Escapist Routes #39

You can tell it’s the Christmas season because I keep having to leave the house and do things with my friends (whom I love) instead of hunching at my desk in my PJs like a goblin, writing this newsletter. Pretty unacceptable that I am loved and appreciated, if you ask me.

Let’s watch some TV.

Stranger Things, season 5, episodes 1-4

Here’s the thing. Stranger Things has never actually been good, and it hasn’t seen a dramatic drop in quality from its first season to its last. I’d say that 2 and 3 had a lot of problems, but the course correction in season 4 was genuinely impressive — but it has never been good. Just intermittently fun to watch.

The problem with Stranger Things is that there’s no escaping the passage of time. Five seasons across nine years, with the last couple of seasons chopped up and released in parts, has left the series unable to sustain its momentum. The kids have grown up, some of the actors playing teens are now in their 30s, David Harbour has gone from a no-name character actor to a big Marvel star to the subject of celebrity gossip and a whole album from his ex-wife about how he cheated on her. (It’s really good!) There are rumours of on-set bullying, drug use and eating disorders; the kid playing Will said some stupid pro-Zionist stuff, which was received with such outrage that you’d think. he had pulled off a rubber mask and revealed he was in fact Benjamin Netanyahu; there is a whole industry of Hot Takes About Millie Bobby Brown. And the episodes just. keep. getting. longer.

Sooooo … is Stranger Things still fun to watch?

The problem is that this release format (four episodes now — one over 100 minutes long), two at Christmas and two at the New Year) is, again, destroying the momentum. It is the worst of all possible release formats.

The first three episodes of this new season were mildly entertaining, mostly annoying. Most of the characters are running in circles, repeating arcs and behaviours we’ve been seeing for years. (Hopper is overprotective and an asshole, Joyce is overprotective and sweet. Jonathan and Steve are fighting over Nancy, who is a Strong Female Character. El wants more autonomy than Hop will give her. Robyn is a delightful motormouth of a disaster lesbian. Etc.)

There are a handful of interesting new developments: Holly Wheeler, who was three years old at the beginning of the series, and who is now nine or ten, though only three years have passed, is now a major player; Dustin is grieving Billy and acting out; and Linda Hamilton is here. But I wouldn’t say these are enough to make the show enjoyable— more than anything else, it made me appreciate Sadie Sink’s Max, and how she became the heart of the show. (Not to mention that Sink is by far the most talented of the young actors in the cast, as I realised when she turned up in a single scene of The Americans and somehow had as much presence as Keri Russell. She was ten or eleven years old at the time.)

GOOD SPOILERY NEWS, Max is back in episode 4, and that is also the point where suddenly I was having fun again. Even though it was, let me reiterate, 100 minutes long. On a school night.

Bad news, we have to wait another month for the rest of the season, because this show simply cannot stop shooting itself in the foot at every turn.

Let me wrap up by talking about how uncomfortable I am with the show’s depiction of girlhood this season. It has never been great — I think it says a lot that first, the Duffer Brothers had to be prodded to add a second girl to El’s peer group, and second, that their first instinct was that Max and El should be rivals.

But here’s a tale of two girls. Holly is seven ten and played by a fourteen-year-old, who is costumed in pigtails and cute overalls, before she transitions to fantastical dresses with puffed sleeves and petticoats and a little orange cape.

I understand why you’d cast an older actress — longer working hours, plus putting an actual child in a scene with the twenty-one year old playing her “sixteen-year-old” brother isn’t going to work — but there is something uncomfortable and fetishistic about having an adolescent dressed like a little girl, especially with her 2025 Clean Girl Make-Up and the way the camera lingers on her mouth.

And then there is Erica, a Black girl of about 13, played by an actress of 30. Erica has always been a problematic character, but at this point, I feel like all pretence of writing her as a child has been abandoned. She’s a Sassy Black Woman, here to crack wise and move the plot along, but she doesn’t get a fraction of interiority, or even the dignity assigned to Holly.

Now, she is far from the only two-dimensional character in the series — Mike, who is allegedly a protagonist, is little more than a stand-in for the audience member, who is assumed to be white, male and nerdy. But Erica is problematic in ways which are very obvious and could have been avoided with just a tiny amount of thought, had the Duffer Brothers bothered to put themselves in a Black viewer’s shoes. And the fact that they didn’t speaks to the biggest problem at the core of Stranger Things.

Chernobyl

Rewatching season 1 of The Americans put me in a mood for more late-era USSR historical drama, and what better option than the greatest miniseries of the 21st century?

I felt REALLY good about this choice right up to the penultimate episode, aka The One Where The Irradiated Pets of Pripyat Have To Be Euthanised (With A Shotgun). Yes, Barry Keoghan gives a great performance. No, I could not watch it. I wound up leaving the room to hang some laundry without hitting pause.

But otherwise, Chernobyl remains both brilliant and intensely watchable. Every single performance is great, it’s just a cavalcade of Notable British Character Actors (And Stellan Skarsgard) doing their best work. There are long, dialogue-free shots of the ordinary landscape, rendered sinister by the presence of invisible radiation. There’s a palpable howl of rage at a culture built on lies, misinformation and outright propaganda, which is as applicable to the late capitalism of the 2020s as it was to the late communism of the 1980s. (Oddly, it seems to have aired in China without censorship, and was particularly popular in the early months of 2020, as Chinese audiences connected the experience of the ordinary Soviet citizens with what they were living through with covid.)

Once again, I thought about getting this for my dad for Christmas, and once again I decided it was the wrong choice. Yes, he does enjoy hating communism, but it’s not very festive, y’know?

But here’s a book recommendation: if you enjoyed watching Chernobyl, go pick up Chernobyl Roulette by Serhii Plokhy, an account of the occupation of the Chernobyl Power Plant by the Russian Army in 2022. Plokhy, a Ukrainian historian resident in the US, has a very clear bias, but equally clear is his prose, and his deep respect for the plant workers who averted a disaster. Again.

Down Cemetery Road, season 1, episode 7

A lot of stuff happens! Downey’s death among other things, because actually no Black men will be left standing in this series. Which I feel is a problem?

We are also meant to think that Zoe has been killed, and I’m sorry, but the books are called The Zoe Boehm Series, I know a fake-out when I see it.

I do not want to give Down Cemetery Road short thrift, but I was absolutely exhausted by the time I reached the couch on Friday evening — we had the work Christmas dinner the night before, and I’m afraid I got embarrassingly drunk and told many people that I respect them and value our working relationship. Dunno how I’m gonna show my face tomorrow. Anyway, I was tired, and all my brain space was taken up by…

Pluribus, season 1, episode 6

I was hoping it wouldn’t be cannibalism, because that is just so predictable.

What I didn’t predict would be that Carol is the last person to find out about the cannibalism (save Paraguy, whose actual name is Manousos), because all the other Individuals have chaperones and Johns Cena to tell them things, and because they have twice-weekly Zoom calls from which Carol is excluded.

She is, literally, the most unpopular person on the entire planet.

That’s hard to watch, but I like the way it highlights how deeply interconnected humans are, even when they’re not part of a global hive mind. Carol cosplays independence, but she needs the Others to stock her personal supermarket and to take away her garbage.

On the other hand, she has also been reaching out and asking for help from the other Individuals, and they are refusing, so, like, the world is complicated and can’t just be reduced to a metaphor for American individualism and selfishness. (I think that is part of Carol’s deal, but not the whole of it.)

Her trip to Las Vegas gives us a glimpse into the life of Koumba, last seen commandeering Air Force One and a small army of sexy women. Now he’s happily ensconced in a luxury hotel, all his material and sexual needs catered to, and spending his time re-enacting scenes from Bond movies. I mean, he’s an asshole, but his interactions with Carol reveal more than that.

I was particularly struck by their breakfast together, where he mimics her in turning a plate of food into an improvised bacon, egg and avo sandwich. I’ve seen some people suggest that it reminded him of what it’s like to be exposed to a person who can innovate, and I don’t disagree, but also I think it demonstrates both his empathy — meeting Carol where she is — and also maybe that he’s not entirely at ease with other people anymore.

Worldbuilding update: the hive mind is on course to start losing people to starvation in a decade or so, because their ethos forbids them from actively causing harm to get food — right down to shaking a tree to get its fruit. This suggests that either the virus is ultimately self-limiting, or that this is in fact a plan from some other entity to soften up humanity for invasion. Or both!

Also, they have worked out how to incorporate the Individuals into the collective, but the process is so painful that it can’t be done without consent. When they promised they would never harvest stem cells from Carol’s body, I immediately thought of the eggs she had frozen years ago, but people who understand biology say it’s not that simple. Nevertheless, I feel like Chekhov’s ova are in play. Stay tuned.