Ace Watches Stranger Things Season 2

Happy Halloween, everybody! Sadly, this will be the last post of the year. I know, it’s awful, but we writers have been working hard, and we need a longer break than usual to recover.

I do hope you have all been enjoying yourself, because I have not. October has been a rough month for me, and my quest to find something to watch to fulfill my Halloween needs hasn’t helped much. Lord knows American Horror Story is, well… it’s something. And the original 1990 It didn’t do much for me either. It was halfway through It that I realized Stranger Things’s second season was out—excited, I forced my sister-in-law to quit It with me and watch it. And oh, thank God. Stranger Things was the pick-me-up I needed. It is so wonderful watching a story where the good outweighs the bad. I hope my love for this show hasn’t been influenced by the shit I watched before it, but Stranger Things’s second season was awesome.

(via DarkHorizons)

Spoilers ahead.

Lady Tropes in Stranger Things

pic by juliettefaraone

Last week Ace reviewed Stranger Things, the runaway Netflix hit. It’s a fabulous sci-fi show quickly gathering what should in time turn into a cult following. The sci-fi-horror-mystery story follows the mysterious disappearance of young Will Byers (and others), the efforts of his family and friends to rescue him, and the mysterious government authorities that want to keep everything covered up. It’s a show that truly pays homage to the spirit of 1980s television and movie tropes, without making the show feel cheap. Most of the time, when a story utilizes a lot of tropes, it’s not a good thing. Usually tropes mean that characters are flat and stereotyped, plots are predictable and boring, and more often than not anyone outside the “straight WASP male” gets shafted. What I find truly remarkable about Stranger Things is its ability to (for the most part) navigate the divide between using familiar tropes and not indulging in sloppy, harmful stereotypes. Take, for example, the way the show treats its female characters.

Spoilers for Stranger Things below. 

Stranger Things: A Better Story than I Had Expected

Sometime last week, I sat down to binge watch the first season of Stranger Things. I’d kept hearing conflicting reports about the show—some people thought it was very well done and feminist, and others, not so much—so I decided to give it a try myself.

Stranger Things is a science-fiction horror show that takes place in the 80s and features a monster that looks like it came out of a movie from the 80s. Like all stories, Stranger Things is by no means perfect, and some of the problems I had with it are hard to ignore, but on the whole, I loved this show.

Spoilers up ahead.

Eleventh Doctor: The Rewatch

So I babysit a seventh grade girl, whose best seventh grade friend happens to be a Whovian. This friend has been trying to sit my (umm…) child down and get her to watch Doctor Who for some time. The friend was failing. So I took it upon myself to right this wrong and get this girl to watch some Doctor Who. And I’ve gotten her hooked. We started with the first episode of Eleven, “The Eleventh Hour”, because it was available for free on demand. We just watched “Vincent and the Doctor” and are at a standstill because the TV doesn’t have the next two episodes (the one with Craig and the first part of the season finale). Here are my feels upon rewatching. 

Doctor Who’s Disappearing Companions

Keep track of the recurring companions the Doctor has in the paragraphs below.

So Nine didn’t have anyone coming to visit him from previous seasons because the show had just been rebooted and the entire show needed to be established. In addition, Captain Jack, Mickey, and Rose’s mom Jackie were introduced. Nine had four people in his crew.

Then came Ten, who started with this same crew. Throughout Ten’s tenure (see what I did there?), companions cycled in, cycled out, and cycled back in again. Sarah Jane came for a visit, Rose came back for a visit, Mickey and Martha too. Ten had Rose, Donna, Martha, Jackie, Mickey, Captain Jack, and Donna’s grandfather as major recurring members of his crew. That’s seven people.

None of these no old companions have come back to visit Eleven, and that is my biggest beef.