Stranger Things Season 5, Episodes 5, 6, and 7

 Here's the thing:

Stranger Things came into the public consciousness out of the blue. I had not seen any marketing or build-up to its release in 2016, and so it came as a surprising, fun little relief for me. That was the year that my mother was diagnosed with what would prove to be (and it wasn't a terrible shock after the initial diagnosis) terminal cancer. I was home visiting her, along with my sister (who lives in New York) when we discovered the show.

It's funny to think that it was this word-of-mouth, out-of-the-blue thing, because now, Stranger Things is Netflix's biggest success story.

It doesn't seem that long ago to me, but I guess there are some who might not remember: Netflix didn't have original programming, originally. It was the premiere video streaming platform, really paving the way for that as a service (though before then it was the service that would send you DVDs in the mail). It was a big deal when Netflix launched House of Cards, a David Fincher-produced remake of a series from England (that most Americans had no idea existed) starring then-beloved actor Kevin Spacey.

But Stranger Things was splashy, a mix of nostalgia and fun sci-fi/horror storytelling with a group of remarkably effective child actors.

It's weird to think how the show has evolved since then.

In the final season's back half minus the finale, we learn some things about the cosmos of Stranger Things that are, frankly, kind of huge... but also the sort of thing it's fine to have saved for the end.

Given that this is a recap of nearly half the season (which is my own damn fault - I just wanted to go to the next episode and not pause to do a review of each one following my watch) there's a lot to talk about.

Actually, it's not a recap, per se - recapping can be useful in a review of this sort, but I'm assuming you've watched it if you're reading this, so we're going to kind of jump around to my thoughts about it.

There will be spoilers.

Stranger Things Season 5, Episodes 1-4

 While there are more out now, it seems fitting for me to write up my thoughts on Stranger Things' final season's first four episodes because they were all released as a batch in November. Netflix is stretching out the release of the season, but perhaps as a point of branding pride, they haven't done the sensible thing of just releasing an episode a week.

Anyway, first, an aside:

I started playing D&D a little before Stranger Things came out. The show makes Dungeons & Dragons a constant metaphor for the supernatural horrors that torment Hawkins, first naming the petal-headed monsters Demogorgons after the iconic demon lord from the game, then calling the Hive Mind that controls them the Mind Flayer, and then naming the former-human monster at the center of it all after D&D's most iconic Lich-god, Vecna.

The fourth episode of the season is called Sorcerer, which is a class in D&D. Unlike a Wizard, who learns magic by studying it and gathers all their spells into a spellbook, a Sorcerer is either born or transformed into one, their magic drawn upon by instinct and force of will.

Now, Stranger Things does have its anachronisms, and this is one of them: the Sorcerer class was introduced in 3rd Edition, which came out in the early 2000s. Perhaps this is just poor dramaturgy on the part of Stranger Things' writers, or a winking acknowledgement that this show, while set in the 1980s, is very much a beast of our modern times.

While most of my experience with D&D is as the game's Dungeon Master, I do, thankfully, also have friends who take on this role, and have been able to play as one of its heroes myself. It's often advisable to have a "back-up" character in mind, should something terrible happen to your main character. I love writing character backstories, so I created several back-ups for the character I've been playing for the past four or so years.

Among them is an elf sorcerer. In D&D, at least the current, popular 5th Edition, you also pick a subclass, which further fleshes out the sort of vibes of your character and gives you some unique abilities. The concept for this character was that he's a Divine Soul sorcerer, namely one whose sorcerous powers were granted by a god. And that god, very unfortunately for him, is Vecna (or, as he's known in the Exandria setting created by Matthew Mercer for the actual play show Critical Role, "The Whispered One.") This character, Spar, was kidnapped by Vecna's minions and held within the dark realm of the Shadowfell, a parallel plane sort of just on the other side of the mundane "prime material plane" reality, which is full of dread, horror, and the undead. Spar was kept in that plane for centuries (elves can live about ten times as long as humans in D&D,) where he was shaped and molded by Vecna's power to serve as some kind of vessel for him. However, after the events of Critical Role's first campaign, when the heroes (players) sealed Vecna away, he was able to be rescued, but would be haunted by the notion that he might be the evil Lich-God's contingency plan to somehow return.

I came up with this backstory years ago. But there's a very clear parallel here that I'll get into within the spoilers:

The Elasticity of 80s Nostalgia and Stranger Things

 I'm late to the party, of course.

I honestly don't know why I didn't jump to watch the new season, the final season, of Stranger Things, immediately when it was put up on Netflix. I've been a fan of the show, as have many. But it's a very weird thing:

The show was created by the Duffer Brothers, who themselves were born in 1984, the year after the show begins. I'm two years younger, and while at this point in my life, a two year difference is pretty small, the amount of the 1980s that I actually remember must be significantly less than it is for them, or for my sister, who was also born in '84.

The show's young stars were a pretty impressive coup of child talent, but in the nine years since the show premiered, they're not actually children anymore. There's a weird, uncanniness about the fact that actors in their early or mid 20s are playing characters who are meant to be teenagers.

But the show seems aware of this:

I'd argue that the first season of the show actually treats Mike Wheeler as its main character - while Eleven is the superheroic figure who is actually powerful enough to fight the monsters, the show takes Mike's perspective more than any other character's, though even then it was largely an ensemble. Mike and his older sister Nancy both got a lot of focus, and have remained core characters, but their younger sister, Holly, was portrayed as a baby in that first season.

Season 5 is set in 1987, and so at most Holly ought to be 5, but she's not - she seems far more mature than that. Nell Fisher, who plays her in this season, is 14 - older, in fact, than Millie Bobby Brown was when the series started, and certainly quite a bit older than her character, who appears to still be in elementary school, is meant to be.

I was kind of shocked at this, and then the show hung a lampshade on it - when the Wheelers' parents are arguing after Holly has an incident talking to an imaginary friend at school, Karen berates her husband for not even knowing how old their daughter is (later, under more dire circumstances, Karen's age is stated to be 46 while Ted is merely "late 40s," which feels like a bit of "turnabout is fair play.")

Still, there's a kind of fourth-wall breaking here that nods to the oddness of having the final season take place four years after the first but come out nine years after the first one came out in the real world.

I think it could have worked out fine in they had just had things keep up with the actual march of time. Set this season in 1992 instead. Why not?

    I have a confession:

I resent 80s nostalgia.

Nostalgia for decades past was a thing before I was born. Happy Days, a 1970s television show, was looking back on an idyllic 1950s, and that 50s nostalgia was a big part of the Reagan era. In the 1990s, we got a bit of a 60s nostalgia period, like with Austin Powers, and then, as I recall, something of a 70s nostalgia movement.

Before we even hit the 80s nostalgia trend, I didn't like the decade. It was mostly about music - I hated the heavy synths, the droning vocals. Compared with the alternative rock music that I discovered as an 11-year-old thanks to KOME in Northern California, all that 80s stuff, I just found it depressing and gross.

Over time, I've developed more nuanced tastes, of course. I can recognize that Kate Bush's Runnin' Up That Hill, which features prominently in this show, is a really good song. And I can look back on my sister's beloved Cyndi Lauper Greatest Hits album from our childhood with some fondness. I've also come to recognize the forebears of my 90s alternative rock homeland with bands like Pixies, whose consecutive-year 87 and 88 albums, Surfer Rosa and Dolittle, are very much in my regular rotation. I've even found a fondness for some of the early 80s metal (which to be fair is a bit more of something carrying over from the 70s) like the cheesy but awesome Holy Diver by Dio.

But while I wasn't really happy when 80s nostalgia took hold, I was at least comforted by the notion that soon enough, people would be bringing back the flannel and baggy jeans and listening to Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, and Cake.

It just feels like that never really came. It's like we got trapped in the 1980s. I mean, the dominant figure in American political life right now is basically the embodiment of the cocaine-fueled "greed is good" vibes of the 1980s. And we just don't seem to be able to move on.

What is it, exactly?

Cinematically, of course, the 80s were when the blockbuster took over Hollywood. And, look, there's actually a ton in film from that decade that rightfully induces a feeling of nostalgia. Stranger Things started off with a combination of Stephen King (especially what is probably his quintessential novel, IT) and Steven Spielberg (with the "Kids on Bikes" feel of E.T.) and John Carpenter (including the synth-heavy score).

But would Stranger Things just not feel right if it weren't taking place in the 1980s?

It's funny, because I could imagine that if this show had been created by people who were the age of the kids in the story, they might feel intimately drawn to the decade (I haven't finished a post about it, but I thought maybe that was why Mike Flanagan had set his Haunting of Bly Manor in the 80s, as he would have been roughly the age of the kids in that story). But the Duffers were only 5 at the advent of the 1990s.

I guess it's just that the 80s is a weirdly mythologized decade, but I feel like I'm surrounded by madness as the person who doesn't really care for it. The fashion was ugly, the music was depressing. And while things are worse now (to a degree possibly unprecedented until you go back to, like, the Civil War) the politics were also pretty atrocious.

My own nostalgia for the 1990s does have some rose-tinted element to it. But I wonder what it is that has prevented it form getting the same nostalgic treatment that the 80s got. By many measures, the 90s were a better time here in America, with the end of the Cold War (and not yet the War on Terrorism) and a better economy. Sure, those larger things might not hit you in the nostalgia the way that more personal, more cultural experiences do.

Maybe the 90s was when culture started to split. How, of course, could something like Alternative Rock occupy the mainstream? In the 1980s, everyone loved Michael Jackson. In the 1990s, we were horrified to discover that he was allegedly a pedophile.

Honestly, that might be it: there was less of a universal experience in the 90s. Not necessarily because everyone actually experienced the 80s the same way, but the 90s was when the cultural touchstones got diversified. I mean, the internet really started to be a thing in the 90s, and while it wouldn't really reach its current form until the 2000s, with the advent of social media, the way that life was portrayed in media was not so universal.

Hawkins, Indiana, is meant to be small-town, suburban America. It didn't have to be in Indiana. It could have been in Virginia or Massachusetts or California.

The heroes of Stranger Things live in this homogenous culture in this homogenous decade (every state except my home state of Massachusetts went to Reagan in the 1984 election. Same spread as Nixon's reelection in 1972 - which is why there used to be bumper stickers that said "Don't Blame Me, I'm From Massachusetts") and in addition to the supernatural monsters to fight, they're also fighting against that monoculture.

The series villain, the late-arriving Vecna (while I think that he's a cool villain and season 4 was the best season since the first, I do seriously question whether the Duffers had really planned his involvement from the start) is cruel and destructive, as well as judgmental, killing those for the bad thoughts they have in their heads. He controls the monsters of the Upside-down as the nexus of their hive-mind. While I don't know what is yet to be revealed about him this season apart from some vague and out-of-context spoilers on my damned facebook feed or in YouTube thumbnails, I think there's space for the fight against him to, among other things, represent a fight against control, authority, and even conformity.

Perhaps the 90s would be too late - the battle, if not the war, already won.

Rewatching Princess Bride in Memory of Rob Reiner

 It's amazing when a movie can turn its ostensible flaws into assets.

I think the first time I saw The Princess Bride I was maybe a little older than its official target audience - I might have been ten or something (the movie came out when I was 1, so I was too young to see it in theaters).

There's a lot of absolute cheese to the movie - its transparently "in a sound stage" sets, the super-fake synthesized score, and even Andre the Giant's "I'm not a professional actor" performance. Yet all of these details do nothing to diminish the film. If anything, they enhance it.

In the wake of, I'd assume, Star Wars, the 1980s saw a lot of fantasy films. But in a lot of ways, I think that the Princess Bride kind of predicted a movement toward fourth-wall breaking, self-awareness, and metacommentary that I remember as a key aspect of children's entertainment when I was growing up.

One of my favorite books was The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales by Jon Scieszka. Published in 1992, the book was a series of re-imagined children's tales with an ironic twist, like the main title story, which takes the Gingerbread Man and instead makes a man out of really stinky cheese that no one even wants to chase because his odor is so off-putting.

When its core plot elements are laid out, The Princess Bride is a bog-standard fantasy yarn (with very little in the way of actual magic). But basically every asset of the movie serves its core idea, which is to embrace the heightened emotions of fantasy (the romance between Wesley and Buttercup is unalloyed true love, capable of convincing anyone with a modicum of good within them to help their cause) and even push back on the urge to detach oneself from such strongly held emotions (the frame narrative with a young Fred Savage as a modern kid hearing the tale read by his grandfather, former angel Peter Falk, would, if written today, or perhaps about ten years ago, have the kid complaining initially that the book is "cringe") without surrendering a biting, clever wit.

The movie is so incredibly quotable, with brilliant lines and moments. (Liberally) adapted from the original book by its author, William Goldman (who also has a ton of other really impressive screenwriting credits, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President's Men) the movie is also very economical.

In the movie's first act, when Buttercup is kidnapped by a group of thieves in a conspiracy to justify a war of aggression, we quickly come to understand that the lead criminal's two henchmen, Inigo and Fezzik, are actually quite decent guys. Inigo and Wesley (though not yet revealed to be him) are set to duel to the death, and yet their mutual respect and honor, and their appreciation for the art of swordsmanship, leads the two of them to what many have argued is the greatest sword fight in cinema as they more or less become good friends while ostensibly trying to kill one another (of course, in victory, Wesley merely knocks Inigo out). He and Fezzik have a shorter, but equally civil fight that ends with the benevolent bandit knocked out.

There's a real storybook kind of honor and chivalry at display, and Cary Elwes fits perfectly as a kind of reconstructed Errol Flynn-type.

The movie is just filled with charm - I even like that its fantasy world is quite slapdash, with fictional kingdoms like Florin and Guilder mentioned alongside such real places as Australia and Spain.

I have to imagine that among most Gen Xers and Millennials, at least, none of this is news to you. I don't know to what extent it's remained in the "staples of children's entertainment" zeitgeist for younger generations.

In the wake of his and Michele Reiner's horrifically tragic deaths, I've been reflecting on the incredible career Rob Reiner had as a director, and I'm struck by the amazing streak he had through the 80s and early 90s. His directorial debut was This is Spinal Tap (which more or less introduced the world to the mockumentary), and then he followed it with Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally..., Misery, and A Few Good Men, which are all classics (you could argue the hot streak continues with An American President, Ghosts of Mississippi, etc.) Not only were these really good movies, but they were all so varied and diverse in tone and subject matter. The guy just knew how to make a good film.

What Are the Joined in Pluribus?

 I'm now seven episodes into Pluribus (er, Plur1bus, I guess,) the new sci-fi show from Vince Gilligan, of Breaking Bad and Better Caul Saul fame (though I knew him first via The X-Files, where he wrote and produced, though Chris Carter created the series).

The premise, to reiterate, is that all but twelve people on Earth have been linked into a giant hive-mind after some scientists received a signal from aliens on a radio telescope and tried to recreate the chemical formula it transmitted. After this collective mind-link first takes over everyone at the laboratory, the hivemind eventually spreads a chemical agent over the entire world to link everyone up. It's not clear why Carol Sturka, fantasy romance author from Albuquerque, wasn't affected - maybe just some rare genetic thing - but the experience is one of utmost horror, especially because the affected people (aka most of humanity) are briefly incapacitated as it takes over, and Carol's partner (both business and romantic) Helen falls and cracks her skull on the pavement, ultimately dying from her injuries.

Carol is faced with an apocalyptic scenario, but shortly thereafter, the collective known as the Joined reach out to her, eager to be helpful and kind and see to her needs. They wish to discover a way to convert her to become one of them, but until they can, they want to make things as pleasant as possible.

The Joined are fascinating. It would be easy to ascribe to them some sinister intent, but time and time again, the show suggests that they truly think that they're better off the way they are, and we're shown again and again that they they seem incapable of doing the twelve remaining individuals any real harm.

The Joined send an individual named Zosia to act essentially as Carol's main liaison, a woman chosen because she looks the most like the way that Carol describes the romantic (male) pirate captain in her books. Carol had initially intended the captain to be a woman, but self-censored her queerness out of fear of not appealing to a broad audience. But because Helen was connected to the collective before she died, her knowledge of Carol's real story is now known to the entire world.

There's something actually kind of fantastical and appealing about being in Carol's position. We see another individual, M. Diabaté, who fully embraces the opportunity to play out his luxurious fantasies, acting as a James Bond-like gambler winning a several-million-dollar hand of poker with a royal flush and then going back to his casino suite with several gorgeous women to hang out naked in his hot tub. The Joined are eager to give him this fantasy. And I think we're left, as the audience, to wonder how exactly consent factors into this: do these women have agency to consent to this kind of thing? Is it the collective Joined will that is capable of consent?

We never get any evidence one way or another that the individuals really retain a personal consciousness. Information seems to be shared instantly between any connected people on the globe, but what the inner experience of that is like is a real question. I'm someone who thinks of consciousness as a pretty concrete thing, and that the information passing through a brain doesn't necessarily allow the merging or division of consciousness. But are there individuals trapped and screaming? It doesn't seem like it. Instead, the individuals just seem to be synced up when it comes to their goals and philosophy around the whole thing.

Unless they're building to a big season one finale reveal, I don't think that the Joined are anything other than what they say they are, and that while it's a truly alien way for humanity to suddenly start behaving, I think the very drama of the show is underpinned by the fact that the Joined are just trying to do their best. In this reading, there's actually something of a positive reading of humanity as a whole - that if we could truly know everything about the other people in the world, that we wouldn't have any reason for conflict, and we'd all value peace and cooperation.

There's naturally a reading of the show to see it as pitting collectivism versus individualism against one another. These have, of course, always been poles pulling at human culture in various ways, and often the basis for political divides (though not cleanly - conservatism in America at least tends to be very individualistic in terms of responsibility and the rewards we can reap, but collectivist when it comes to cultural expression, favoring a homogeny of religious and social custom).

And I think that there's a degree to which Carol exhibits a lot of the less attractive aspects of American culture, the way that she first excludes the non-English speakers when asking the Joined to gather up the other individuals (being self-centered enough to assume that it's only worthwhile if she can speak to them) or the way that she is so hostile to other points of view regarding whether this is actually a good thing or not.

All that said, I think we can cut Carol a lot of slack, because she  is also in the depths of grief, both for the world she knew but also the one person she really had in her life. While other individuals have their family and friends around them, albeit now linked up with the collective, Carol is profoundly isolated.

Still, one thing that I've been wondering about is whether there's another allegory at play here:

In the past couple years, LLMs, or large language models, have more or less absorbed the internet - already a kind of human hive mind, in some ways, or at least a vast, shared network of information and data unlike anything the world has ever seen.

LLMs have become a huge part of the global conversation about the future of technology and even the human race. What will they be capable of? What problems might they solve?

The notion, with an LLM, is that by connecting all of the information we've ever put out there on the internet and having a mechanism that can generate output that is profoundly convincing, as if a knowledgeable person were writing eloquently on whatever subject it's asked, that we might have some brilliant new tool that will utterly replace a great deal of the work that humans have needed to perform.

The Joined are almost like an LLM made out of the actual human race. They're extremely helpful and pleasant, and they seem to really know what they're talking about. Except that sometimes they don't really get it right. It might be something as innocuous as sending a room-temperature gatorade to Carol when she requests it, or it might be something as big of a problem as not being able to even harvest any vegetables because that would go against their "don't harm any living thing" programming, thus forcing them to ingest liquified human remains.

Oh yeah, that's a thing. And when Carol first discovers it, it seems like the bombshell that's finally going to convince the other individuals that this is horrifying, but they cop to it immediately, and explain that it's just a matter of caloric necessity to keep humanity from starving, and is hopefully some kind of temporary measure until they can come up with a sustainable option (currently they're only eating food that was already harvested or living off of fruit that falls of its own accord from the tree).

The Joined are, despite how coordinated and industrious they are, kind of helpless on a certain level. They're an imperfect system.

Personally, I'm an AI skeptic, which does make me feel more and more like I'm becoming one of the Carol Sturka-like alarmists in a world that's getting on with the program. My dad is a computer scientist who was a tenured professor at one of the world's top Computer Science departments (he went into the academic equivalent of retirement recently) and so he's naturally much more knowledgeable about all of this. But he's also been something of a skeptic - the thing about LLMs is that literally the only thing they're trying to do is come up with a plausible-sounding response. The fact that they often get the facts right is impressive, but he's advocated for a little of a "hold your horses" attitude on assuming that this is going to suddenly solve all of our problems, a big part of it being that we've created a system that builds its own systems that we aren't really privy to - we don't really have the window on its inner processes to trace how and why it has come to the conclusions it has (I'm paraphrasing here, of course, and I'm sure that there are lots of nuances and even elements of this that I'm getting flat out wrong).

I think it's possible, even probable, that LLMs could be used for really useful things. But A: I think that the current imaginings of how it could be used are corrupted by an ultra-capitalistic greed incentive that seeks to consolidate even more the means of production (now including intellectual labor) under a smaller and smaller billionaire elite and B: I think that our dream of creating genuine artificial sentience is priming us to see it where there is none. And C: the captains of industry have embraced this technology so quickly that it doesn't feel like the common people have been given the right to opt in, but must instead try as best as we can to opt out.

For all of the Joined's pleasant, accommodating, and ethical treatment of the individuals, the initial joining was all done with absolutely zero informed consent, spread instantly like a virus, in an act that killed millions of people (including Helen). At no point were these people (as in, nearly all the human species) asked if they wanted to be Joined. That's kind of the rot at the root of all of this. No one ever told you that the photos you posted to Facebook, or even to your family's Christmas website in 2003, were going to be used to train LLMs. How many people posting mirror selfies for a little boost of self-esteem thought that some part of their face was going to be taken, melded with others, and combined to form some AI-generated porn video?

Again, there's something almost aspirational about the Joined. Wouldn't it be nice if every hostile, violent urge was gone, if all the things we divide ourselves with dissolved away? Just what might humanity accomplish if we were all working as one?

And yet, that initial violation, the most horrific violation of agency, taints everything. I don't think Carol's wrong to hold that particular grudge.