How One Character Basically Ruined ‘Stranger Things’

Stranger Things

Credit: Netflix

In the beginning, Stranger Things was the story of a group of kids in a small, rural Indiana town in the ’80s who find themselves thrust into an adventure not unlike their beloved game of D&D.

There’s a monster, the terrifying and mysterious demogorgon who you don’t really see for most of the season (because monsters are scarier when they’re in the shadows or under the bed), a nefarious government lab and a runaway girl with psychic / psionic superpowers.

All these things, we learn, are connected, as is the vanishing of Will Byers, who is kidnapped in the first episode by the monster, but who shows up on the phone with his mother, Joyce, and who somehow sends messages through the lights of their home from the Upside Down, a genuinely terrifying alternate dimension that the government scientists opened a rift into during their experiments Eleven before her escape.

This is a pretty terrific setup. It’s simple to follow and really captures those classic Steven Spielberg 1980s’ Amblin Entertainment vibes. Stranger Things Season 1 also did a great job introducing us to a relatively contained cast of mostly lovable characters, while carefully unspooling the mystery over the course of its eight relatively short episodes (relative to later seasons, that is).

Season 1 was simple and nostalgic and fun. It felt like watching E.T. for the first time, with its shadowy government operatives, oblivious parents and larger-than-life characters suddenly thrust into our young protagonists’ otherwise normal lives.

The core group was small. Mike, Lucas, Dustin and Eleven searched for Will on foot or on their bikes, dodging parent curfews and irritable cops. The older teens had lesser, but still important and distinct roles, with a sort of love triangle forming between Nancy, Steve and Will’s big brother, Jonathan. There was a satisfying arc for each of these characters (though especially Steve) just like the younger kids. Barb got killed off, because you need at least one innocent victim in a monster story and she was as disposable as they come. It wasn’t going to be Will.

The grownup involvement was even more limited but still crucial to the story. Will’s mother, Joyce, went a bit nutty trying to figure out what was going on with her phone and the lights in her house and the weird, horrifying shapes pressing through the walls. Chief Hopper led the police investigation. Mr. Clarke provided a bit of technical support.

And that was pretty much that. This was a tightly written story with a beginning, a middle and an end. It was, as David Harbour once told me, “Pure.”

The Stranger Things Feature Creep

But with great success comes feature creep. The simple story had to be expanded, because the Duffer Brothers needed another season and then another season, and Netflix loved the attention and success of this surprise hit. The cast ballooned, adding more kids and more teens and more adults, some of whom were great characters like Max and Billy and Murray, but the cast kept piling up like bodies for a Mind Flayer. And other than one heroic guest star bucket-kicking per season, nobody else died (and the show’s best death, Jim Hopper’s heroic season 3 sacrifice, was a fake-out).

As the cast grew, so did the scope of the series – and its problems. All this expansion led to cracks in the foundation. Now we didn’t just have one terrifying monster lurking in the shadows, we had demodogs, which were less frightening but more plentiful. The scariness of the first season began to leak out around the edges. Then demobats. (Though all these minor monsters were mysteriously missing for the big Mind Flayer/Vecna showdown in Season 5).

The Mind Flayer was certainly a fascinating monster, and Season 3 did a lot of neat things with it, but the story just kept getting bigger and more complicated as it shifted away from its premise – scary monster from another dimension capturing a young boy – and became something more epic in scope and messier in execution. That scary monster was just a minor bad guy, we later learned, in service of an even bigger and more deadly monster.

Of course, Season 3 was also not the end of the show, so in order to keep going, the Duffer Brothers had to create an even bigger, scarier and more diabolical villain in Season 4. This is, I believe, when the show truly went off the rails. I would argue that it should have ended after Season 1, which was perfect, but if it had to continue, the creative choices in Season 4 led directly to the creative bankruptcy of Season 5. And the show just kept runnin’ up that hill until it ran out of anything even remotely resembling a good idea.

How Vecna Ruined ‘Stranger Things’

The character who bears the most responsibility for the decline of Stranger Things is, of course, Vecna / aka 001 /aka Henry Creel. Creel fundamentally changed everything about the story we thought we knew, and none of it for the better. Now, all the bad things that happened because of the Hawkins Lab experiments were actually Henry’s doing. Indeed, Eleven and the children, we discover, were byproducts of Henry’s blood. In Season 5, we learn that his blood is the byproduct of a space rock that he finds in a mine, in a briefcase belonging to some random guy he ends up killing.

To make all of this work, the show’s writers had to change the very nature of Eleven, the Upside Down and the Hawkins Labs. Eleven didn’t actually open the rift to the Upside Down at all. Dr. Brenner was behind that, and he created the Upside Down as a wormhole to connect to another planet that our heroes dub “The Abyss.” Will, meanwhile, wasn’t captured by a scary monster that snuck into our world as part of some nightmarish and inexplicable. He was chosen by Vecna because he was “weak” and Vecna needed kids to, um, power the Mind Flayer to crash-land The Abyss through the Upside Down into Earth . . . .

As you can see, at this point the elegance and simplicity of Season 1 have been utterly erased and replaced by a convoluted and goofy plot that goes in a million directions at once while basically doing nothing, made much worse by the fact that our cast of heroes has expanded beyond all reason. The unwieldiness of the story is only matched by the unwieldiness of its burgeoning cast. Even with extra long episodes, few of the remaining characters are given a chance to really grow or shine, sidelining even characters like Eleven, while Holly of all people becomes one of Season 5’s major heroes.

Obviously, this is feature creep. This is worldbuilding gone wild. This is what happens when you take a great story and instead of letting it end organically, you just churn out more content. Bigger content. Just not better content. Vecna changed the arc of Stranger Things, but also the vibe. What was once a story about mysterious horrors from beyond became something more personal, but they had to retcon past seasons to make it work. No, Vecna was not planned from the beginning. There is no whiff of him in Season 1, and Season 5’s CGI-laden bits with Will being dragged by the demogorgon to Vecna just cheapen the events of Season 1.

This desire for more and bigger content often comes at a price. The scripts get messy. The cinematography and special effects, despite bigger budgets, look cheaper. The algorithm and Netflix’s influence are stronger and stronger with each passing season. So perhaps we should not lay the blame at Vecna’s gnarled feet. Perhaps he is just a symptom rather than the, ahem, root cause. Still, if nothing else, Vecna is the most obvious and crucial change from Seasons 1-3 and the final two. The eldritch horrors of the Upside Down facing the town of Hawkins and its young band of heroes were replaced by a Voldemortian Dark Lord. The shadowy Hawkins Lab goons, and “Papa” were replaced by goofy military goons and Dr. Kay (though “Papa” also had a miraculous resurrection, just like Hopper).

The fear and the heart and the thrill were all gone, replaced by a viney Grinch lookalike that said “mmmmmh” a lot and monologued occasionally and was never as scary as the Mind Flayer, or really never scary at all once we learned who he was. The Mind Flayer, for that matter, was never as scary as Season 1’s demogorgon. The purist in me wishes this show had ended after Season 1, or become an anthology series. The pragmatist wishes it handed in Season 3, with the Mind Flayer defeated and Hopper mourned. The realist in me thinks we could have wrapped the whole thing up with one more Season 4 episode in which Eleven saves Max from Vecna and defeats him once and for all. We certainly did not need Season 5.