#except maybe el i know my socially avoidant queen has something

[curioscurio]

Also my god. These women are so gorgeous. There's no doubt Bridgerton is a historical fiction because no one in real life or their right mind can deny how Nicola Coughlan is the most gorgeous woman alive

[frasier-crane-style]

Stranger Things season 2

Well, that rallied quickly. The back-half of the season is straight up fantastic, except for Episode 7 about Eleven, which comes off like a backdoor pilot for a not particularly good spin-off. Suddenly Eleven has a sister with more budget-friendly powers and she has a team of young, sexy, multiethnic sidekicks (hey, did you guys know they have a large and physically threatening black guy who is also an affectionate teddy bear of a human being? Wow!) who for some reason are helping her take revenge on the Department of Energy and also this one episode contains all of Eleven’s character development instead of anything about her and Hopper as surrogate father and daughter, which we spent so much time on and was so much more effective than this weird ‘give El something to do’ side quest. Seriously, it is teeth-grindingly bad when Eleven needs motivation and she flashbacks to dumb Dr. Brenner (seriously, prestige TV, stop bringing back villains for encores after they’ve been soundly defeated! It just cheapens them!).

-Also, I know they’re edgy badass outsider people, but seriously, y’all are making fun of a twelve-year-old. That’s not cool! What’s next, are the Dream Warriors going to make fun of a dog? Yeah, sick burn ya landed on that Schnauzer, bro! You really took that puppy down a notch!

-All of the new kids acquit themselves well, even if the concept of Max (you guys, she’s an edgy cool girl who rides a skateboard and plays video games better than the boys and has a tragic backstory and all the boys have a romantic interlude with her!) is stupid as shit. The execution redeems it, though. Even the love triangle worked well, as it was just Lucas and Max having chemistry, Dustin having a crush on Max but moving on when it became obvious she wasn’t interested, and that being that. That’s more mature than, like, any twenty-something on the CW has ever been about a love triangle. Like, I don’t think it’s the prospect of two people being attracted to the same person or one person having their affections split between two people that’s so bad, because that obviously happens in real life. It’s when the love triangle suddenly makes people act like immature jackasses or outright supervillains, like these grown-ass men and women have no idea how to control their emotions, be professional, or act maturely about their love life. That’s what makes people hate love triangles, not the Team Edward Team Jacob stuff.

-Also, was I the only one suspecting that Billy’s antipathy to Lucas was racism? It was weird, because that seemed like kinda a gimme, but he never came out and slurred Lucas, so it’s just “I hate this black kid who’s honing in on my white sister for totally unspecified and mysterious reasons!” I guess maybe they want to keep him redeemable for future stories and having him be an out and out racist strikes them as going too far, but it’s the obvious implication anyway and I think as far as these things go, a dumb teenager who’s being abused by his parents can be somewhat forgiven for that shit, as long as he realizes he was wrong and changes his ways. 

-Although, really, how many teenagers were there with six-pack abs in the eighties? I just don’t think that level of fitness was that prevalent. I mean, sure, there was Schwarzenegger and Stallone, but that’s more of a bodybuilder thing. Billy is like this, I don’t know, Edward Cullen dude. Was the ‘skinny with rock-hard abs’ look really a thing?

-I liked the ambition of the Shadow Monster/Mind Flayer, but I thought it ended up being too scattered to be really effective. I get that they were trying to avoid just having it be the Demogorgon Queen, but it felt more like a random collection of concepts than a real character. Like, what is it? A sentient virus? A collection of Demogorgons controlled by puppeteer parasites (and if so, why didn’t it take over any humans other than Will?)? A sentient cloud of dust? A bunch of vines under the earth? A giant sky-monster? Apparently it’s all those things... somehow.

-Was it just me or were there a lot of times when the music was on the verge of overwhelming the dialogue? Like, exactly as loud as the conversations people were having? Nolan can do that, show, you can’t.

-DON’T GO ALONE INTO THE DEMONIC HELL TUNNELS WHEN NO ONE KNOWS WHERE YOU ARE, IDJITS!

-Agreed with whoever said that the first scene of this season should’ve been the last scene of the season. 

-Irritating how the government conspiracy’s power level varies between ‘omnipotent’ when threatening the heroes and ‘totally useless’ when pitted against monsters. Okay, the military base in charge of guarding a portal to hell just went dark. The way the conspiracy finds out about this is that the local sheriff calls them and gets put on hold? Come on. Where are the black helicopters? Shouldn’t they be in there in thirty minutes or less, like a hot pizza on a Friday night?

-Points for this being the whole story on earth where heroes who have discovered a paranormal conspiracy reveal only the pertinent information without going into the overt craziness. Seriously, how many well-meaning protagonists has that one tripped up? “Somebody’s trying to kill me!” “We’ll help you out, miss!” “He’s a killer robot from the future!” “Ha ha, get out of here you crazy slut!”

-I rather doubt that, after a year of social interaction with Hooper, that Eleven would still have such a limited/awkward vocabulary. That seemed more like “we have to write Eleven with her patois” than how such a character would actually sound at that point in her life.