I mostly enjoyed the first season of Stranger Things, way, way back in 2016, but lost interest in its less mysterious, more CGI-heavy season two, and haven’t looked at it since.
But it’s become such a juggernaut that it’s been impossible not to hear about it, especially during what has felt like the longest pre-season hype in history in advance of the final season – which is now, finally, upon us.
Actually, it’s split into three parts: there will be three episodes on Christmas Day, and a grand finale on New Year’s Day, but for now there are four new episodes to get to grips with, offering plenty for fans to enjoy.
Mind you, if you’re not a hardcore fan, you might be bewildered by it all. That’s partly because it’s just taken so long to get here that the original young actors have clearly matured beyond the age they’re supposed to be; and partly because it’s been so long since the last season that you might not even remember who’s who and what’s going on.
So, to summarise: the town of Hawkins, having cracked open last time out, has now been militarily quarantined; the characters we know from before are variously missing, dead, or just getting on with things; and Vecna, the show’s big bad, appears to have been vanquished.
But just as Robin (Maya Hawke) enters the fifth minute of her tedious exposition dump in the first episode, things begin to go suspiciously wrong again…
And away we go with the kind of supernatural chaos that fans will love but may leave others a bit shellshocked. There are too many characters in too many different situations in the first episode, and it’s too packed with weirdly dated-looking CGI, to the point that most of the big scenes just look like old video games.
Vecna looks, I presume deliberately, like one of those skinless bodybuilder demons who lived under the bed in 1980s horrors (we know he’s bad because, like the bare-bones Terminator or Voldemort, he’s human-shaped but has no nose).
And I have always been mystified (think: Buffy) how so many TV battles against demons who can break the laws of physics and move across dimensions end up as chases or fist fights (or, here, a house comically booby-trapped in the style of Home Alone).
Still, there are moments of charm among the action. The old cast are generally likeable, and there’s probably even an element of nostalgia now for the original 2016 series, given the initial age profile of most of the viewers. But so far at least, there’s too much other unreal drama going on: still good for committed fans, but unless it takes time to breathe, not something to convert the more casual viewer.
The War Between The Land And Sea
Meanwhile, BBC gave us the not-entirely-dissimilar The War Between The Land And Sea: the title might make you think they didn’t pay much attention to the whole thing, but actually this is supposedly a more adult spin-off of Doctor Who, one which has been on the cards for a long time.
It begins with office functionary Barclay (Russell Tovey), becoming accidentally involved in a situation where Spanish fishermen have discovered some, well, fishmen, in the water. These, it turns out, are a species (once known as Sea Devils, but now called Homo Aqua – something which will have you rolling your eyes with its mixture of cheesiness and sheer wrongness) who have risen from their long hibernation under the sea to reclaim the planet humans have taken over in the meantime.
Their ambassador, played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, heads to London in a tank (despite the title it’s a water tank), to negotiate with the human team led by Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave).
It is…fairly fishy, and not as deep as it thinks. Tovey is actually quite good as the confused Everyman (his cropped hair and newly buff figure give him the look of a “Jason Bourne from TEMU”), and there’s no doubt the environmental issues raised here are very real.
But does it need to be so obviously preachy? Do the secondary cast need to over-enunciate their bland script quite so much? Does it all have to look so stagey and perfectly lit?
Yes, the parent show also has these problems (and is more frantic to boot), but at least that’s on at teatime where it can be ignored. This silly drama might have been acceptable at the same time slot, but it has absolutely no business being on during Sunday night prime time.
Say Nothing
There are plenty of more serious dramas, good and bad, which take the Troubles as a backdrop, but not so many that focus specific and familiar events: it’s often too complicated, still too divisive.
Channel 4’s Say Nothing, based on a book by Patrick Radden Keefe, does just that, centring on the true story of Dolours Price (here played as a teenager by Lola Petticrew and as a telling-all adult by Maxine Peake): a girl from a staunch IRA family whose own early commitment to peaceful protest is destroyed by a loyalist attack shrugged at by the police.
Driven to joining the IRA herself, even though the IRA is reluctant to get women involved beyond first aid, Price becomes an IRA bomber, bombing the Old Bailey and ultimately being involved with the notorious 1972 disappearance and murder of Jean McConville.
Actually the whole story opens with that disappearance: that’s part of the time-jumping structure which makes the story slightly hard to follow at times, but it’s also an immediately gripping (and appalling) bit of drama central to the longer story.
Some viewers might even have such strong views about the whole thing that they can barely watch, and certainly there are disputed elements here (for example, Gerry Adams is shown here as a senior IRA member involved in McConville’s murder, but he has always famously denied these charges in real life).
But while it flags a little at times, and the accents vary a little, on its own terms it’s quite strong, for the most part well-acted and allowing some little personal touches and dialogue that humanise the characters.
Most of all, it takes care to show ordinary people driven into desperate moral debates (with others and with themselves), and sometimes to violence which affects them as much as the people they attack.
The Rumour
RTÉ2’s import The Rumour, meanwhile, wants to be a serious drama, but in its delivery it falls closer to BBC1’s new nonsense.
This is based on a Lesley Kara novel, and follows young, newly-separated mother Joanna (Rachel Shenton), who moves back to her hometown to be close to her mother. But she struggles to bond with the other snooty local mothers at the school gates…at least until she mentions an online rumour about a child killer moving into the area. That changes her standing, and changes the local dynamics, and gradually heightens tensions until Joanna herself begins to fear for her child.
There’s potential here for various kinds of exploration: you know, the social impact of rumours, the love of ghastly tall tales, the rehabilitation of former criminals, all that interesting stuff.
But in practice this is just another group of well-groomed, unpleasant people fond of wine and gossip, and living in a town as sterile and uninvolving as the drama itself.
You might wonder why Joanna even wants to join this particular social group so much that, despite being sorry she even mentioned the rumour, she continues to bang on about it all the same; you might wonder, but you really won’t care.
