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Post by 🔪 silly buns on Jul 7, 2022 13:53:01 GMT -5
I didn't see a thread, but swear we were discussing this show somewhere during season 2. Please let me know if there is a thread and I will delete or condense this one.
Anyhoo-- loved the horror movie elements of season 4. Not sure where they are taking this show after the finale, but I am curious.
Also, curious to see what they do with the Will character. Will he ever get a different hair style..I know that this is probably related to his trauma and issues with growing up...which makes me even more interested in seeing what they do with that character.
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Ben Grimm
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Post by Ben Grimm on Jul 7, 2022 14:57:27 GMT -5
I'm assuming we're spoiler friendly on this thread? Because, if so:
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Post by Celebith on Jul 13, 2022 10:19:43 GMT -5
I've only watched the first two episodes, and Eddie feels like a young Andy Samberg for some reason.
I keep intending to watch more of it, but I open the app on my TV and then end up doing so many other things that my TV goes through 'screen saver' mode and ends up with a blank, dark screen before I remember that it's even on. I like a lot of TV shows, but hate setting aside time to watch them.
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Post by Celebith on Jul 18, 2022 8:30:20 GMT -5
Finished up through Ep. 4.7 - pretty good, even though I was spoiled on too many things. I blame internets, headlines and massively spoilery attention grabs. It's great that streaming series don't need to maintain a standard episode length, or even remain structured around commercial breaks, and I am always down for a good 3 hour-ish movie, but come on! The final 2 episodes are like, 5 and a half hours, on top of the 90ish minutes of the first 7. There was a lot of fat that could have been trimmed. I've loved Brett Gelman at least since the iBrain sketch, and David Harbour is pretty awesome, but their entire arc is like the Finn / Rose bits of Ep. 8. Maybe Netflix etc. should impose time limits - constraints breed creativity. I think we're going to learn that Hopper is 011's real father, and he was brainwashed to forget it or something. Because he has to have some sort of mutant powers to even walk, much less fight or run, after all he's done to his feet and ankles. Those things are going to be msishapen and infected AF give conditions there, and traveling from the camp to town (what, an hour's drive from each other?) barefoot in the snow. |
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Post by Albert Fish Taco on Jul 18, 2022 15:03:13 GMT -5
I'm assuming we're spoiler friendly on this thread? Because, if so: Here's the thing about that scene that's been bugging me. So Eddie brings his guitar and Dustin helps him with the amps, speakers and whatnot to play Master of Puppets. I couldn't tell if Dustin also brought along a boombox. OK so far so good, Eddie starts jamming the intro. All guitar. But 33 seconds in we start hearing the drums kick in. So the questions are: Is Eddie just air guitaring it and it's all just Dustin playing a cassette? If so what was the point of lugging the guitar and amp along? If Eddie is for real shredding with the rest of the song coming off a cassette Dustin is playing, wouldn't the guitars sound off, duplicative or echoey? |
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Ben Grimm
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Post by Ben Grimm on Jul 18, 2022 15:07:18 GMT -5
I'm assuming we're spoiler friendly on this thread? Because, if so: Here's the thing about that scene that's been bugging me. So Eddie brings his guitar and Dustin helps him with the amps, speakers and whatnot to play Master of Puppets. I couldn't tell if Dustin also brought along a boombox. OK so far so good, Eddie starts jamming the intro. All guitar. But 33 seconds in we start hearing the drums kick in. So the questions are: Is Eddie just air guitaring it and it's all just Dustin playing a cassette? If so what was the point of lugging the guitar and amp along? If Eddie is for real shredding with the rest of the song coming off a cassette Dustin is playing, wouldn't the guitars sound off, duplicative or echoey? I read it as the guitar was diegetic and the rest of the song was non-diegetic. The alternative is that the sheer metalness of the moment summoned the remaining instrumental and vocal tracks purely out of the ether, in keeping with the setting. |
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Post by 🔪 silly buns on Jul 18, 2022 15:16:11 GMT -5
I read it as the guitar was diegetic and the rest of the song was non-diegetic. The alternative is that the sheer metalness of the moment summoned the remaining instrumental and vocal tracks purely out of the ether, in keeping with the setting. Well the sound wasn't metal enough or it would have turned those bats into hot babes or cool cars, or something. Pfft. |
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Post by chalkdevil 😈 on Jul 22, 2022 8:42:19 GMT -5
Look, I'm no metallurgist, but wouldn't Master of Puppets fit better thematically with season 3? Shouldn't Eddie have played something like Ride the Lightning? Is that too on the nose for Stranger Things?
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Ben Grimm
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Post by Ben Grimm on Jul 22, 2022 11:45:39 GMT -5
Look, I'm no metallurgist, but wouldn't Master of Puppets fit better thematically with season 3? Shouldn't Eddie have played something like Ride the Lightning? Is that too on the nose for Stranger Things? Master of Puppets barely came out in time to be included in season 4. If it had shown up in season 3, it would have been anachronistic. |
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Post by Celebith on Jul 26, 2022 15:07:42 GMT -5
Finally watched the final 2 episodes - they probably would have had more emotional impact if I wasn't also playing on my computer, but it was still pretty cute, with everyone's relationship arcs .... ending. Concluding is definitely not the correct word, given the non-overlapping love triangles, and obvious V/H/1 red herrings. Still, it would have benefitted from some tightening up.
With some spoilers, I expected the probable / possible deaths, and Max's coma, so the big emotional beats for me were Steve getting all giddy over Robin and notMolly Ringwald, and then Dustin with Eddie's Uncle. He seemed like such a decent dude, and then just gets kicked in the junk by events. I felt terrible for him. Did they even say what happened to Max's mom? You'd think she'd be around somewhere, or that they'd mention her fate.
When is Brett Gelman going to find someone? Maybe he, Enzo and Yuri can help scout the new hellgate with Katinka, but doesn't he deserve some romance, too? There aren't many spares to pair him with at this point.
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Post by liebkartoffel on Aug 4, 2022 14:26:19 GMT -5
Also, curious to see what they do with the Will character. Will he ever get a different hair style..I know that this is probably related to his trauma and issues with growing up...which makes me even more interested in seeing what they do with that character.
I think they noticed Will turned out the best looking so now they have to try extra hard to dork him up. |
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Post by liebkartoffel on Aug 4, 2022 15:04:29 GMT -5
Just wrapped up season 4. Padding and weird episode length aside, I think 4 was surprisingly successful and might be my favorite season after the first. There's a lot of table setting and splitting up the band just so they can dramatically get back together again for the final chapter, but I found myself more or less equally enjoying each disparate plot thread. I also appreciated how they treated time and distance seriously, and didn't have, say, Hopper magically teleport to Hawkins from Kamchatka after escaping prison. Obviously the Duffers were just as pissed at the last couple of Game of Thrones seasons as the rest of us. In addition to all the horror homages they were pretty clearly going for an Empire Strikes Back vibe, what with the protagonist leaving her training too early and rushing off to help her friends only to ultimately fail, leaving one said friend comatose. Brenner is no Yoda, though, and I liked how they fleshed him out without even trying to redeem him or push El toward forgiving him.
Don't know how I feel about Vecna/001/Henry. He's a fun season villain, and he opened up some spooky new horror possibilities with his mind powers, but I could feel the narrative machinery groaning a bit trying to retcon him into El's/the Upside Down's origin story. His lengthy speech trying to tie together his very confusing motives--and delivered to a 9-year-old, mind you--is very silly. "I love, spiders, you see, because they're the ultimate predators, and they don't live by society's rules, which are represented by clocks, so that's why there's this recurring grandfather clock motif...Okay, let me back up. Hawkins is a land of many contrasts..." Sometimes subtext can just remain subtext, particularly if you're not certain what you're trying to say. Plus, I don't know, I preferred it when they were up against some vast, unknowable, Cthulhu-style evil. Making the ultimate big bad into just some (admittedly all-powerful) guy makes the stakes more personal but also a lot smaller.
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Post by Celebith on Aug 5, 2022 12:32:30 GMT -5
Don't know how I feel about Vecna/001/Henry. He's a fun season villain, and he opened up some spooky new horror possibilities with his mind powers, but I could feel the narrative machinery groaning a bit trying to retcon him into El's/the Upside Down's origin story. His lengthy speech trying to tie together his very confusing motives--and delivered to a 9-year-old, mind you--is very silly. "I love, spiders, you see, because they're the ultimate predators, and they don't live by society's rules, which are represented by clocks, so that's why there's this recurring grandfather clock motif...Okay, let me back up. Hawkins is a land of many contrasts..." Sometimes subtext can just remain subtext, particularly if you're not certain what you're trying to say. Plus, I don't know, I preferred it when they were up against some vast, unknowable, Cthulhu-style evil. Making the ultimate big bad into just some (admittedly all-powerful) guy makes the stakes more personal but also a lot smaller. It might be fun to have a novel from Henry's POV from the start. Misunderstood boy with weird powers has to protect himself when his parents decide to give him to the government to experiment on. He's tortured by a mad scientist and then injected with a device that keeps him enslaved. Slow years pass as he plots to free himself and the other slaves, but at the last minute, his one trusted prisoner turns on him and sides with their captors. Like Firestarter, but less obvious that the lead is a psychopath. There was a pretty good novel along those lines, but since the slow realization is part of the fun, naming it would really spoil it. I didn't love the 001 stuff, but before S4 was betting on a Dark Phoenix storyline for 11 in season 5, so of the two, this is probably the better option. Still assuming that they'll both have to die to seal the gates forever, so we can have big, emotional sacrifices and goodbyes. Then they'll undercut it by having some blinkenlights at the end, because this country can't resist taking the punch out of strong endings. Also, we didn't actually see Brenner die, and Paul Riser has to get out of the Nina facility somehow, so figure on some lab family drama. Maybe Kali will come back? It slowed the story down, but that was a good standalone episode. Very scanners, low-rent psychic underground vibe. They kinda lost the opportunity to go with cosmic horror after they beat the first demogorgon in S1. It has some of the trappings, but leads in Chtulhoid stories have less agency. They're doomed from the start, and the story is just them learning how doomed they are. They could do it with a story based on one of the side characters, though. POV of Eddie's uncle - nothing about the last 3 years could make any sense, and it ends with the nephew you were raising probably dead, blamed for ritual murders and an apocalypse, with not even a corpse to grieve over. Some kid tells you he died a hero, but no one else is gonna believe it, and it still doesn't explain anything. Give you some good, The Mist, shoot-your-own-family trauma. |
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Post by chalkdevil 😈 on Aug 9, 2022 13:04:32 GMT -5
Just wrapped up season 4. Padding and weird episode length aside, I think 4 was surprisingly successful and might be my favorite season after the first. There's a lot of table setting and splitting up the band just so they can dramatically get back together again for the final chapter, but I found myself more or less equally enjoying each disparate plot thread. I also appreciated how they treated time and distance seriously, and didn't have, say, Hopper magically teleport to Hawkins from Kamchatka after escaping prison. Obviously the Duffers were just as pissed at the last couple of Game of Thrones seasons as the rest of us. In addition to all the horror homages they were pretty clearly going for an Empire Strikes Back vibe, what with the protagonist leaving her training too early and rushing off to help her friends only to ultimately fail, leaving one said friend comatose. Brenner is no Yoda, though, and I liked how they fleshed him out without even trying to redeem him or push El toward forgiving him. Don't know how I feel about Vecna/001/Henry. He's a fun season villain, and he opened up some spooky new horror possibilities with his mind powers, but I could feel the narrative machinery groaning a bit trying to retcon him into El's/the Upside Down's origin story. His lengthy speech trying to tie together his very confusing motives--and delivered to a 9-year-old, mind you--is very silly. "I love, spiders, you see, because they're the ultimate predators, and they don't live by society's rules, which are represented by clocks, so that's why there's this recurring grandfather clock motif...Okay, let me back up. Hawkins is a land of many contrasts..." Sometimes subtext can just remain subtext, particularly if you're not certain what you're trying to say. Plus, I don't know, I preferred it when they were up against some vast, unknowable, Cthulhu-style evil. Making the ultimate big bad into just some (admittedly all-powerful) guy makes the stakes more personal but also a lot smaller. It felt to me like the grandfather clock thing was because they figured out they wanted to do a Labyrinth homage for Vecna's lair and worked backwards from there. |
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