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| I did not. |
Really, my issues with Stranger Things as a series comes down to the fact that I don't think it ever needed to be a series at all. The first season is a nearly perfect eight-hour movie that is charming, emotional, scary, compelling, and full of that homegrown Stephen King/Steven Spielberg flavor that goes down smooth every time I watch it (which has been many times now). These "sequel" seasons don't exactly ruin anything--I'm glad that Babysitter Steve and Big Daddy Hopper and Super Sailor Robin exist and it would be a lesser pop culture landscape without them--but they are simply unnecessary given how well-contained and poignant the first season is on its own. Sure, there are a couple of cliffhangers--is Will really out of the Upside Down? Is Eleven still out there somewhere?--but these were questions I was willing to let hang in space indefinitely because everything ended exactly where it needed to.
But because Stranger Things was such a runaway success that literally everyone loved, there was no reason not to keep it going, and that's where things began to fall apart. Now, like any sequel, we've got to do the same things again only bigger, badder, and more bombastic. One interdimensional monster was bad, but how bout a whole colony, led by a huge monster that can get in your head and make you all moody and weird! Top secret government agencies sneaking around and doing crazy experiments is pretty scary, but what about if they were Russian! Yeah, Steve was a big jerk, nothing worse than a high school bully, but what about a completely psychotic new kid who is just as quick to fuck your mom as he is willing to run over a pack of children with his car! AND he's racist!
It's all typical sequel stuff, but one would hope that this show in particular would remain true to its heart and not lose sight of what made it so successful in the first place: its well-drawn, relatable, flawed but endearing characters. These kids who were never precocious or annoying, but awkward, vulnerable and surprisingly strong. These teenagers who let go of petty high school bullshit in order to rise to the call to action. These adults who let their emotional walls and hardened skepticism fall away in pursuit of protecting what is truly important. Stranger Things is still what it always was on the surface, but it's just different now....as if its own adolescence has made it so self-aware and self-assured that it has reached a point of undeserved swaggering--much like Mike is suddenly so ready to be a callous dick to everyone just because he's kissed a girl.
And nowhere do the seams start to show more than in the steady crumbling of the first season's best character: Joyce Byers.
When we first meet Joyce, she is the chainsmoking single mom of two boys who is just trying to keep it all together. She works full time at a grocery store and has raised her kids to be largely self-sufficient, which is why she doesn't immediately freak out when her youngest, Will, doesn't come home one night. But once she's exhausted every reasonable explanation for his absence, her panic is still considered to be too much too soon. We're to understand that it isn't exactly out of character for Joyce to overreact, so she's not taken very seriously by the local authorities or even her own family.
When she starts spouting wild stories about crackly voices over fried phone lines, lights talking to her, and monsters clawing through the wall, she's still told to calm down and be reasonable. And when the unthinkable happens and her boy's lifeless body is pulled from the quarry, she refuses to believe it's him and insists that he is still alive out there somewhere. By all appearances, it's the ravings of a strung out mother unable to cope with the loss of her child due to her own negligence. But we know as well as Joyce that she isn't crazy, and to accept the "reasonable" explanation is the worst thing she could do. So, with no allies and little more than flickering Christmas lights to follow, what does Joyce do? She fucking gears up and travels into the literal abyss in search of her child.
That scene of Joyce sitting on her couch with the alphabet wall behind her, ax in hand and a look of pure mama bear fury on her face, is as iconic as it is deeply moving. This is what Joyce Byers is--somewhere between frazzled and unblinking clarity, focused and ready to fight for what she knows is the truth, even if she can't quite put that truth into words, aimed to defend what is hers without a thought to her own safety. She is the image of motherhood in its purest and most badass form, standing tall alongside the likes of Ellen Ripley and Sarah Conner--but instead of a mecha suit and a bigass gun, all she has is a splintered wood ax and her own moxie. Who better than Winona Ryder to play this unflinching yet vulnerable role, the petite outspoken weirdo screaming at the world to just listen to her? I love Winona in just about everything, but Joyce is the part she was born to play, so deeply felt and painfully alive on the screen that you can't help but grow just as desperate and determined as she is as the story develops.
Stranger Things is, again, a story that thrives with its boldly drawn characters. The kids may be the ostensible stars of the show, but its emotional core is truly experienced through Joyce. We follow her highs and lows, from the frantic hope that Will is still out there, turning to furious anger with "voices of reason" that tell her to go home and get some rest, to the gentle patience of coaxing Eleven into overcoming her own traumas in order to help Will come home. Joyce knows that she is far from the perfect mother, but she does her best and nails it where it counts, from surprising Will with tickets to Poltergeist, to venturing into the Upside Down to pull him back to the surface. The greatest reward for Joyce after all that struggle and grief would be a quiet Christmas dinner with her boys, her little family finally mended together again, stronger than ever.
Now, we all knew it would be hard to top that kind of vivid and visceral journey for a single character in a new story, so I guess it only makes sense that the Duffer brothers didn't even bother to try.
In comes Stranger Things 2, bigger and brighter and more 80's-tastic than before. While the kids go on a high flying new adventure to fight the monsters and Eleven cracks the code on her mysterious past and Hopper comes to grips with the meaning of fatherhood, Joyce...gets a boyfriend. A very nice boyfriend, to be fair--who doesn't love Sean Astin? But other than that, she just doesn't have much to do this season. Her emotional climaxes come with one scene of her pounding her fist at a boardroom full of doctors demanding to know why Will is still being so weird, and then again when her boyfriend gets gutted by a Dema-dog. And...that's it. Even skimming through Wikipedia's summary of the episodes only mentions Joyce's name a few times.
Well, surely, third time's the charm and we'll see a return to form for crazy ol' Joyce Byers giving those naysayers what-for and helping the kids save the day! Well....sort of.
See, one day Joyce notices that her refrigerator magnets suddenly aren't sticking anymore, so through a little detective work she figures that it must have something to do with another mysterious government experiment that will let the monsters in again. So of course she enlists Hopper to help her follow this lead, but he's recently decided that he's in love with her and demonstrates his affections by being really, really shitty about everything. SOOO they go on this wacky little road trip involving Russians and conspiracy theorists and other hijinks, finally culminating in them admitting their feelings for each other just in time for Hopper to (maybe?) disintegrate in an explosion. But before that, yet far too late in the season's run to feel timely, we get this charmer of a scene that lends a voice to what the audience has been feeling through six long episodes:
Isn't that cute? This whole time they've been too busy fighting to realize that they're in love! And isn't that what we've all been waiting for all this time?
Umm...no, not really? Yes, there's been tension between them since their first scene together back in Season One, but their history of maybe some fooling around in high school was a footnote in a much broader story. We didn't especially need a romance between these characters, and the story was all the better for not exploring it. But I suppose a combination of "we don't know what else to do with Joyce" and the TV rule that a man and woman can't be in the same room together without some kind of sexual shenanigans going down is what brought us to this.
It's such a damn shame. Hopper and Joyce both deserve better, but at least Hopper gets the benefit of some funny lines and a noble death. ST3 Joyce returns to her raving maybe-not-crazy schtick, but amplifies it through the romantic comedy formula of "these characters don't get along, but soon they'll realize they're perfect for each other," and the show leaves her with the grief of another dead boyfriend and the responsibility of taking in another kid. Cool, coolcoolcool. Thanks for reducing one of your most compelling characters down to something I could never take seriously no matter how well Winona plays it.
It's hard watching a show you love turn into something so impressed with itself and so caught up in winking at its audience that it becomes something you can't stand. Where the 80's references were once a cozy background to set the action against, they've now become a garish staple of the show to the point there is literally a commerical for New Coke delivered directly to the camera. Where our characters were recognizable kids we grew up with, they're now snarky quippy versions of what adult writers think kids are. Where we once referenced Stephen King's best work--the stuff that struck at the heart more often than the stuff that sent chills up the spine--we're now in the shallower, more obviously cocaine-fueled days.
And poor Joyce Byers, that awesome strong-willed mother who guided us to the underworld and out the other side is suddenly nowhere to be found, replaced by a kooky woman too caught up in romantic foibles to share more than two scenes with her own children. Stranger Things has become that thing we used to praise it for not being, and it's just so sad that its decline is illustrated so blatantly in one of its best characters.
But hey, at least we still have Steve.
