Stranger things 4 vol 2 thoughts

- Eddie's death was a contrived plot point. He had no real reason to die past 'OMG tropey character revelation', it's also killing off good characters who actually can act as opposed to killing off Mike who can't fucking act to save his life...

- worse than Eddie's death is the reaction to his death... where was it? We saw Dustins reaction.... and his Uncle who we've known for like 2 scenes. Where was Mike's, Lucas', Steve's??? Even if you don't want to do individual reactions... where was the general group reaction? How do you expect the audience to care if your characters don't? Better be thankful he was acted well and a likeable character.

- the cutaway may be the reason for this and I have a theory why this even exists at all.... and why the writing around his death is so poorly done:

It exists because the writers probably filmed both Eddie living and dying, and the actors didn't know which it would be (the actors reaction on social media hoping he made it to s5 is a good hint of this) and so after Eddie dies... there is the cutaway of 2 days later to avoid any explaining directly after the fact and then the same scenes regardless of if Eddie lived or died. This may be why we see zero fucking reaction around his death from anyone whatsoever... because these scenes were also filmed from the perspective of if he never died, they just inserted the Dustin scene and removed possibly any scenes Eddie may have been in after the fact.

- the three emotional scenes of this episode, Lucas and Max, Dustin and Eddie and Mike and Eleven ... one of them stands out like a sore thumb and its Mike's and Eleven's scene. I don't know what it is about Mike's actor but he simply isn't good at conveying emotional scenes. You have Max and Eddie in mortal peril and Dustin/Lucas' actors convey the stakes well... but Mike's just doesn't sell it for me. It felt more like a "oh here comes the plot convenience again where Eleven saves the day" than a "I should care about these characters in this moment" scene. His acting is wooden, and to be completely honest I find Mike's acting to just generally be very wooden. He's clearly surpassed in ability by a lot of the cast but because he's a main character who also is involved with Eleven massively he has to be front and center, and I just think if anything it shows he's not as strong an actor as Gaten and Caleb.

- Max's scenes were great but they were undercut with the revival from Eleven, and this is bad for two reasons in my eyes: it shows the writers utter inability to commit to main character deaths, and two it shows that Eleven can always just bring anyone back from the brink of death even if she's not physically there with their body. After Max's supposed death there's also, yet again, like Eddie just... barely any reaction for one of their best friends who risked her life for this to even be possible and it cost her dearly.... Nancy and Jonathan care more about their fucking awful relationship than they do Eddie or Max...

- plot convenience is something used a lot this episode, and the biggest example is Steve, Nancy and Robin being choked out for literally 10 minutes, Vecna ignoring Eleven, you know....the girl who has stopped him like twice already, and not immediately trying to kill her the moment he trapped her, Vecna taking forever to kill Max, the Demogorgon not immediately killing Hopper despite us seeing it kill others in seconds from the fight pit scene. Just main characters surviving in the silliest ways possible, it was... very weak. Then there's the power of friendship defeating Vecna which has been a repeated theme of the show... love conquers over hate, which Vecna thrives off, but here it just felt a bit too easy. There needed to be more conflict between Vecna and Eleven shown.

- the set up for the trap I liked, but it also introduced some kinda silly plot holes.

Vecna knew about all of their plan all along, so why did he send the bats to Eddie, why let Nancy and Co up the stairs and not just send the bats and kill them, why fall for Max's trick? The only answer I can think of is he wanted to taunt them, and Eleven was what he didn't predict possibly... but this still falls into plot convenience if anything. Its not believable writing in my opinion. This is like a super evil villain wants to gloat esque cliche in my eyes and its... not good.

- the whole Jock character plot line kinda fell on its ass I feel like... I didn't care for a single one of these characters, didn't like them, as soon as that guy came into the attic I couldn't wait for Lucas to kick his arse and when he died I was like thank fucking God finally, all the scenes with then in were just boring in my opinion, nothing more.

Overall I did like volume 2, but it was also a contrived mess filled with tons of plot armour, silly moments, writing that in my eyes kinda fell flat on its arse and them doing Eddie dirty whilst not committing to a single main character death like they said was going to happen. If they had killed Steve, Nancy and Robin right then and there, you know what.... I might have been like holy shit there are actual stakes, if they had let Max die instead of saving her after death and setting her up for coming back perfectly fine in S5... I might have said holy shit they killed a fan favourite, if they had killed Mike I might have been like finally I don't have to suffer his atrociously wooden acting any longer... but all they did was kill Eddie, a likeable character, acted well, who deserved to stay on for s5 but was sadly reduced to being a plot device and that's it.