https://youtu.be/4i5M8HOOlDs

Stranger Things season 5 has ended with its finale and I wanted to talk about it, obviously. In many ways, it's an improvement on previous episodes. I maintained the hope we would still get a mostly coherent conclusion and we...mostly do. It mostly sticks the landing in a very, very safe way that I think makes this season feel disappointing more than outright terrible. There are things to love but, even within that, I feel like the whole thematic point of the show is completely undercut by the finale; which prioritizes sentimental moments over depth.

It did get me thinking about all the ways I would've wanted to change this season, though. So I'm partly tempted to next make a video about that.

https://youtu.be/kNiLwOov1bw

This video was genuinely meant to be 10 minutes long. It ended up 3 and a half hours because I just kept feeling my "constructive criticism" was too easy to make. It's too easy to just say "the season should've included this idea, or done someone's arc this way, or replaced this aspect with this alternative idea" ... but is any of that true? How do you know an idea that sounds great in your head and sounds great when you explain why it would be great...how do you know it actually fits into the story? That it compliments the flow of the story? That it informs the existing ideas and themes? You have to at least roughly jot out where things could go in order to see the pitfalls with the idea, so that's what I tried to do. I couldn't help myself. This video is nowhere near as thorough as my Harry Potter series but it was still an interesting exercise where I consider myself somewhat successful.

I did get bored and rush the editing, however. I hadn't planned to make time in my schedule to edit something long, so you've got a very slapdash mash of icons occasionally overlaid a Dave's Walks and often not. I doubt anybody cares too much about that bit though.