Stranger Things: The Vanishing of Joyce Byers

So some time has passed now and I can say with full confidence that Stranger Things 3 is fine...just fine. By now, there's been a good deal of discourse over the newest season and everyone has their thoughts, some more hyperbolic than others. While I wouldn't say Hopper is "ruined" in the third season, I would definitely agree that ST2's bumbling dad schtick has somewhat overlapped ST1's burnout jaded cop veneer, creating a blob of over-the-top brutishness that is, at best, cartoonish and, at worst, exhausting. The fact that Eleven still can't seem to speak in complete sentences and is instead still parroting whatever other people say is irritating, but acceptable given we're all so attached to her "ET phone home" cadence. Hey, that Neverending Story reference sure was fun, wasn't it? I really hope the fans enjoyed that.

I did not.

But I digress. The new characters are fun and watching our favorite gang of D&D nerds grow up is a treat, and I can't say enough how much I enjoy the series' commitment to giving Steve a wicked shiner by the season finale. So while I have my problems with Stranger Things 3, it's far from a failure and is certainly better than certain other continuations of beloved shows these days. But, much like ST2, I probably won't be rewatching it anytime soon.

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.

All About Steve -- STRANGER THINGS

SPOILERS AHEAD FOR SEASONS 1 & 2 OF STRANGER THINGS

Just like most of you, I devoured the second season of Stranger Things in a matter of hours and am now dealing with an epic hangover full of feels. There is very little in this world I'm not cynical about, but Stranger Things has a way of bashing down every one of my walls with thumping synth bass and homegrown nostalgia. If you're anything like me, you've already discovered the wealth of essays and thinkpieces online explaining all the many ways in which the show is so damn perfect, so there's no need to repeat the obvious power it has over its viewers. But it's not just about the inversion of tropes and fantastic music that sets Stranger Things so high in the ranks of great television--it's the characters.

At the end of the day, all these pitch-perfect 80's references wouldn't matter much if the people living within them were just as pastiche. And Stranger Things' greatest strength lies in that magic formula of the familiar turning into something new, just like childhood itself. That magic makes watching something as simple as a bunch of kids riding their bikes and sniping at each other over D&D lore a joyful experience--a vibrant feeling of nostalgia for our own childhoods as well as an almost parental pride in watching these kids grow up.

Even characters that start out as cliches slowly become something else entirely unexpected: ballet-pink Nancy realizes she is secretly a badass, known nutcase Joyce turns out to be seeing more clearly than the entire police department, and Scumbag Steve transforms into the world's greatest babysitter.

I need this Funko figure.

Steve is one of those characters that, when you're discussing the show with a group, the very mention of his name causes the whole crowd to stop and spit and scoff and say "Steeeeve" with such utter contempt that no further commentary is necessary. It was one of the absolute truths of Season One: Will Byers is trapped in a parallel dimension, the government is in on it, Hopper is not to be fucked with, and we all hate Steve.

Like anyone, I had a lot of feelings about Steve from the beginning, mostly negative. My first time watching the show, it was instant, intense hatred for this poofy-haired, over-confident King Shit who was really bad at interpreting the word "no." He was in every way the asshole we all knew from high school, some swaggering peacock that would only look your way if he wanted to fight or to fuck. So as much as the show calls to mind all the wonderful things from childhood, Steve served as a reminder of a lot of the crappy ones. This hatred for Steve soon dulled into mild irritation, as I was assured that soon enough he would be punished for his sins, hopefully by way of getting gobbled up by an interdimensional beast.

But then something happened: Steve got his ass severely kicked.

It was glorious.

After this severe spanking to his ego, Steve's more human side begins to emerge. He sees the error of his ways with surprising sincerity and immediately begins trying to turn things around, starting with cleaning up his slut-shaming graffiti about Nancy. It's this moment that beautifully illustrates the beginning of Steve's redemption: he made a big bombastic display of his hurt feelings for the whole town to see, only to realize how immature and hurtful it was towards a girl he genuinely cares about. Now he has to clean up his mess, and it's not coming out easily. For once, his popularity and charm will do him no good. He really needs to scrub in order to erase this mistake.

He follows this up by going to Jonathan's house and apologizes for his general shittiness with nearly frantic humility, only to stumble into a house full of booby traps and a very pissed off monster. And it was at this exact moment that Stranger Things busted through my last remaining wall of cynicism and I began to fall helplessly in love with Steve Harrington.

My thoughts exactly.

The Duffer Brothers recently revealed that Steve as a character was exactly the hollow douche he appeared to be until Joe Keery auditioned for the role. They said that his natural charisma and likeability instantly changed the way Steve was written, and you can see it as early as the very first episode if you really look for it. Joe is able to show through subtle expressions and delivery that some of his more dicktastic moments are tinged with just the slightest flicker of discomfort. Perfect example--when Steve casually destroys Jonathan's camera in what is ostensibly a defense of his lady's honor but in reality is just a dick move, you can see in his body language how instantly he regrets it. But, ever the tough guy, ever the King Shit, he walks away before his guilty conscience can chime in.

See, the thing with Scumbag Steve is that he is a scumbag because that is what he feels he is supposed to be. He grew up wealthy, he knows his way around a can of mousse, and he "kinda looks like" that guy from Risky Business (yeah, sure Steve), so he poises himself be That Guy. That Guy gets all the ladies. That Guy beats down anyone that steps to him. No one says "no" to That Guy. Maybe the reason we are so inherently bitter towards Steve in Season One is because we can sense that he's just a big phony. All that swagger, all that posturing--it's all fake, merely a performance of the kind of guy Steve thinks he should be. And for all intents and purposes, it's been working for him quite well, up until he begins courting Nancy Wheeler.

The full scope on my feelings for Nancy are for another blog, because I have a lot to say about how damn proud I am of my girl (actually, I probably have enough material gathered up in my head to write long-winded, overly emotional thinkpieces for every single character in the cast), but for our purposes today, let's focus on the profound effect she has on breaking down the thick layer of sleaze that coats Steve in Season One.

From the jump, Nancy is not swayed by Steve's usual tactics of seduction--you know, those old romantic gestures of shoving a girl up against the bathroom wall and interpreting a cancelled date as an invitation to sneak in her bedroom window. To his credit, for all his rapey vibes in the beginning, Steve does catch on pretty quick that Nancy is different from his former conquests, and what starts out as just another notch on his bedpost quickly slides into something more sincere. Nancy's sweetness and genuine decency begins to chip away at Steve's need to look cool in front of his friends, and when she blows him off to hang out with outcast Jonathan Byers, it is both an unexpected blow to his ego and a wake up call that maybe being a dick to everyone isn't the best way to show that you care.

But this is still gross.

The end of Season One shows Steve blissfully happy to be snuggled up with Nancy in his Christmas sweater watching It's a Wonderful Life with her folks, while she listlessly stares off in the distance, leaving us questioning just how long this relationship can last. Season Two wasted little time in answering us, since the second episode ends with Nancy drunkenly revealing her true feelings about their seemingly perfect union: "It's all bullshit."

To be fair, he had it coming. You do not fuck with a girl's white sweater.

As if this wasn't enough, Steve also has to tangle with new psycho in town Billy, who is aiming to be the new king of the senior class. If Steve was tempted to go back to his old ways after being dumped, any attraction quickly sours with seeing the ugliness that radiates from Billy and all his unhinged alpha male aggression. Heartbroken and humiliated, Steve is left to stumble around with a new identity that has made him a more decent person but causes him to lose his place within the high school food chain. Seeing no other option than to return to the only good thing he knows, he goes to her house to try to reconcile. But instead of finding Nancy, he runs into Dustin who says he needs the assistance of a certain bat armed with rusty nails, and suddenly, everything falls into place.

Scumbag Steve becoming Babysitter Steve is one of the most magnificent transformations of a character I've ever seen. It's on par with Jaime Lannister going from an incestuous bloodthirsty prick to a one-handed man of honor. In a season that seemed to pride itself on attempting new team-ups between characters, this one is the last thing you see coming and one of the most delightful surprises of a show that aims to shock. As much as I love Hopper being Eleven's new dad, there is little that compares to the feels of watching Steve and Dusty walk down the railroad tracks talking about girls.

And the benefits of quality hair care products.

If you're one of the non-believers that chalked up Steve's heroics at the end of Season One as merely an attempt to win back his girlfriend, then Season Two should put that shallow read to rest. Once again, Steve is inadvertently dragged into a second encounter with the Demogorgan(s), but this time it is undoubtedly selfless. He willingly puts himself in danger to help--and then fiercely protect--a bunch of kids that shouldn't mean anything to him. Not only does he square off against a gang of literal monsters, but he even throws himself in front of the testosterone-fueled freight train that is Billy when he comes looking for his stepsister. When he wakes up from his severe ass-whooping in a car being driven by a thirteen-year-old, he has one of the most fantastic freak-outs put to film. And come on, tell me you didn't get chills watching him swing that bat again like a goddamn superstar.

Come at me, bro.

Nancy's influence certainly contributed to Steve's metamorphosis, but ultimately, it does not define him. Because for all the softening the love of a good woman can do to a hard man, it is obligation and responsibility--these moments that we are sometimes accidentally thrust into--that reveal who we truly are. And, surprise, Steve reveals that not only is he a good person, but also the King Shit he always tried to be, only in a different way than anything he could have prepared for.

Stranger Things is that rare perfect show, striking the balance between exploiting our nostalgia and expanding upon it, teasing out unique perspectives on old tropes while introducing us to rich characters who are both comfortingly familiar and refreshingly new. But Steve Harrington stands out among this wonderful cast by becoming something entirely unexpected: a hero.