Please be a little considerate folks! Netflix isn’t faring so well
In the first quarter of 2022, the streaming leader lost 200,000 subscribers, there is no longer no alternative on the market, but surrounded by increasingly powerful competition. Who can stop the Netflix bloodletting? Well, preferably a strong in-house production. “Make Netflix great again” is what one wishes for from his long-described 80s supernova “Stranger Things” – and now presents us with an overstretched new season that, although it causes hype, buzz and attention in the short term, does not save the streaming portal but merely consumes the “Stranger Things” phenomenon even further. Shame about Eleven and her people.
11 reasons stranger things season 4 sucks
01 “Stranger Things? I think I’ll slip into something more comfortable…” [leckt sich die Lippen]
One would have to hate pop culture very much if one were to seriously retreat to the lost post that “Stranger Things” is fundamentally no fun. His gloomy approach to the 80s revival that was always the same before was a great credit to the franchise. Or of course the sound aesthetics around the neo-electro band Survive. But with such feuilletonistic arguments you actually only create distance instead of simply saying how much you appreciate this magical cast around Eleven and the four nerds from the basement.
Caring for the characters is a big part of the emotional investment in the show as a viewer. Please don’t let anything happen to them in all the demon twilight! When a fourth season was announced, that concern remained, but the direction is changing. One no longer fears that the Demogorgon will bite their heads off like schnitzel, but much more that the capitalist logic of exploitation will tear apart a wonderful franchise so much that bit by bit all of their own positive links to the series will be severed.
Well then, welcome to Stranger Things Season 4.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQEondeGvKo
02 Police Academy 7
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to conjure up any purism here that only validates the very first statement. Not every sequel is the same as “Police Academy 7”. But there are too many subjects whose success made sequels seem economically advisable and which then lead(ed) to the fact that as a fan at some point you no longer feel like your former fetish.
03 The Fear of (read: The Fuck off) the Walking Dead
You might think what you wanted of “Game Of Thrones”, but the story ultimately bore its many seasons. The same cannot be said of the bizarre echo chamber of “Walking Dead”, for example. Here the franchise itself already seems to be the zombie who just can’t let go of us and runs around stupidly in the forest until it is finally decapitated in Season 11 (with only a tenth of the former ratings). Hallelujah. But is it supposed to be like that in Stranger Things?
04 The premise
What a rocky road we walked with the main characters around Eleven, Mike, Will, Dustin and Lucas: The girl from the closed prison and the gritty nerds – and how they not only wriggle out of demon claws, but above all the high school Mobbing. Because the whole thing is above all an outsider story, the monsters are actually just a backdrop. So how nice was it when the characters who were once ostracized in the playground finally became heroes in the previous season – and how frustrating is it to have them presented as total losers again with the new season? Eleven is being bullied, the boys are the idiots of the school again, everything that you fought for on screen in the previous seasons is waste. Everything forgotten, everything devalued. No development possible. Many thanks. The beginning of the fourth season is sitcom-level, where after each episode (or season in this case), the next one is like it was the beginning again. Even the start of the new story requires a great tolerance for frustration.
05 Sometimes they come back [Spoiler!]
The Season 3 finale confronted us with the death of the central adult protagonist: Chief Hopper sacrifices himself for the community and is vaporized. You know it from yourself from your own everyday life.
The script of the new season now reanimates him as a matter of course, from now on he fights in a kind of Demogorgon petting zoo created by the Russian military. In almost every scene, the comfortable to deviated Hopper is threatened with death. This is how the internal tension between sequences is supposed to be maintained, but how are you supposed to go along with it seriously? We already buried the guy in tears, only the new story labels it all as a kind of hoax – so why worry for him again? Ultimately, everything seems to have no consequences here.
06 At age 29 in high school
The meanwhile completely overstretched ensemble of the series is also a big nerve factor. I mean, how many characters can you emotionally mentor in one night of TV? “Stranger Things” was already circling in the red in Season 3. The new season simply serves us a handful of overly likeable crackpots. I would like to hook up with the most striking: Joseph Quinn as Eddie Munson, one of the classmates of our role-playing nerds. No place for Ageism here… but where a 29-year-old actor plays a high school student, the casting calls for pot!
07 This hair
And while we’re at it: Even his “Wayne’s World” memory wig doesn’t make the character of Eddie Munson any more believable – on the contrary.
08 The plot
With all the smokescreens, new people, new monsters, new side scenes, the plot remains a complete blueprint of the previous ones. A fact that already made us wonder in season 3 what motivation one should actually have for letting the same story be told over and over again? Typical case of pop culture dementia.
09 The drastic
Where the death of a character obviously doesn’t last much, you have to shock in a different way. That’s probably what the Duffer Brothers, the makers of “Stranger Things” thought, and gave their franchise a disturbing level of violence on top. And where a cruel chopping block murder is no longer enough, the next effect remains… exactly, torture. Psycho-torture against eleven, slow physical destruction of prisoners – so if you don’t follow the meager story after switching off, at least the drastic pictures should. Another way to make an impression. Just what a…
10 The New Darkness
What ten years ago was desaturated colors intended to make a film or series appear “cooler”, today it is the dismissal of the lighting technician on set. Adventure eyesight? Not with films like “The Batman” or the new season of “Stranger Things” – how much can the title “film noir” actually be taken literally? But that means something more than just residual light attenuation.
11 Save the worst for last
Between us, as a “Stranger Things” fan, you’re of course willing to forgive a lot for a new season. That dead figures just live again? It’s kinda nice too! That you can hardly see anything for minutes before it gets dark? Hey, the schemes of the figures, which you can guess through the shadowy world, somehow stimulate the imagination! No, despite all the reflexive sequel quibbles, there is one thing in particular that is really unforgivable here: the length of the episode.
Yes, we get how epic the plot is and yes, two dozen characters have to be moved in groups, but that in no way justifies that the individual episodes are no longer 43 minutes long (like in Season 1) but over 70. And just because a story is awkward doesn’t make it complex. What creates this celebrated overlength is just a diversion excess. Every scene is a build-up into nothing, every re-cut claims a cliffhanger that, on closer inspection, isn’t one at all. Stranger Things Season 4 is a waiting room. Waiting for the grand finale, waiting for the next manipulative soundtrack moment (with Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” it may have worked again on paper), Waiting for the next Piff Paff, the next intermediate climax.
The bottom line is that you are waiting for what comes first: the announcement of further seasons and spin-offs – or the feeling that the once special series has slowly become irrelevant.
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Off topic [Eine Plattenkritik]
Daniel Benjamin
ERAL FUN
(Ghost Palace / Cargo)
It broke my heart a little that one of the busiest and most creative pop couples split up. Sea + Air were no more. Love crushed on a thousand kilometers of tour together. The male part of the duo, Daniel Benyamin, has now found his way back to his solo outfit: theatrical pop elegance, staged as a constant walk between artificiality, head voice and drama. My favorite track is definitely “Why Do You Look So Sad When You Smile” which sounds like the Sparks wrote a power ballad for Van Halen.
What happened until now? Here is an overview of all pop column texts.
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