Stranger Things Pumps And Dumps Plot Points Because It Thinks We’re Stupid

By Robert Scucci
| Published 1 minute ago

With Thanksgiving festivities in the rearview, the discourse about Stranger Things Season 5 is heating up, and there’s a lot to talk about. While it’s still the same show we know and love, something is happening on a narrative level that has bothered viewers who can’t quite put their finger on what feels off about this season’s trip to the Upside Down. What I’ve noticed, and can no longer ignore, is how patronizing the dialogue has become whenever characters unpack the in-universe’s internal logic. We’re being spoonfed exposition in a way the series never relied on before.

Instead of letting the chaos unfold and trusting us to follow the breadcrumb trail, Stranger Things now pauses the story to give sprawling, hyper-detailed rundowns of what is happening and what will happen next. The charm used to come from letting us connect the dots. We were given a recipe and told to figure it out. Now the bibs are fastened, the slop is flying into our faces, and it feels like the Duffer Brothers think we’re too dumb to follow the story on our own.

Stranger Things Has Always Operated On Horror Movie Logic

Think about your average slasher flick. The appeal comes from the audience knowing they’re smarter than the characters. The more meta the slasher, like Scream, the better because there are obvious beats to follow that lead you to an obvious outcome. Don’t run upstairs or into the basement because there’s no clean way to escape. The virgin always lives. Don’t separate because there’s strength in numbers.

I can go on about the internal logic of slasher films, but I think you get the point. The slasher audience knows more than the film’s characters, not necessarily because the characters are dumb (though in some cases they are), but because they don’t have all the information they need to make informed decisions in the heat of the moment, resulting in those “No! what are you doing?!” scenes we all love. The storyboard and familiar beats inform the logic, and the audience is informed enough to have fun with the premise. 

Stranger Things used to operate with this same kind of internal logic in the early seasons. There’s one important distinction, however, that needs to be considered. The audience is allowed to feel smarter than the characters, who are all massive nerds, which is not an easy feat from a writing standpoint. When the gang gets separated, principal characters get pieces of information that they have to interpret and relay to everybody else. That’s easier said than done because evil, cosmic forces are at play, resulting in dramatic tension because they don’t yet know everything they need to know, and there are obstacles along the way. 

Like most series with an ensemble cast, Stranger Things puts the onus on the audience to piece the puzzle together. We’re watching everything unfold through a third-person omniscient point of view, meaning we know more than the series’ protagonists, as intelligent as they may be. The tension comes from knowing that Will, knowing a crucial piece of information, needs to get in contact with Dustin, Mike, Lucas, or anybody else involved in order to figure out the next logical steps in their adventure. Season 5, on the other hand, takes this thrill away from the audience through its many exposition dumps that do all the heavy lifting, stripping away any form of tension from the storyboard. 

Writers Need To Trust Their Audience

With so many loose ends to be tied up in Stranger Things before Season 5 concludes, I understand the urgent need to blast through exposition in order to stick the landing across the final eight episodes. There is a cost, though, that makes the series’ original appeal feel like a distant memory. Across the four episodes that premiered on Thanksgiving, literally every single plot point is spelled out by the characters through dialogue in order to move things along, but at the cost of insulting the audience’s intelligence. The exchanges between Will, Robin and Joyce are the most telling in “Chapter Two,” when Will explains, at length, the meaning of his visions. 

Shifting from sobbing about his previous traumas to full-on “Professor Byers” mode, Will lays out in great detail how his mind works, so in later scenes he can have a split-second vision of a spinning sky that proves to be a crucial plot point. He shudders, Robin asks what’s wrong, and he goes straight into this spiel about how his vision sets him in a specific place, a specific time, involving a specific antagonist, and needs to be addressed in a specific way. Had this exchange happened in an earlier season, Will would have had his vision, Robin would see him in a trance-like state, he’d snap out of it, spend some time thinking about it, and there would be a later payoff when the logic fully snaps into place. 

By spelling out the exposition in such great detail, there’s no longer a mystery. There’s no dramatic tension. There’s none of that sweet, sweet slasher logic that used to drive the series because the audience knew more about the situation than each individual character. We’re no longer allowed to be smarter than the characters; they’re written smarter than the audience, and they don’t even give us a chance to linger in the tension before revealing what’s really at play here. 

There’s Still Hope

A month away from Stranger Things’ next Season 5 drop, I’m hoping that these early exposition dumps were a necessary form of housekeeping to cram in the details that we need for the mystery to carry forward in a more static environment. In an ideal world, and an ideal Upside Down, we’ll get more showing without telling, and our favorite nerds can find themselves in sticky situations where they can’t just rattle off every minor detail to their cohorts as a means to spoonfeed the audience, who is smarter than the Duffer Brothers are currently giving them credit for. 

Presently, though, I’m just waiting for another exposition dump, where Hopper turns to the camera after another deluge of details spill through the dialogue, and says, “Stranger Things have happened … because that’s the show you’re watching,” without breaking eye contact with the camera. 

Stranger Things is streaming on Netflix.