Get 'em, Mamas

I'll put it out there upfront: the writing of Stranger Things declined in Season 5. (I have people in my life who I think genuinely might cut me off if I say this. I'm so sorry.) There are so many things I could say about it: the pacing was weird, the plot armour was insane, and there were so many conversations involving one character explaining an idea using props that I started to feel dread whenever someone picked up a coffee cup or whatever. I've seen people pinpointing this noticeable decline on everything from ChatGPT to Netflix's rumoured second screen policy to divorce gate. I can't write TV; it's a skill that I hugely admire for its immense complexity. But I do know that there are basic storytelling tenets that were not met here. And not in a cool experimental way, more in a 'this is baffling, what are they doing' way.

But! Having said all that, Season 5 is not as dramatically bad as people are making it out to be. I suspect that some people who hate it now might soften on it in later years. An unfortunate byproduct of modern discourse is that something has to be categorised by the masses as either a success or a failure, either excellent or a steaming heap of unforgivable shit. And Season 5 was neither of those, IMO. It was okay. The finale, I thought, was pretty good. I cried and I laughed and ultimately I feel glad that these characters exist.

Outside of Holly Wheeler, who I had completely forgotten existed prior to Season 5, one character with the most dramatic escalation of importance was Mama Wheeler herself. Her plot points were both brilliant and incredibly silly. And it's her that I keep thinking about now that it's over.

A highlight of the first part of Season 5 was the entire Holly kidnapping scene. If you're reading this and you're not into Stranger Things, a brief summary for you: a demogorgon breaks through the ceiling of ten-year-old Holly Wheeler, throwing her into a bookcase before, I don't know, perhaps pausing to let her collect herself. Meanwhile, we see her mother, Karen, sitting on the edge of the bath. She's downing a glass of wine while pouring liberal amounts of bubbles into the water. It's a whole mood. Anyway, Holly bursts in, waffles about monsters, and Karen just presumes it's childhood nonsense (which in itself is insane given what's been going on all around her for the past four seasons). And then the lights flicker. In bursts the demogorgon. Holly and Karen are nowhere to be seen. Slowly, as the camera sinks down, we see them desperately holding their breaths, sunk deep under the bubbles in an effort to save their life.

It's a genuinely terrifying scene, one that makes my heart leap both as a mother and someone who can't hold her breath for very long. I'd be dead already by this point if this was happening to me. Ultimately, Karen and the demogorgon have a face-off. 'Stay - away - from - my - DAUGHTER!' she screams, smashing a bottle of wine on the kitchen counter and thrusting it right into the demogorgon's face. It is immensely satisfying television.

There's a moment in which Karen's eldest daughter, Nancy, arrives (armed to the gills as usual). She's running into the kitchen. Her eyes widen. Time seems to slow. On the floor, having had her throat slashed by a monster, is her mother.

It could have been a triumph in heartbreaking television. It could have been this:

We could have kicked off Season 5 with some real, tangible danger and an incredibly sad development for the Wheeler kids. But instead, Karen (and her oft-forgotten husband, Ted) survives. Not only does she survive, but in a later episode, she manages to drag herself out of her hospital bed, carry oxygen tanks down to the basement laundry room, and load them into a dryer, all while demodogs gallop around the hospital, showing both improbable strength of body and presence of mind for someone who nearly died not long beforehand. It's plot armour to another extreme. She is a plot Bubble Boy. In the making-of documentary, even Cara Buono herself expresses doubt that Karen would survive the extent of her injuries.

I don't like pointless character deaths, and I love Karen, but she should have died there on the kitchen floor. Every 'oh my goodness, they could get killed!' moment that the narrative serves you from that moment on is toothless. You know that they don't mean it. When Jonathan and Nancy have their near-death experience with PVA glue a bit later in the season, I didn't fear for them. No way would they get killed off, not if Karen managed to survive a demogorgon slash to the throat.

The Duffer brothers came across, to me, as though they were running on fumes. They talked about the lack of deaths: they didn't want to make the show 'depressing', not acknowledging the fact that this would have an impact on the tension, which, for a show about enormous battles, horrific monsters, and gut-wrenching death scenes in previous seasons, feels like a really strange take. Deaths don't instantly equate to good writing. Handled badly, it feels cheap and manipulative. But we've seen brutal deaths in the show before. No (official) deaths at the end of the world, within this world they have created, is nonsensical.

In earlier seasons, I would have loved to have seen more of Karen. But her story should have ended there. On the floor of the Wheeler home, defending her child, as any mother would do.

But when I write that sentence, something sits uncomfortably with me. Too often, dead mothers are used as props for character growth. I genuinely think part of my terrible fear of death came from the amount of orphaned children I saw on television as a kid. For the classic hero's journey, parents are an obstacle. Best to just bump them off so a child can grow up properly, become the man or woman they're supposed to be.

Years ago, I wrote on an old blog about growing out of YA fiction. And one of the reasons was because I had become a mother. Yes, I was a fairly young mum at 25. But I'd read these books and think: where are their parents? It instantly broke me out of the story. No way could all this shit go on without an adult at least attempting to intervene. Yeah, I did some dangerous stuff as a teenager, but it either got found out eventually, or I had a narrow escape. No way would I be able to, say, spend five years of my life fighting against the forces of evil without the adults in my life having the slightest clue that something might be up.

And maybe that's coming from a position of privilege. I have a family who love me. Some people don't, yes, but not to the scale shown in YA media. So I get why it's tempting to bump off the parents. You get to sidestep that issue altogether.

I'm a hypocrite, because in a way, I'm glad Karen lived to tell the tale. I was happy to see her there, at her kid's graduation ceremony, proudly displaying her scars. For the overarching story, it made sense to kill her off. But for the representation of mothers who are interesting and valuable in their own right, I can see why they kept her.

Which leads me onto the other mother of Stranger Things - Joyce. Aside from the lack of real threat, the sidelining of Joyce is one of the things I dislike the most about later seasons. In S5, Joyce is, on the whole, reduced to sitting around looking worried. She gives the same speech to Will, over and over again, that she's been giving him since he first returned from the Upside Down.

This, I feel, should be legally classed as a crime. An unforgivable waste of both Joyce and Winona Ryder herself. She was the beating heart of Season One. And yes, I get that the whole point is that it's a coming-of-age story; I get that the kids have to grow up and deal with their own shit as part of it all. But the Joyce we see in earlier seasons is fearless. She will go to the ends of the earth to protect her children. Here, she's a spare part. Often, she is the butt of the joke. Perpetually out of the loop, struggling to catch up.

I don't know how I feel about this. I get that the focus is on the kids. But in previous seasons, we see more going on with Hopper (similarly sidelined in this season) and Joyce. Yes, they're not the driving force behind the series, but they were still a big part of the story. They still had their own motivations, their own needs, their own subplots. Where was that in Season 5?

It gets me wondering who this show is for. It's beloved by many; as of the 6th of January, the season has over 105.7 million views. That is many, many people gathering to watch the end of the Upside Down. When this show began, back in 2016, I was in my late twenties. I had very tiny children. (In fact, when it first aired I was still pregnant with my youngest, who is now a silly and lovely nine-year-old.) That is a dramatically long time. I know part of it can be blamed on Covid, but that's not entirely the reason why it took so long. A decade is a long-ass time. In that time, Millie Bobby Brown herself has got married and become a mother. (Very young, yes, but that's not the point.)

If anyone was watching in their teen years - the prime age to be hit with funny and emotional coming-of-age media - they're now in their mid-twenties, trying to work out how to pay rent and keep the electricity running or whatever. They're adults now. Even with the time jump, they've outgrown the main crew.

The show has never just been about the kids. It's been about everyone swept up in the chaos of it all. That's what made the storytelling so full and rich and layered in the beginning. The gut-punch for Hopper, when you see him losing his first daughter. Joyce, struggling to get by as a single parent with a useless ex-husband. This is part of what made Stranger Things feel relatable to so many people. To see so much less of Hopper and Joyce feels like such a waste.

But the finale pulls it back somehow. The characters feel more rooted in themselves. In the epilogue, it really feels like we're back in classic Hawkins. Prior to that, even, we get to see Joyce finally doing something. On behalf of everyone hurt by Vecna, she chops his head off. (Slowly, and somewhat brutally, with an axe that maybe should have been sharpened beforehand.) She's the one who first begins to fight for the truth to rescue her son; she is the one to end it. It's a moment that made up for so much of the previous episodes. This feels like the Joyce we came to love so much right back at the start. I cried throughout this entire scene. It felt like justice being done on behalf of everyone, yes, but specifically for Joyce, who went through so much heartache and fear for her sons.

Shows like Stranger Things always bring up funny conversations with my sisters. I wrote about this before, but my middle sister called me in tears after the Season 5 finale of Buffy. 'I'd throw myself into a portal for you!' she said. I said earlier that Karen protected her children as any mother would do. And it's entirely hypothetical, but yes, I would smash a bottle and thrust it into the face of someone trying to harm my children, and I would do it without hesitation. Consequences be damned. I can easily say that as I sit here in my safe home, cuddled up in bed with my cats and the heating on and no immediate threat of monsters ripping open my ceilings. But the theory still stands.

In my early years as a mum, I felt quite nervous about this part of life. The beginning stages made sense to me. I know how to look after little kids. I know how to soothe the worries of a five-year-old while balancing a squirming toddler on one hip. That bit felt natural. The thought of trying to navigate their preteen/teen years while also figuring out what I want for myself felt like a huge and daunting task. Who am I, when I don't have a little one around me?

Luckily, I am surrounded by women who have seized the opportunities in this stage of life. Both my sisters and my sister-in-law have graduated from university, post-children, and pursued new career paths. They've gained new hobbies, deepened their friendships, learned what they love and what they can do without. I look to them, and the other women around me, for guidance and ideas, for a path I can safely follow. So many people I know have said their forties were better than their thirties; that the older they get, the better they know themselves, and the more meaningful life has become. So I look forward to it now, rather than feeling afraid of it. There's a lot of life ahead of me, if I'm lucky enough to have it.

Wheeling it back around (see what I did there?) to Karen, Joyce, and Stranger Things in general. Ultimately, the presence of Cara Buono and Winona Ryder was a huge blessing for the show. To see interesting and complex women in television, especially women who are in their forties, fifties, and beyond, is something I always long for. (I was also happy to see Linda Hamilton for this reason, but man I wish her character was more developed beyond Generic Military Bad Guy.) To see mothers who have thoughts and ideas and initiative is also something I long for, and we do see this in the show, albeit imperfectly. Greedily, yes, I would like to see Karen and Joyce outside of the context of motherhood. But I do see that the runtime for Season 5 was outrageous as it is, so I'll take what we got.

My feelings about Stranger Things are complicated. I don't want to just be a miserable git about it. I think they pulled off something remarkable, but perhaps got lost inside the hugeness of their own imaginary world. There are a lot of things I would change about it; I kind of see it as an example of what happens when writers get too involved in their own source material, when they're not able to be completely objective about the work because they love their characters a bit too much. The end scenes of the documentary had me in tears. You could see how much of a family they had become by how difficult it was to say goodbye. Particularly for the kids. I love that for them (genuinely), but I can't help but think that it held them back.

It's a useful thing to hold in my mind as I attempt to write a novel, primarily about a mother and daughter. Don't get so close to the work that you can't see straight anymore. I'll try to remember that, if I ever get around to actually finishing the thing.

The Ghost of Newsletters Past

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