The series is fun, even though the depiction of the U.S. government and the town of Hawkins has taken a decided turn in this final season.
It’s Friday afternoon, so time for something lighter . . .
I have enjoyed the previous seasons of Netflix’s wildly popular series Stranger Things — well, aside from a few gripes with season 4 — and I’m enjoying the first batch of episodes released a bit before Thanksgiving.
But two plot points from this season are sticking in my craw. Spoilers ahead.
In the world of Stranger Things, the U.S. government has been portrayed as a deeply flawed institution from the opening scene. The experiments going on in Hawkins National Laboratory are at best a reckless and dangerous pursuit of advantages over the Soviet Union and represent a slew of criminal acts, including kidnapping and child abuse. (The fictional Hawkins lab project is said to be an extension of the real-life MK Ultra CIA experiments with LSD and behavior control.)
What’s more, over the course of these seasons, we see federal agents execute ordinary civilians willy-nilly, all in the name of national security and hiding the dangerous experiments going on at the lab.
Still, while the lab’s director, Dr. Brenner, is a cruel man, a viewer could conclude that his superiors have only a vague idea of what he’s doing and don’t know about his ruthless, amoral methods. His replacement, Dr. Owens, seems like a kinder man with a functioning conscience who takes his duties seriously and is perhaps willing to intimidate the likes of Nancy and Jonathan, but he’s not willing to actually harm innocent civilians. And when confronted with public outcry about Barb’s death — attributed to toxic chemicals instead of extra-dimensional monsters — the U.S. government shuts down the lab.
For the first four seasons, a viewer would conclude that the U.S. government in the 1980s meant well, and wanted to protect its citizens from a serious threat of the Soviets in the Cold War, but had malevolent factions within its ranks who pursued their experiments and protected their secrets with utter cruelty and cold-blooded lethality. (And balancing out the Cold War tensions, seasons 3 and 4 portray the Soviet government, its military, and its agents as utterly irredeemable.)
This season, set about a year and a half after season 4, finds the circumstances around Hawkins dramatically changed. The town is under a military-enforced quarantine, fenced off with barbed wire and guard towers along the major roads into town. (I wonder if this plot development represents the Duffer brothers’ feelings about the Covid pandemic.)
The citizens are subject to “mandatory medical checkups,” the giant chasms leading to the Upside Down are covered with steel plating, and it seems surveillance cameras are ubiquitous.
Stranger Things is a show with a big cast, so maybe the creative team felt that they didn’t have time to explore how the typical Hawkins resident feels about the suddenly imposed and lasting quarantine. The kids and teens are still going to schools, but maybe the tensions between Ted and Karen Wheeler indicate that everyone is starting to buckle under the stress.
We also don’t get any sense of what anyone outside of Hawkins thinks of a small town being closed off from the rest of the world, with a massive military presence. (A cute short snippet of television coverage at the end of season 3 suggests that the town is becoming the subject of urban legends and is believed to be cursed.) Everyone else in Indiana just . . . shrugs and accepts it, apparently? No one in America thinks this is a little controversial or mysterious?
Finally, at one point this season, the military forces in the town correctly determine that there’s an impending threat to the town’s fourth- or fifth-graders, and incorrectly conclude that the best plan is to bring all of them to the military base in the center of town, right next to the doorway leading to a hellish dimension full of monsters.
In one of the show’s most chilling scenes — and I wonder if it was meant to be — the military knocks on family’s doors in the evening, and armed soldiers inform families that their kids must be taken to the base for safety. (Deliberate allusion or not, it reminded me of “the midnight knock of the secret police” warned about by leaders in free societies.)
And as far as we can tell, every parent in town goes along with the plan, letting their sons and daughters get escorted to school buses by soldiers with rifles.
Nope, not buying it. Americans support their troops and respect legitimate authorities, but they’re extremely protective of their kids, even in the 1980s, when we Generation Xers were allegedly getting away with everything as latchkey kids. Remember, this story is set in Indiana in the Reagan era. You know that town had some gun owners and NRA members.
There’s still about half a season to go, but the portrayal of the government and the residents of Hawkins has taken a decided turn in this final season. The U.S. military’s behavior toward the citizens of Hawkins is increasingly fascistic. (The soldiers do at least attempt to protect the kids once the monstrous demogorgons appear, and sacrifice their lives in a futile effort.) The residents of Hawkins seem like naïve sheep, shrugging off the wholesale abridgement of their rights and acquiescing to their kids’ being taken in the middle of the night.
Again, don’t get me wrong, it’s a great show. But these particular plot developments suggest that Hawkins really isn’t the pleasant town full of good people that the previous seasons depicted, and that the U.S. government has become a malevolent force in the lives of its citizens. I’m hoping the tone changes before the series finale.