Tuesday TV Touchbase: Stranger Things

New Year's Eve night, Andrea and I went out to dinner.

Like last year, we went to Mimi's Cafe.

Unlike last year, I'm on a Tirzepatide which curbs my appetite. I barely got half way through my French pot roast (beef, carrots and onions made with a red wine sauce) when I hit what I call "the wall" where I cannot possibly eat any more. 

Our nice evening out for New Year's Eve was over in less than an hour.

Well, that's OK. We had TV to watch.  

We needed to bring 2025 in for a landing alternating between Ryan Seacrest on ABC and the two Andys on CNN (Andy Cohen and Anderson Cooper) to bring us to midnight for the ball drop in New York's Time Square.

So Seacrest is a total tool but he's a professional and hosts this thing with energy and enthusiasm. Meanwhile, the two Andys are drinking on the job with Cohen embracing the chaos and Anderson trying to rein it in with limited success.  

And before that, we watched the series finale of Stranger Things.

Which brings us to today's Tuesday TV Touchbase.  

Series finales are notoriously tricky things to pull off. 

Suffice to say a series finale, no matter how good or ill conceived, is going to piss off somebody.

So how does the end of Stranger Things rate?

Over the course of days since the finale dropped on Netflix, the responses I've seen online have been... devisive. 

One person claimed the finale was a debacle on par with the series finale of How I Met Your Mother. 

Hey, I saw the series finale of How I Met Your Mother  and no, the Stranger Things finale was not.... that.

Others were more enthusiastic and said the Stranger Things finale was perfect.

Well.... no.

But screw those other people.

What did I think?

There will be some spoilers! 

Let me go ahead and kill any suspense about what Andrea thought about the Stranger Things series finale. She was thrilled, amused, moved and scared. She was expecting a blood bath.

She really thought Steve Kerrington was gonna die. 

I checked the time. Nope, too early in the plot for that.

Anyway, she liked it just fine. 

Me? Well, I have to admit, I kind of agree with Andrea but not as emphatically. 

I'm not gonna dive to deep into the weeds of the plot to finally defeat Vecna, save the children he kidnapped, destroy the Upside Down and oh shit! It's the goddam Mind Flayer and a new terror dimension dubbed the Abyss.  

We get most of the entire cast in a race against time inside the Upside Down to stop Vecna's scheme to destroy the world...

But there's still time for character building.

I saw some reviewers criticize characters taking time to explore their feelings and relationships with the world about to end. 

Yeah, it's kind of weird when people are up against a ticking clock to solve some deadly problem taking a moment to discuss their feelings.

It's kind of like the SNL MacGruber sketches.

• Kristen: MacGruber! The door is locked and that bomb is going to go off in 20 seconds! 
• MacGruber: Don't worry! I got this! And me that paperclip and that stick of gum and.... what do you mean you're into women?!
• Kristen: Not NOW! The bomb's only got 12 seconds!
• MacGruber: Yeah, I think we really need to discuss our sex life right now!

Anyway, I digress...

I agree it's a silly trope and other shows and movies have done this but when are we supposed to get our character building moments?

When else are we going to get Steve Kerrington and Jonathan Byers have a heart to heart that yeah, they still don't like each other very much but they've been through too much shit to let that get in the way of their very strange relationship?

Or when else are Mike Wheeler and Will Byers going to have their first meaningful conversation since Will came out in episode 7?

SIDE NOTE: Episode 7, "The Bridge", got review bombed by a bunch of right wing trolls who were in a pissy mood over Will's coming out speech to the gang. 

Yeah, the same dude bros who were silent for all those episodes with Robin who likes girls like that but have to shriek to the heavens that Stranger Things has gone "woke" and shit because Will does not like girls like that.  

I think so dude bros doth protest too much, yeah?

OK, back to the finale....

Even with the clock ticking down seconds, we get a heart to heart between Hopper and Eleven. 

It's a conversation that needed to happen that I personally found undercut by real life.

SIDE NOTE: Whatever closeness exists between Hopper and Eleven is not echoed by David Harbour and Millie Bobby Brown with Brown accusing Harbour of inappropriate and quasi-abusive behavior on set.  

Back to the finale...

Vecna winds up impaled on a giant rock, squirming, gurgling, not quite dead.

Joyce Byers (Wynona Rider) says, "You messed with the wrong fucking family" and chops his goddam head off with an axe.

Hey, Joyce has been through some shit over and she damn well earned that moment.

So everyone who needs to be dead is dead.  With explosives set to go off at the end of side one of Prince's Purple Rain, the gang dashes for the exit from the Upside Down....

Only to run into the damn military!

Why those fucking fuckers are still intent on capturing Eleven for their nefarious experiments and potentially create another Vecna. 

So Eleven elects to stay on the other side of the gate when the explosives go off to destroy the Upside Down. 

Everyone lives but Eleven has to die? C'mon, Duffer Brothers, what the hell are you doing to us out here? 

Well, that's a sad note to end on.

Except... time check. We've got about a half hour still to go.

Running time for the Stranger Things series finale: 2 hours, eight minutes! 

Time jump by 18 months brings us to 1989 and the "kids" graduating from high school. Dustin Henderson is valedictorian and in a stunt straight out of a 1980's teen comedy blows up the graduation with rock music and confetti cannons, leaving the straight laced principal of Hawkins High a blubbering mess.

Over on the roof of the Squawk radio station, the older "kids" are having a reunion: Steve, Nancy, Jonathan and Robin.  

Meanwhile, we finally get to see the oft referenced fancy Hawkins restaraunt called Enzos with Hopper proposes to Joyce. Their plans for the future involve a move to Montauk NY.

SIDE NOTE: the Duffer Brothers' original pitch for the show that became Stranger Things was going to be set in Montauk NY which is a real life place with a history of conspiracy theory fuel like secret government experiments and unexplained 

stuff 'n' junk.

And finally finally, we get one last D&D game with Mike, Will, Lucas, Dustin and Max. The campaign ends with Mike telling a story about what happens next for everyone.

Including Eleven.

Flashing back to when the gang exited the gate from the Upside Down, we see the military base has ringed the area with the sonic devices that negate Eleven's powers. Yet Eleven used those powers to communicate with Mike one last time.

Perhaps all was not as it seemed?

Mike tells the tale of how Eleven survived the explosion, left Hawkins and wandered the Earth until she found a distant safe place to settle down.  

It's a nice story. Is it true? Maybe? Maybe not?

But it's a nice story to believe in.  

And we at least reach the end with a sweeping cinematic closing credits sequence. 

We can quibble the details but I think that ultimately, Stranger Things delivers a finale that accomplishes what the series needed to do after nearly 10 years! 

Oh my God! Has it really taken this long to get through 5 seasons of this show?!

I'll call the end of Stranger Things a win.

And that is that for this week's Tuesday TV Touchbase.

Next week: The Paper

Until next time, remember to be good to one another and try to keep it down in there, would ya? I'm trying to watch TV over here.