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[00:00] Okay, to answer your first question, while the only really anime thing about Stranger Things is how many ideas it steals from Akira, it does begin and end in a mother's basement, so I think you'll find it is still fully within my jurisdiction.

[00:13] As for the second one, when I made my video Stranger Things is a better 80s movie than most 80s movies, my cartoon avatar at the time had this hat on, and someone on Twitter said I should wear it when I do a full review of the series, so here we are.

[00:28] Perhaps it's a little insensitive, given that Gravity Falls actually is a carefully crafted web of clues and mysteries whose ending was planned out years in advance, as opposed to a hastily slapped-together jumble of capital-C streaming content whose entire fan community just collectively went through something between the first stage of grief and a public schizophrenic episode.

[00:48] But I already bought the hat, so anyway, since making that video, I completely fell off watching Stranger Things as of Season 3. And to be honest, I was very happy with that choice, despite reports that Season 4 was the best one since the first one.

[01:05] But then I started hearing rumblings that Season 5 was getting really good, and I thought it might be worth finally catching up to enjoy that. Though I still had all of my end-of-year videos to work on, so I had to put that off, and by the time I was actually ready to get started, the fans were losing their goddamn minds, and I knew I'd have to give it a full, painfully honest review.

[01:27] Almost 24 straight hours of binging later, I have not hated my past self this much since I decided to make that Seven Deadly Sins video. I mean, even at its worst, it's not quite as bad as the worst of that show, but there is quite a bit less common Seven Deadly Sins.

[01:44] And at least it had the decency not to waste my time when it was already wasting my time. Remember when every episode of Stranger Things was 50 minutes long? Boy, I remember. The last two-fifths of this show make up more than half its total runtime,

[02:00] and so much of that is just summarizing itself for the second-screen audience, solving problems the same theme they're introduced for no other reason than to delay the solving of other problems,

[02:12] and following tangents off of other tangents as it struggles to juggle all the new disposable meat stacks it's got to characterize before they can be killed off in place of anyone we actually care about. or killed themselves for no goddamn reason,

[02:26] except Dustin really needed something to argue about with Steve, while Nancy and Jonathan are busy finally dealing with their relationship problems that the show very intentionally stalled out for the entire last season

[02:38] just so they'd have something to do in the finale, but then it didn't have any idea how to actually organically integrate that into the main storyline, so it kind of just locks them in this big c*** room until they sort it all out.

[02:50] So where did it all go wrong? Well, say this novelty Nintendo keychain is the Stranger Things production crew, and each of these buttons is a Duffer brother. Now, this bottle of hand sanitizer is Netflix's corporate offices,

[03:07] and this hat represents a well-planned-out script with a beginning, middle, and end that was decided on well in advance. Please note, the hat never comes off and is never used in this demonstration in any way.

[03:20] Now, this tub of Gamersupps is all of the 80s references that are possibly applicable to Stranger Things story and would actually make it better.

[03:32] And the number of episodes that they had to fill is the entire Atlantic Ocean. And if you wanted to have enough Gamersupps to fill the entire Atlantic Ocean, The best way to do that would be on February 20th, 2025, to go to gamersofts.gg slash basement and use the promo code basement, because for one day only, they are offering 20% off any order of any size of anything on the site, including their delicious and very energizing energy powders, their delicious go-to-sleep powders that they got now.

[04:06] They also got cups with waifus on them. They just put out a new one for their 10th anniversary. She's got like a birthday cake and like real big cake of her own. Other waifu cups have just been released.

[04:18] They got, you know, creator collabs going on. I think they got something going on with Code Zane right now. And any of that, all of it, you can get 20% off on February 20th only if you use the promo code BASEMENT when you check out.

[04:31] And again, that's an order of any size. Promo code BASEMENT, 20% off everything. you can get enough gamer stuff to fill the entire Pacific Ocean and that would solve the problem with Stranger Things? I feel like this metaphor has gotten away

[04:46] from me. Stranger Things began as this brilliant one-off experiment infusing the formats of film and television weaving characters concepts tropes and storylines from a wide range of classic movies and other influences into a vivid expansive unapologetically nerdy pop culture simulacrum of the 1980s

[05:10] A cozy, nostalgic movie world that the audience gets to live in for nearly seven hours instead of two, where side characters of one genre enjoy the full interiority of protagonists in another.

[05:25] Honestly, it's one of the best ideas I've ever seen for a single season of television. But then, it made a whole f***load of money, so Netflix decided to make a whole f***load more of it than the concept was ever really built to support.

[05:40] Suddenly, instead of having all the time in the world to pick and choose all the best bits of their favorite movies and piece them together into something new and self-contained, The Duffer Brothers were left scrambling to find new 80s shit they could riff on that at least kind of fits with the things they'd already done before the teenagers they hired to play children got too old to play teenagers.

[06:04] So, uh, let's do some exorcist shit, a little bit of Lost Boys. We can talk about MKUltra. Ooh, you know, the thing, that was the 80s. That was a real good 80s horror movie. It's basically Invasion of the Body Snatchers,

[06:17] which was about red scare hysteria, which was really big in the 80s, too. We can have capitalist individuals fighting a communist hive mind in a shopping mall with Fourth of July fireworks.

[06:29] That's 80s as hell, and God bless America. Oh, my God, we could put so much product placement in there. Then, f*** what next? Um, Freddy Krueger, Silence of the Lambs.

[06:41] Ooh, D&D, the Satanic Panic, that was about nerd stuff. We can just kind of gloss over all the, like, actual bigotry and, like, people's lives that were ruined by that and just make it about the nerd stuff.

[06:54] Speaking of nerd stuff, uh, Akira, we haven't milked that nearly enough yet. Oh, you know what's real 80s? Roller rinks. Let's do the Carrie bullying scene, but at a roller rink. You know, we don't really have like a Bender breakfast club type character yet.

[07:09] We could throw one of those in there. And we'll tie it all together with a Stoner Road Trip comedy. Oh, we still have a whole other season to go. Ah, what's the 80s? Um, 50s nostalgia.

[07:21] Let's do that. Wrinkle in Time, 50s guys and 80s kids. They both recognize that. That really works. Um, Home Alone? That was the 90s. Ah, it's close enough. We're Home Alone-ing a Demogorgon.

[07:33] Upside Down's a wormhole now. Psychic powers come from magic space rocks. Everyone really liked that fake-out ending where Eleven sacrificed herself, but not really in season one, so let's just do that again.

[07:46] Okay, I think we've got enough to start. What do you mean we're already filming? Today's a very interesting day. We are shooting episode eight, which isn't completely written yet, so we don't even know what's going on.

[07:58] And of course, all of that comes on top of the inherent problems with trying to turn any horror film into a franchise. The further you stretch a story, the looser and less focused it becomes.

[08:10] The more you see of a monster, the less scary it seems. The more danger your characters go through, the less we ever feel like they're really in danger. No monster or slasher series has managed to dodge those pitfalls for more than a couple sequels at most,

[08:26] and every Stranger Things sequel is five times as long as those. Plus, those kids putting the production under that ticking clock were cast for their acting talent as children,

[08:38] so you really gotta hope they keep improving their skills as adults instead of just resting on their worlds because they became insanely famous actors at 15. And hey, two out of five ain't terrible.

[08:51] I really do think the show is just doomed from the start, and it's honestly kind of a miracle that we got as much decent television out of it as we did. The first season's the only one I'd ever want to re-watch,

[09:04] but the two that followed were fun enough, expanding on the characters in mostly entertaining ways, especially Dustin and Steve's whole bromance, and revealing more of the horrors without completely destroying their mystique.

[09:19] Three probably shouldn't let the Mind Flayer monologue, but at least the monologuing was cryptic and didn't instantly reduce this incomprehensible eldritch entity to just some f***ing guy who really likes spiders.

[09:33] And even the later seasons do still have some really good moments. You just have to slog through an entire hour of intentionally repetitive crap for the people who are on their phones and need to be reminded of things a couple times to get to each of them.

[09:48] And sure none of the monsters are scary anymore but they did still pour quite a bit of practical movie magic into making them which does still keep that 80s vibe alive

[10:01] although Netflix did make them ditch the retro film grain and color grading in favor of mandatory HDR after season 2, so everything past that kind of looks more like a 90s, early 2000s movie set in the 80s than a real 80s movie,

[10:16] which isn't an unappealing look, per se. It's just wrong, and that played a not insignificant part in my choice to drop the show after season three. That and the show's choice to just completely undermine

[10:29] all the time that all of the characters had just spent mourning Hopper by revealing that he didn't sacrifice himself after all and he's still alive in that post-credits scene. I mean, technically they didn't reveal that until season four.

[10:43] It's plausible, I guess, that someone with, like, severe brain damage might have not made the connection between no hopper body and mysterious American locked up in Kamchatka.

[10:56] But literally, who else could even be behind that door? Elle's sister? Oh, shit, I just solved the mid-season five-plot twist. I'm sorry, Duffer Bros, you're not slick like that. And the amount of time you waste pretending you are is frankly insulting.

[11:11] No one thought Zekna was behind that f***ing door in the lab, and everyone figured out he was the creepy, whispery, smiley guy from L's flashbacks the first time they saw him.

[11:23] We didn't need five episodes drawing that reveal out, and we definitely didn't need that slow zoom in on the tattoo on his wrist after you already match-cut between his identity just to make sure the slow kids understand what's going on.

[11:41] Pulling back to the Hopper thing, though, that really is where the show fully lost me, and I think where it completely lost its way, for so many reasons. Between him and Billy's death, it really felt like season three was finally saying,

[11:55] anyone can die, no one is safe anymore, and by walking that back, they basically confirmed that no, only the new characters are ever going to be on the chopping block,

[12:07] and everyone else has infinite plot armor. Since Max showed up in season 2, I might have believed she was in real danger in season 4, if she wasn't one of the only three good young actors in the cast, but literally only her.

[12:23] The much bigger problem, though, is the show didn't need Hopper anymore. He'd already finished his arc, battled and beaten his demons, given Eleven everything she'd ever need from him.

[12:36] The only question that was still hanging over his head at that point was when, not if, he'd hook up with Joyce, and never was far and away the most dramatically interesting answer the show could have come up with.

[12:51] So, once the novelty of the whole Hopper in a Gulag situation wears off, which is very quickly, all that's left for him to do is beat himself up some more over the dead daughter shit that he already worked through ages ago.

[13:05] Except this time, he feels extra guilty about it, because it turns out the reason his daughter got cancer is he was a ranch hander in Vietnam, and all the Agent Orange that he dumped on the countryside to, you know, kill their crops and starve out the civilian population,

[13:22] also f***ed his junk up, plus some of his buddies' junk, and all their kids had birth defects, kind of like the hundreds of thousands of birth defects that he and his buddies inflicted on the Vietnamese. But Hopper isn't really thinking about all those people whose lives he ruined,

[13:37] and the show really doesn't want you to think about them either, because you're supposed to be feeling sorry for him. You kind of need to feel sorry for the unrepentant war criminal, because totally one quarter of the season's dramatic stakes rest on the question of whether or not

[13:51] Joyce and Murray will be able to rescue him, which isn't really a question, because he's a main character, and they are too, so obviously they're all invincible. So, like, you really need to be invested in good things happening to him personally.

[14:03] And if you're not, because he's, like, not really a character anymore because he has, like, nothing else going on emotionally than he did in prior seasons. And also, turns out, he's an unrepentant war criminal. That might kind of, like, f*** up that entire story arc

[14:17] if the two final seasons weren't also busy completely ruining the show's lore. This could have at least been a fun opportunity to, you know, explore what the upside down looks like on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

[14:29] They need a Soviet psychic or two, or ooh, they could have done a gulag break through a gate. That could have been real fun. But between seasons, some genius decided the other world only needs to exist

[14:42] in a few miles radius of this one town in Indiana, and also it locked in time the same day Will disappeared Even though the single most iconic visual from the first season proves that changes to the real world affect the upside down and I really have no idea what the f they thought they were doing with that twist

[15:01] Literally, the only purpose it serves for the plot is making it take a little longer for the kids to get done. I'm getting distracted here. Point is, because there's no Russian end of the upside down, All that this massive multi-hour detour can actually accomplish is getting the adults out of the kids' way so they can have their own adventure,

[15:21] and inflicting some psychic damage to the hive mind in the final battle. And honestly, the way that they do that might be the single worst thing in the entire fourth season.

[15:33] I can certainly see how some screenwriter might have typed the words, and then Hopper chops the Demogorgon's arm off with a f***ing broadsword and thought he was cooking with God's own propane.

[15:47] But that's the kind of thing that, credibility-wise, movie monsters never come back from. Like, they try to make Demogorgon scary again at the start of next season when that one tears Mrs. Wheeler's entire jugular out,

[16:01] But the whole fake-out there only works because it legitimately seems plausible, even for a second, that she might actually just stab the thing to death with a wine bottle. And frankly, the things they do to these monsters later are even more ridiculous than that.

[16:31] Hell, Mrs. Wheeler eventually takes out three demodogs by herself with some Tom and Jerry bullshit that doesn't even make sense,

[16:43] because why would a hive mind need to send three bodies to investigate one noise? Any horror franchise that runs long enough eventually demystifies its monsters to some extent,

[16:55] but if I didn't know better, I'd think Stranger Things was doing this shit on purpose. By the time the kids are fighting the mind flayer itself on Planet X, there's not a single doubt left in my mind that they will kill this 40-story tall psychic spider kaiju using nothing but guns and molotovs.

[17:15] And lo and behold, that's exactly what happens without a single casualty or even serious injury. By the end of the show's run, there is not a single thing in the Upside Down that feels more threatening than an unfed Mogwai.

[17:31] Even going back to Season 1 now, with its much more effective and reserved horror filmmaking, just knowing that the thing lurking off camera is one of these goobers sucks all the fear out of it.

[17:44] Plus, it makes the big endgame twist that Will can use the hive mind's powers against it feel completely superfluous when pretty much anyone who's not in an army uniform can also easily take these things.

[17:59] Far and away, the greatest sin that Stranger Things 4 and 5 commit against their own lore, though, is giving that hive mind a face and a name. And not just any name.

[18:11] You thought it was an unknowable eldritch entity from beyond time and space, but it was me, Henry! Literally just some f***ing guy who hates people and loves spiders,

[18:25] but then I guess they decided that was too dumb, so they retcon it in the next season, and now he wants to kill everyone because he touched a magic rock and the big space spider pulled him to. But also, he independently decided that he would still be working with the big space spider,

[18:39] even if it wasn't mind-controlling him, so he is, in fact, totally irredeemable, and we don't have to feel bad about impaling or decapitating him or whatever in the finale. Which is somehow all the explanations that we ever get for what makes him tick,

[18:54] despite spending two entire seasons building him up as the biggest of bad, and spending half the last one literally running around inside his mind.

[19:06] It's hard to imagine a less whelming explanation for all of the horror that's befallen Hawkins over the years. And while there is actually more to his character, you have to fly to New York or London and watch a separate stage play to learn what the main villain of the show's real motivations are.

[19:28] I understand a lot of Stranger Things fans enjoy Zetna as a villain. Certainly, it's not a bad performance from the actor, but I think that mostly comes down to all the cool, scary shit that he does.

[19:42] Not anything about who he is. Certainly the idea of a psychic serial killer who can get anyone at any