i let myself watch one single "here's how st got to the point where st5 is the way that it is" video and now my yt recommendations are fucked, but i don't really regret it, bc while it didn't actually make this point specifically, it did kind of dance around the idea that getting rid of the byers family after s3 could have saved the show, and that has now become a firmly held belief that i will be carrying into a hypothetical series rewrite that will probably only ever exist in my mind
the big changes i would make in a hypothetical series rewrite that will only ever exist in my mind would follow the basic theme of: trim the fat. kill your darlings, but i'm not talking scenes or lines, bc the problem is full on superfluous subplots and characters. st4 tried to give the bloated cast & lore more space, and it was certainly more successful than s5 and maybe even s3, but its lopsided quality between hawkins and everywhere else basically proved that the problem isn't the lack of space in the show, it's the bloat itself
so...
no magnet supblot in s3. that means no murray from here on out and no alexei. joyce and hopper reunite with the kids a little earlier, but are firmly tertiary characters. hopper still dies, but it's real, so from here on out no more hopper as well. trim! the! fat!
no russia subplot in s4 (trim it!), but joyce is somehow still kept out of the road trip rescue entirely. the road trip rescue itself is extremely tertiary, and gets as much focus as suzie's family got (there is no suzie's family. it's been trimmed)
jonathan and nancy break up at the end of s4, and the byers leave hawkins again before the walls fully close in. they are all argyle now. there are no byers at all in s5
nor any turnbows. holly's kidnapping is explored, and we can extrapolate the other kids are going through similar things, but they. are. tertiary. diminished-screentime derek
my personal theory on why the show Got This Way is that the duffers are actually really good at introducing new characters and subplots. they're so good at hooks. they're great at building potential. and then something else needs to happen, but why focus on that when they're, like, sooo good at starting new things
they say write what you know, right? play to your strengths. so the duffers wrote what they were good at, and kept creating really cool new characters. and then those really cool new characters either died or got added to a growing pile of old characters who needed follow-up but follow-up isn't as fun as potential. so they wrote a new new character
and the story needed it! any longform story is hard to write when you limit yourself to the same characters introduced at the very beginning, let along a genre mystery. joyce and the magnets was a joke of a hook to get a character invested in the plot, but they did it anyway because that's what their formula has been since s1. the solution doesn't have to be "find a better hook." it can just be, well, why does she need a hook? why does she need to be at the center of the show? because it's a show and she's a main character played by a famous actress? not good enough. these aren't superheroes who are actively searching for crime to solve, they're average people who experience strange things. when a character doesn't really have a reason to be involved anymore, they can go, and that can only show that the story takes place in a big world where people can grow and have unseen stories of their own away from the camera
and in exchange, there's suddenly space for the newer characters like max and robin and erica to grow into even bigger presences in the plot, expanding the world even further while the story itself stays intimate and focused
and going back further
i would take jonathan out of nancy's revenge against the lab storyline in s2
fandom often groups s2 with s1 as "back when it was good", but this plotline in particular was always a blemish for me. it's a plotline that only exists to let jonathan and nancy hookup, so one might say my dislike is because i'm biased against jncy, but tbh it's this plotline that made me biased against jncy
the subplot started as a character driven mystery with nancy breaking down bc of her guilt and restlessness, but there's nothing similar for jonathan to show that he's also emotionally invested. the lab's cover-up is why jonathan thought his mom was insane and he felt he had to plan his brother's funeral, but that's not something he ever ruminates on. the most weight given to jonathan's motivation is that will wants more independence to get some semblance of "normal" back, and jonathan can only do that by giving him space which he hates because he just wants to fix it. and that's really more of my own interpretation of a scene jonathan doesn't even share with nancy
the second nancy and jonathan leave town, anything of substance goes out the window and they only ever talk about their feelings toward each other, which exists in this weird sanitized space separated from everything else going on in their lives. and it's weird, because there is meat on this bone. will's desire for his life to go back to normal is the same thing steve wants, and nancy and jonathan could have a similar "but things will never be normal again" feeling of disagreement. but that's not a theme the plotline explores. and it's a departure from jncy's dynamic in s1, when they actually did bond over their families and their self-image. but from s2 onward the only thing they bond over is their nebulously described shared trauma, and that's what turned me against jncy
on their mission of revenge against what the lab did to the most important people in their lives, those people are apparently absent from their thoughts. they replace those people to each other, and it makes them both smaller characters for it. will only comes up as the reason jonathan has been avoiding nancy for a year, and barb is only mentioned as part of the mission itself. even when nancy's talking to the detective barb's parents are selling their house to afford, she doesn't get space to confront those feelings. instead, murray plays matchmaker, and that's the end of nancy and jonathan's emotional arc in the whole season. they stroll back into the main plot with no one but steve really noticing or caring that they've been gone, bc nothing is effected except that now they're dating
the fact that the rest of series' story of their dating shows a slow deterioration of trust and affection until they have to tell each other they feel suffocated is, i guess, something that justifies the things i hate most about the plot. bc it is the trap that forced them both together, to their own eventual resentment. but it's also a plotline of the series that feels very much like the #justiceforbarb storyline itself: bit of a nothingburger. completed before the final climax, effecting nothing that comes after it, and weirdly detached from their actual individual story arcs
but in the hypothetical rewrite i probably won't write, i don't think i'd do the work to actually fix it. bc well, lol it's stancy endgame babes why would i fix jncy's problems?
no, in my version, if jncy happens (which it hypothetically would i guess if i were to hypothetically write it bc i do think the love triangle has some really interesting themes in s4), it can happen afterward, and instead it's hopper going with nancy on this mission. bc will and steve aren't the only characters who long for normalcy - it's the whole thing el is striving for the whole season, even if for her it's not something she wants back but just wants. and hopper can't give it to her, because of that fucking lab
it'd be another unexpected match-up that shows the strange cohesion to this weird little group like dustin and steve, and would give hopper another young girl to project all his dead daughter trauma on, one who is very different to either el or sara. and having nancy spend time with hopper while he's keeping el a secret would give a lot of opportunities for mike and nancy bonding once el's survival is revealed, because like did nancy grow to trust hopper enough to take his side, putting her at odds with mike too? or were they an awkward disaster enough that she's 100% on mike's side, and hopper is just fully hated by both wheeler siblings? how would that go forward into s3? and s4, after hop's dead?
and in return, jonathan is finally shown trying to be the protector that he was often forced to be. so much of jonathan's backstory and motivation is centered on a parentification that just isn't shown on screen past s1. he alludes to it in s2 & 4, when he cites will as a reason to avoid nancy, but without actual scenes with his family it feels like lip service. even as the accidental guardian and driver in s4, that arc is about how his family is just a convenient excuse. it's only interesting that joyce didn't even notice jonathan had left town for multiple days in s2 or was constantly stoned in s4 if there's space for jonathan to feel something about that lack of attention. s5 even had joyce send jonathan on a job that will wanted to do but joyce thought was too dangerous, but that was just a vehicle to get jonathan and steve off alone, and to start will's independence arc with robin. no, we are digging deeper. s2 had jonathan bristling about his mom dating someone new - let's explore that. let's see a parentified jonathan who's fighting against no longer being parentified. he doesn't trust his mom's new boyfriend because his father was an abusive jackass, and he's repeatedly shown to not really trust his mother's judgement because of it, so that made jonathan the man of the house. let's see how jonathan reacts to bob solving the map puzzle and then dying heroically. hopper's gonna die next season too, i don't care about his jealousy
a big change i would make in s4 would be to not refer to vecna as vecna until after nancy's vision (if i include a vision)
bc i think i landed on another mantra for this rewrite that i won't write: connect the dots. i don't think season 1-2 are considered "the good era" necessarily because they're actually the best; i think they get lumped together as the best because they're the only seasons that really do lump together. season 2 is a direct sequel to season 1 in a way that no other season really is
s3 has all the same characters and picks up with them mostly where we left them, at least in terms of their relationships to each other, but it doesn't answer any questions from s2. s2 didn't ask many besides kali, but brenner and owens and hawkins lab - the primary human antagonists - are all absent from s3. that bow was tied up, and s3 instead works as a soft reboot with a new season, a new government baddie, and a mind flayer that has completely changed its mo on a new set of victims. this doesn't quite start a new arc, however, since s4 has many of the same quirks
it answers more questions left over from s3 (el's powers, billy's death, etc), but with another season shift, a pretty drastic tonal shift, and a lot of location shifts. it, too, is functionally a soft reboot
henry creel's mystery spanning s4-5 links them in a similar way to will's disappearance linking s1-2, but i think the 18 month time skip and military occupation pretty firmly sets s5 as another soft reboot that stands more on its own than it connects to earlier seasons. i've said it before but stranger things has remained at its heart an anthology series
anyway i gotta think more on how to connect the dots better between s2-3 and s4-5, but at least for s4 a big one would be keeping the characters in the mindset that this is the mind flayer. this is the sentient upside down. that's how they understand their otherworldly enemy, and yet from the moment they think of the most recent mo as "vecna's curse" they start to anthropomorphize "vecna" (who they should conceptualize as another fragment of the mind flayer in the same way the demogorgon was) in a way that somehow gives away the fact that this monster is more human than hive mind while also not really engaging with the actual henry creel mystery
with few exceptions (like pointing out that the gate shouldn't have been open) the hawkins gang talk about vecna as if he's a separate entity than the rest of the upside down. they ask what vecna wanted with the creels, not what the mind flayer wanted with them. i feel like some kind of theory trying to link will and barb to henry and virginia would be an interesting red herring, too, one that would hit nancy super hard if she did get a vision. the theory would be wrong, but it would be wrong in a horrifying way that reveals that vecna wasn't always part of the hive mind, and then we get to treat henry's backstory as an actual mystery that people care about instead of just something that the characters incidentally learn so that the audience can also learn it. vecna in general just took over in a way that kind of makes me want to just remove him entirely, but the writing challenge for this project i'm not actually writing is more interesting if i have to make even things i don't like work
but like obv #notallthings bc as established there is no hopper and no gulag subplot and i think i found a way to continue to write the byers off in a way that lets their arcs and goodbyes be more satisfying
instead of the cops picking el up from the byers house, and then the military shooting up the house, they take her from the airport after she and mike try to make an emergency escape after the roller fight. this is el sacrificing her normal life, one that the byers will get to have. this is the mirror to s1, when el returned to the upside down just as will was leaving, now solidified going into the final arc rather than the actual conclusion. will deserves to escape and heal, but so does el (eventually...and the question will linger)
before that final arc though, el leaves the byers in sunny normal california to return to hiding in hawkins. but her cover was already blown, and the cops take her, and then they hand her over to owens
and just owens
brenner really is dead, but owens is forced to work at the behest of sullivan to get el's powers back so she can contain henry creel, because i never understood the point of having the military think el was a serial killer. brenner and the lab had always been after henry creel to recontain him, and were experimenting on el to do that. owens is a guy who can only find his bravery at the most desperate of times, and otherwise consistently falls in line to protect his own interests. sullivan is the military interest behind brenner's mad science, and even if he doesn't think el is killing people that will still make him the bad guy, no miscommunication necessary
mike, in the meantime, doesn't even have time to think about pulling the byers back in, so desperate in his chase for el. mike's solo search mirrors el's road trip in s2, up to and including the return of kali. idk if she's coming from all her friends dying, or if they're still around and take mike under their wing and go in to save el and that's actually how they all die, or if they don't die at all they're just not there for other reasons (they are however, not there by the end, because i'm not in the business of adding more characters), but she and mike rescue el together
the hawkins team can get into contact with the byers - the special guest stars for like 5 scenes in the whole season just don't know shit. they sent mike and el off already, so assume they'll be there soon. when mike and el don't show up, well then the byers jump into gear...it's just days too late, because they've escaped hawkins curse and aren't part of the plot anymore. they can't catch the trail to either of them, and finally make it to the border around hawkins after the wall went up (if the wall does indeed come up in this story i'm not really writing)
and if the wall comes up, i could see them becoming the smugglers and connection to the outside world for everyone else still in hawkins. will is devoted to his friends, and joyce feels guilty for leaving the kids alone, and jonathan feel obligated to stay, so maybe they can stick around in the background of s5. it would be an interesting continuation to the idea of trade-offs - will's family technically able to move on but emotionally they feel unworthy of it when their friends are all suddenly much worse off than they were
i thought i wanted jncy to break up earlier, but jonathan stuck on the other side of the wall while shepherding goods in and out would be as good a reason as uncomfortably living under the same roof to make he and nancy feel like they have to stay together even though they don't really have a relationship anymore. idk. will ponder more. i'm like, not even married to keeping the military occupation tbh
not that i'm actually writing this at all of course
if "connect the dots" conflicts with "trim the fat", "connect the dots" should win, because the over-crowding problems with st isn't really a problem of maximalist storytelling, it's a problem of breadth vs depth. there are a lot of characters and locations and story beats, and on paper that sounds like the makings of a rich world and a complex story, but not if the story beats don't actually connect
and it's worse for the characters
st1 got a lot of praise for its genre mixing, and it was deserved. the problem is that later seasons did the same thing that it would have done if it were a true anthology series, and continued paying homage to and mixing more classic 80s tropes. with the same characters sticking around and rarely allowed to leave, that often meant established characters were forced into new archetypes between seasons, or had their arcs reset. moralistic lessons were learned repeatedly, and then contradicted as the duffers moved between genres without looking back
all that excess isn't there to tell the story, it's there to tick a box. maybe stranger things needed less homages in general, and more conversation. not necessarily conversational dialogue, but a story architecture that adds the genres it plays with - an artistic conversation. it needed better homages. it needs to trim the fat to be able to make more delicious fat
