Tag: Stranger Things

SHOW OF THE WEEK: Stranger Things (May 27, Netflix)

What do you do when your mega-hit of a show is coming back almost three years after it was last seen, to towering expectations? You give the fans more, a lot more.

I don’t mean just the supersized episodes in Season 4 of “Stranger Things” (the season finale reportedly clocks in at two and a half hours) but the breadth of the content in the seven episodes I’ve seen so far.

It’s not just about what’s going on in haunted Hawkins, Indiana, where Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) are navigating high school. The series also takes us to California, where Joyce (Winona Ryder), Will (Noah Schnapp), Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) and Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) moved at the end of Season 3; to Russia, where former police chief Jim Hopper (David Harbour) is being held prisoner; to the Upside Down, where a creepy humanoid monster named Vecna holds sway; even to Salt Lake City, where Dustin’s hacker girlfriend Suzie lives; and to other locations I don’t think I’m allowed to tell you about.

It’s March 1986 and a new creature is stalking the troubled teenagers of Hawkins, meaning the town is still endangered despite the defeat of the Mind Flayer at the Starcourt Mall eight months before.

The Duffer Brothers give us classic horror references here, sometimes dark and graphic ones. There’s even a haunted house and Freddie Krueger himself, Robert Englund, appears as the former homeowner, accused of murdering his family. But the scenes in which aspiring journalist Nancy (Natalia Dyer) visits him in an asylum are all “Silence of the Lambs.”

Plus all the kids are wrestling with adolescence — shades of 1980s high school movies.

Couples Mike and El, and Nancy and Jonathan are trying to keep the spark alive thousands of miles apart; Lucas and Max (Sadie Sink) have broken up and Max is in denial about the after-effects of seeing stepbrother Billy die in front of her; besties Steve (Joe Keery) and Robin (Maya Hawke) are still searching for girlfriends and keeping us entertained with their banter. And friendships are being strained: Will feels abandoned by Mike, and Lucas has chosen the high school athlete path to popularity while Mike and Dustin stay firmly in the nerd camp.

But El has it worst of all.

Stripped of her psychic abilities, still mourning her adoptive father Hopper and missing Mike, she’s preyed upon by bullies at her new high school. And once again, with her friends in Hawkins at risk, she’s asked to make tremendous personal sacrifices for the greater good.

It’s no spoiler to say that the Hawkins National Laboratories are back in play in flashback, particularly a 1979 massacre that killed all the children in Dr. Brenner’s (Matthew Modine) experimental group except Eleven, and which holds great significance to this season’s mysteries.

And I haven’t even touched on Hopper’s attempts to escape from his Russian prison with the help of a guard named Antonov (Tom Wlaschiha of “Game of Thrones”); the government agents who are hunting El; the “satanic panic” that grips Hawkins, directed at the Hellfire Club, Mike’s and Dustin’s Dungeons & Dragons team; the fact that ex-journalist Murray (Brett Gelman) teams up with Joyce when she learns that Hopper might still be alive; or any of the new characters.

British actor Joseph Quinn (“Dickensian”) joins the cast as Eddie, charismatic metalhead and leader of the Hellfire Club, and Eduardo Franco (“American Vandal”) is Jonathan’s stoner friend Argyle. Fan favourite Erica (Priah Ferguson), Lucas’s witheringly smart sister, is back as a season regular. And fans of the late, lamented “Anne With an E” will be pleased to see Amybeth McNulty in a small part as Robin’s crush, Vickie.

Sure, it’s a lot, but it’s entertaining as hell. And when the kids are working together to keep each other safe, you’ll likely feel some of those Season 1 thrills. I plan to rewatch all seven episodes and look forward to the last two of the season when they arrive July 1.

Short Takes

Prehistoric Planet (May 23, Apple TV+)

What do you get when you combine the latest scientific research in paleontology with state-of-the-art CGI? A fascinating look at creatures that have commanded our imaginations for centuries. “Prehistoric Planet,” produced by BBC Studios, is described as a docuseries, but it’s more like a fantasy nature show. MPC, the company that did the photorealistic critters for movies “The Lion King” and “The Jungle Book,” gives us dinosaurs that look as startlingly life-like as the animals you’d see in any other nature documentary, except they haven’t roamed the Earth for 66 million years. As in regular nature docs, you’ll see dinosaurs hunting, mating, fighting, tending their young and whatever else is required to survive in five types of landscapes: coasts, deserts, freshwater, ice worlds and forests (the landscape footage is all real). Things kick off with the rock star of the dino world, Tyrannosaurus rex, but the series covers everything from lizards just a few inches long to titanosaurs 85 feet long, and lots in between, including some never before seen onscreen like the long-snouted Qianzhousaurus and the feathered Nanuqsaurus. The series also presents new information about dinosaurs that have been familiarized by popular culture. Those T-rexes, for instance, could swim and those “Jurassic Park” Velociraptors should have had feathers. The series was produced by “Mandalorian” creator Jon Favreau and Mike Gunton, and stars the eminence grise of nature docs, David Attenborough, who narrates. But the real reason you should watch is because it will give you a whole new appreciation for what was lost when that asteroid struck Earth and wiped out so many amazing animals.

The Responder (May 24, BritBox)

In a TV genre more often populated by detectives solving murders, creator Tony Schumacher and star Martin Freeman give us a far less glamorous side of policing. Freeman plays Chris Carson, a first responder working the night shift in Liverpool where he’s regularly confronted by the dregs of society. i.e. the people that society doesn’t give a shit about. He’s been demoted for a past transgression, his marriage is falling apart and he’s being watched by another cop (Warren Brown of “Luther”) who wants him fired. It’s a lot to shoulder on top of the human misery he’s confronted with night after night, and it’s little wonder that the cracks in Chris’s psyche are showing. Then he’s saddled with a suspicious new partner (Adelayo Adedayo), and his attempt to do a good deed by helping a young drug addict (Emily Fairn) who’s in trouble with a dealer goes spectacularly wrong. Schumacher was a Liverpool cop before he was a TV writer and it shows in the execution of “The Responder,” in which the grind that wears down officers like Carson is all too palpable. And then there’s Freeman, such a joy to watch in everything from “The Office” to “Fargo” to “Sherlock” to “A Confession.” Here he’s a decent man struggling against the pummelling of an indecent world and every bit of that struggle shows in his fine performance.

Odds and Ends

Clearly, all “Star Wars” fans will be awaiting the May 27 debut on Disney+ of the series “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” which begins 10 years after the events of “Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith,” and sees Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen reprising their roles as Obi-Wan and Darth Vader. I chose not to ask for screeners since reviews are embargoed until the day of the premiere.

Netflix this week also has Season 5 of food and travel show “Somebody Feed Phil” (May 25) and the standup special “Ricky Gervais: SuperNature” (May 24).

NOTE: The listings here are in Eastern Standard Time and I’ve verified the times where possible, but it’s always best to check listings for your own area. The selection of programs reviewed reflects what I’m given access to by networks and streamers, whether reviews are embargoed, how many shows I have time to watch and my own personal taste. The Odds and Ends section includes shows that I have not watched.