Although, at the same time, I found this baffling... One of our main characters is a mother who has lost her child and there's some sort of evil monster on the loose, yet the series is always easy-going, it never fills you with a sense of urgency or dread.
Additionally, the story is so spoonfed to the audience that there's no sense of surprise, and we often know what's going on long before the characters do, which makes a lot of the series a wait for them to catch up to us.
As the show wore on I became frustrated by its eighties references, they seemed too nostalgic, specifically in how each kid's bedroom seemed to have a big neat poster of a different 80s touchstone, whereas if you were to think of your own childhood bedroom - or kid's bedrooms from similar films - they were a lot more scrappy in their decor. It felt too artificial, and took me out of the show.
Worse I found the main trio of kids to be very badly directed, their notes always seemed to have been "Louder and angrier", and their anger felt very adult. As much as some people find The Goonies to be annoying at least the kids bicker and fight like kids do, their dialogue overlapping and - even at the most petulant - still feeling like the words and choices a kid might make in arguing with friends.
Similar problems with the actor's direction fell upon Winona Ryder who - thanks to the script as well (as far as I can tell as a viewer of course) - she was always operating at the same level of frazzled.
It was around episode five when we first entered Eleven's mental space though that the series took a harsh nosedive into really bad for me, primarily because its homaging turned into plagiarism by stealing visuals from Jonathan Glazer's 2013 film Under The Skin.
Now, whilst I do believe in the adage "steal from the best" I always felt that that phrase implied that the point of stealing ideas was to add a new twist to them or to improve upon them, to use them as a shorthand springboard into something creative. Here, as with the rest of the show, the "homage" was nothing more than a direct lift.
When ripping other people off like this, and adding nothing new, your choices become hollow, it's like trying to cook like a famous chef by stealing from their recycling bins - all you've got as ingredients is the packaging, so flavour, no body, nothing.
Finally, as we reached the conclusion of the show characters began making stupid choices, for example, Sheriff Hopper breaks into the evil science lab and discovers the portal to the alternate dimension he is caught by security who promptly take him home, allowing him to carry on with his investigation and break back into the secret lab again later this time with a better plan...
Why? Why didn't they keep him locked up? Sure, kidnapping the Sheriff might look bad, so why didn't they frame him in some way - as they planned to do the second time they caught him - what was the point of letting him go? Was it to try and find Eleven? Because if so they managed to do that entirely without the Sheriff's help anyway.
In the final episode Dr. Brenner finally catches up to Eleven, and even has her in his arms, when suddenly the evil monster emerges and - despite their being plenty of armed agents around - Brenner inexplicably chooses to put Eleven down so she can escape with the kids and walk towards the killer monster. It felt entirely out of character and just put in their so Brenner could be killed and Eleven could escape.
Also, Eleven's ability to use her telekinetic powers - and by extension how conscious she is at key moments - fluctuates wildly, with her dipping in and out of wakefulness at the whim of the writers, and too often situations are solved by Eleven using her abilities because the script has reached a slight dead end.
However, what bugged me most about the series was the roles adults played in the show overall.
A notable feature of a lot of its influences is the division between the worlds of children and adults, and the presence (or lack thereof) of adults is a key feature in creating these magical - and frightening - fantasies in which so many of our childhood nostaglias are rooted.
Look at the role of adults in Nightmare On Elm Street, The Goonies, The Gate, Explorers, E.T., etc., or even more contemporary fare like Hocus Pocus, The Hole (Joe Dante) and It Follows.
Stranger Things needed to focus more on a child's view of the world, and keep the adults out of the programme except as antagonists - or reluctant allies as we moved towards the finale.
So, how about if we made one change to the cast, and sadly - for me - that means less Winona Ryder in the show.
What if Joyce Byers (the mother of missing kid Will) was much more of a peripheral role, and rather than being active and engaged with trying to find her son she was a bit out of it, and she's been that way since Lonnie - her husband - left.
Instead, Joyce has three children...
Jonathan who is Will's older brother as he is in the show, and he's the loner character exactly as written, though maybe he felt more antagonistic towards Will in a way - rather than making him mixtapes he would always get frustrated that Will stole his records, and so the mixtape gesture at the show's finale has more weight.
Will, as written again, the kid that goes missing, and who is friends with our main trio of kids.
And finally a daughter, let's call her Gertie, who is the middle child and ever since her father left and her mother "zoned out", she's had to grow up fast, sacrificing her childhood to keep the house together as best she can.
So, when Will goes missing there could be a threat of their family dynamic being called into question (maybe a social services character who might be a covert science lab agent?), and as Gertie begins communicating with Will through the lights she's dismissed more readily as a traumatised child.
Eventually Gertie's story and the three boys (along with Eleven) cross paths and they form a group who has to unravel this mystery.
I feel like this change would have grounded the show in a child's eye view and made the dangers more terrifying.
That alteration wouldn't - in my opinion - have solved all the problems with the show (see posts linked to at the top of this article), far from it, but it would've made for a more interesting foundation on which to tell this story.
