I inadvertently saw spoilers for the two-part Stranger Things season four finale. The spoilers - only headlines of reviews - suggested that I was about to sit down and watch the conclusion to a fun but increasingly convoluted story. However, those reviews lied; they lied like a pathological Boris will tell you the sky is pink and elves really stole his homework.
Stranger Things hasn't concluded, because if that was the conclusion then no one educated the Duffer Brothers in the art of storytelling.
Episode #8 - the penultimate 90 minute preamble to the big pay off was exactly that; scene-setting in a big extraordinary way. Episode #9 just went on and on and on some more and then on again until you reached the final scene that told you that you had been conned and were going to have to sit through season five, which would be out in probably three years with 18, three hour episodes with a $billion budget and you'll still be wondering if Natalia Dyer (Nancy Wheeler) is anorexic because no one is that thin without having a disease...
Part of the problem with Stranger Things season four is that because they've gone so BIG as a result it kind of loses its soul and feels disjointed and disconnected. There was a feeling that with Eleven, Mike, Will, and Jonathan stranded in Nevada and Hopper, Joyce and Murray in the USSR that it was firmly down to the B team to save the day in Hawkins and it was down to Steve, Dustin, Lucas (and his sister), Max, Nancy, Robin and Eddie Munson (who wore the metaphoric red jersey from episode 1) to defeat the big bad and save the day. Except, they couldn't without Eleven's intervention, rendering her forever the deus ex machina of this series.
With a third of the remaining Hawkins crew on holiday with the Byers in their relocated home, things start going wrong back in Indiana - more unexplained deaths, conveniently blamed on a heavy metal fan and his band of D&Ders and the propensity for at least one of the locals to go bat shit crazy in the interest of having a loose cannon floating about. Perhaps it's because we're familiar with Hawkins and its people, but the scenes everywhere else seemed like filler; like creations to give the characters who were having the season off the feeling they were involved, because the only real development is that Will Byers has probably been nurturing a very homosexual crush on his best friend and Eleven's seemingly reluctant boyfriend, Mike Wheeler... Oh and Jonathan is smoking a lot of weed and hanging around with a weird native American.
We then conveniently lose Joyce and Murray on a wild goose chase to try and track down the presumed dead Jim Hopper to the Soviet Union and presumably, given the weather, Siberia. This is borderline comedic and a mixture of unreal slapstick, melodramatic and The Thing and doesn't really work and feels like it's been shoehorned in simply to tie the Russian subplot up. I've been using the word 'convenient' a lot recently in relation to other film and TV things and that's how this subplot felt - a convenient way to lose three main characters but still have them think they're helping - and I'm still not sure if they did or just thought they did. Oh and Hopper was in this Gulag for a year and never got a whiff of an idea that it was also the base for the Soviet's excursions into the Upside Down.
Then we have the 'Papa' interlude with Eleven going to a top secret underground base to be experimented on, again, by Mathew Modine's evil/not evil Martin Brenner, in order to get her lost powers back in a set-up that was always going to end badly, especially with some gung-ho US army general determined to shoot Eleven - and think about asking questions later - floating about and ready to pounce when least expected. Naturally, it turns out that Papa's first experiment is the reason for all the strangeness in the first place and if Eleven hadn't stopped it - presumably shortly before she wandered into Mike Wheeler's world in season one - we might have had a different series that lasted one season.
Have I said I think it was all about six hours too long? Especially the final two hour ten minute last episode? If something could be milked then this was it; so much so you really believed they might conclude it all, but, of course, they left so many unresolved threads that there has to be a fifth season and it will have to be bigger, bolder and even more strange and have the villain become bigger and stronger than Eleven and her entourage - her ever increasing circle of people who bring little to the story but pad it out nicely.
I'm not even sure I fully understood it; how the Upside Down became; where all those creepy creatures came from or how it's stuck in a specific time. It was always a style over substance series and I reckon the newspaper reviews that hinted this would be a good place to stop were maybe suggesting that because it needs to stop and now is as good as any time...
***
The Boys is heading toward a finale and the bad taste epic is going incredibly tits up for our heroes. Hughie and Billy are literally killing themselves by shooting up with temporary V; Frenchie and Kimiko seem to be mainly caught up in another of this series' seemingly irrelevant sub plots - although actually seeing Frenchie do something is a surprise. and Marvin is transfixed by his obsession with Soldier Boy, which I don't recall ever being mentioned until the beginning of season three. Meanwhile Annie seems to be the only super with a proper set of balls who isn't in incarceration and while Homelander is even more barking mad (I could make that Miracleman reference again, but only four of you would get it), his sycophants he surrounds himself with are all flotsam and plot jam - put in there to slow down the pace of everything.
However, the Soldier Boy story has been increasingly interesting and it appears that his Vought created super team is a little like a dysfunctional version of the Minute Men, who appeared in Moore & Gibbons' Watchmen and the current Seven are like an even more perverted and fucked up version of the actual Watchmen - so if you've never seen this but have seen or read Watchmen you'll realise how fucked up The Boys is. Special mentions for Jenson Ackles, who is brilliant as the insane, PTSD-suffering, all-powerful SB and Antony Starr's Homelander, who just gets more bonkers than you could imagine.
It is one of the best things on TV, yet if you were really dissecting this you'd find that a lot of this series inadequacies are hidden by its outrageousness.
***
For All Mankind... top drawer quality melodrama. Still the best thing on TV and season three has been no exception. It feels as though everything has been ramped up to the hilt now and you wonder if you've maybe seen the last of certain characters - that their stories have ended while the big one goes on - and while that has a sad edge to it, you also know that if this series gets renewed a couple more times that none of the original cast will be in it other than in historical flashbacks. But that's okay because it's so well made, so addictive and you become so emotionally involved that just by it existing makes you feel a little better...
***
Not a big gun as such, but Fort Salem: Motherland has just started its third season. It's an underrated show presumably aimed at adolescents and people in their early 20s, but there's something compulsive about it and how it has also evolved way differently than you would have forecast. I expect if this gets renewed for a fourth season it will feel like a totally different show than the original series portrayed.
***
We have the third season of The Umbrella Academy to get through in the coming week or so. I'm a little concerned that the wife isn't keen, but she said this evening that 'once we start watching it, I'll get into it again', which is pretty much the thing with most TV shows you watch but aren't necessarily a massive fan of.
I'm interested in this season because it poses one of those great questions and scenarios that fans of the concept of historical time travel wrestle with all the time - how great an effect does you being in a time you don't belong have on the over all timeline - the Butterfly Effect, essentially. Well, our heroes have been to the past, prevented something happening that never happened and returned to the present to find everything different - probably due to Tom Hopper's character Luther informing his father they were from the future in series two.
The dilemma here is how do you go back in time, prevent the new reality from happening, but also ensuring the reason you travelled back in time in the first place is also resolved... I expect it won't get that complex and opt for a cop-out conclusion...
***
Better Call Saul season six, part one was, as usual, brilliant in its sloth-like way. Given how old everyone in this show is now and that it's supposed to be set a few years before the events of Breaking Bad, which finished eight (?) years ago, this is probably a good idea that they're finishing it now. Gus Fring is the biggest problem because he looks about 20 years older than he did in the penultimate season of BB but also Mike Ermintraut is about 102 in real life and Jimmy 'Saul Goodman' McGill is 60 now and has had a heart attack in real life... Tempus fugit and all that.
So the fact it still seems to be creeping along like slime mould rather than hurtling towards a conclusion is oddly satisfying, I don't expect I'll feel that way when that final episode drops and I realise that it's all over.
The cliffhanger at the end of the first part is probably worth all the hours of investment alone and this show still is tops at doing things you don't expect. I expect the final seven episodes are going to leave a trail of death with only the three aforementioned BB alumni surviving.
***
Ms Marvel has been really fun. However, I don't think I've really enjoyed it; it feels multicultural, groundbreaking and there's been something educational and fresh about it, but it also feels utterly unnecessary; like it's being done because of the character not because the character is worthy of a TV series.
It also appears to be creating and introducing yet another ancient mythos, like the MCU is just littered with gods that simply clutter an already rammed to the gills universe.
Episode #4 exchanged New Jersey for Karachi in Pakistan and did a good job of making the capital city look vibrant and not at all constricted by the principal religion. It's an interesting take on the Partition as well, focusing on the fact that many of today's aged Pakistanis were born Indian and it was all the fault of the British that there was such a problem now.
One of the quibbles I have with it is the way it seems to be introducing new characters all the time; we barely get a fix on one before another bounces along and this is really before we've got that familiar with Kamala or her family and network of friends. Too much is happening in a short space of time and too little happens in longer sections - if anything the pacing of this series is all over the place and more worrying is the fact that the recent Doctor Strange and the Insane Balloon Animals film's entire plot depended on you having seen WandaVision and I expect next year's Marvels film - originally the Captain Marvel sequel but now allegedly focusing on a group of female superheroes saving the planet - is going to have Kamala's story continue in that.
That's not interconnected storytelling, that's cheap marketing ploys employed by Marvel in the early 1990s to sell more product and if MCU films continue to use MTVU series as links to each other, they will soon learn about the Law of Diminishing Returns 2020s reboot. I don't know for sure, but the post credit scene in Eternals which apparently featured Blade is all you need to know about cynical marketing ploys. One of the main reasons why comics went from being HUGE in the early 1990s to average and borderline cottage industry within 10 years was down to a number of economic factors, but creatively, people were fed up with cynical crossovers, tie-ins, multi-title ongoing epics of varying degrees of quality, so they simply stopped buying everything and became selective.
Ms Marvel - according to reports and rumours - has been the least successful MTVU launch, which suggests that Feige and the team behind Marvels are a wee bit worried, especially given the problems that haunted Brie Larson's first foray into superhero films. There are going to be a lot of eyes turned to She Hulk and Mark Ruffalo's guest starring Hulk role in that, because there are going to be accountants sitting in plush offices in DisneyWorld crunching numbers and wondering if making these TV series is worth while. She Hulk needs 2020 audiences and given that the last two series, Hawkeye and the current Ms Marvel have both been well made and should be popular and neither have been makes me wonder about the long-term viability of lesser Marvel projects.
The franchise feels like it's in a right mess at the moment and I can't help think that's down to over saturation post-Covid and not having the same coherent plan as they did in the first four phases.
