#CAN'T BELIEVE I PAINTED IT IN 1 HOUR WTF

[arnaerr]

I'm taking a ride with my best friend

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[whatislife1babydonthurtme]

Things in Stranger Things season 4 (Volume 2) which did not make sense, were forgotten or simply pissed me off.

❗️Spoilers obviously❗️

The whole town was convinced that there was a cult going on and people got up looking for Eddie and seemingly the rest of Hellfire Club because they were convinced it was a cult. Did they just give up? They never showed up again. Also the parents didn't bring this up at the end when everyone was reunited.

Why did Mike believe that the painting was for him and El when he clearly read the letter that said Will was painting it for someone he likes. Additionally, how the fuck did Mike not notice his supposed "best friend" sobbing in the car right next to him? You can clearly see him look in Will's direction but he just doesn't do anything.

Is the police just... dead? Where are they? Why are they not actively going after Jason's crew

Where is Owen? Is he alive? Why did he say that he could get El back in Hawkins in 2 hours tops if the Cali crew said it would take all night to get back, was he gonna call a private jet or something??

Where is the military? They went to that lab and then were never heard of again.

When Nancy was Vecna'd, she was in the laboratory. Why???? She had nothing to do with that place. Why wasn't she robbed from facing her own fears and traumas at the start of volume 2? Also when she got stuck in front of those doors which were blocked off by planks, they were push doors. Why did she rip off all of those planks if she could've just pushed the door and crawled in between those planks. Maybe I'm getting something wrong here but that just seems like such a hard thing to miss while writing the script...

Why did only Jason and his buddy go to Lucas and Erica when he had a whole team? Were the other guys just watching tv?

Vecna survived being transported to another reality and being hit by lightening so much that his skin peeled off, but can't handle Steve and Robin throwing a molotov at him? Or a shotgun? Really?

Did they leave Eddie's body in the upside down? Why is nobody mourning him besides his uncle and Dustin? I thought Mike, Lucas, Steve, Nancy, Robin and even Erica cared.

So El can bring people back from the dead now? That's not telekinesis, that's Mary Sue magic. What's next? She can share her powers with anyone she wants and then they can make people fly with the jerk of a wrist?

We still don't know why the upside down is stuck on the moment Will was taken. With the way this was brought up in volume 1 it really seemed like this would be answered in volume 2. But of course not, because Will Byers just kept getting sidelined in every way possible.

How come it was leaked that 5 people would die in volume 2 but the only important characters who died were Brenner (papa) and Eddie. Max died but she was brought back to life because apparently Eleven can do that now. That's not 5 is it? Or did they count the people in that helicopter who were trying to shoot Eleven?

Were we supposed to care about Brenner's death???? With how the cemra kept focusing so much on him? I was glad to watch him go!!

The timeskip of 2 full days in the middle of the climax???? Wtf was that??????

Mike being a complete asshole to Will these past 2 seasons was just for no reason then? He is JUST an asshole??

Were Robin, Nancy and Steve just choking on those vines for like 15 minutes or was the time where Eleven struck Vecna actually a lot shorter than that?

They actually forgot Will's birthday, I hoped they were just joking but they really forgot. He was the only character with a canon birthday within the series (until they talked about Dustin's) but clearly they care so little about Will that his entire existence is forgotten.

Wasn't the upside down toxic? Why is everyone just fine inhaling the shit?

The queerbait. No, gay people didn't bait themselves. Netflix, the Duffers, and the actors were actively promoting Byler and hyping up Will's sexuality when in reality Byler is just doomed, not just as a romance but as friendship as well. And Will did not explicitly come out to anyone. People are STILL in denial that he's gay and that's exactly why you make characters come out instead of keeping it "up to interpretation wink wink"

Will calling Mike the heart of their group yet Mike's the one who broke their party up the most.

Mike saying he instantly fell in love with Eleven when they met, as if he didn't tell her to shut up, go away and stop being weird back then.

Mike saying his life started on the day he met Eleven, the same day Will went missing, in his face. When Mike said before that the best thing he had ever done was befriend Will in kindergarten.

So did Vecna create the Mind Flayer or did it already exist? Cause if Vecna created it that's so goddamn lame and it adds no new mystery.

The continuous stereotypes and suffering/deaths of outcasts, poor people, queer people and people of color. One black character plays basketball and the other is a sassy one-liner. The brown guy is a funny weed man with barely to no relevancy to the plot. One lesbian gets a lazy background ship with a girl who is an exact copy of herself and the gay character is living in a painful unrequited love story and used as fuel for the main straight couple, without even being given a canon coming out scene. All this while the straight couples get together and have tons of moments together. Eddie who is poor, is seen as a cultist, dies and nobody besides 2 people mourn his death. Max, another poor character who had already lived through trauma and abuse, dies, gets brought back to life, is now comatose, probably crippled, and maybe permanently blind.

Will's endless suffering. He just can't ever be happy can he? Wtf is wrong with the writers...

Did the Russian crew just end up at Hoppers cabin like that in 2 days? No problems whatsoever? Wow that's convenient.

Hopper hugs Mike but not his new stepsons?

Not one, not two, but three jokes about Hopper once having been fat because he's lost weight in the prison.

Comments had some great additions and I came up with some more too so here's more:

Nobody showed up to Lucas' game when he had a very valid reason to want to play, and it was never brought up again. They all stood him up.

Eddie's death was so rushed and predictable. I saw it coming as soon as he said his whole "I'm a coward I run away I'm not a hero" speech. It's typical "I'm a coward so I'll die a hero" foreshadowing which is overused and just horrible. And in the end he didn't even save anyone, it was completely unnecessary. Eddie deserved to live.

Eleven not being able to win the final fight until she got validation from her boyfriend. Why was she not allowed to do this by herself?

The military watching the pizza van drive off and then do nothing about it? I thought they were experts at tracing and tracking, but nope, they just gave up after Eleven escaped the underground lab.

Just the Cali crew being sidelined so much when they once were such interesting characters (besides Argyle)

Steve saying he always loved Nancy and never moved on despite him telling Robin in season 3 that he didn't like her anymore. Let Steve move on and stop having Nancy jump from boy to boy, hurting them both in the process.

Just a nitpick but the sound design was so overly dramatic at times? Like Brenner LITERALLY snapped a pencil and the sound design was like ☄️💥🔥

Tell me what I missed cause I'd love to add it on this shit list.

[discotreque]

LwD 1.10, “No Small Parts”

Well, that was the most fun I've had watching Star Trek in literally a quarter of a century.

I had high hopes for this series. I love TAS, largely because of its wacky outsized concepts that could only have worked in animation—not that they all did work, but the potential was so apparent to me, even as a kid reading the Alan Dean Foster novelizations—and as an adult, there's something about the imagination of Lower Decks's FX setpieces that transcends even the glorious CGI bonanzas of Discovery.

Pause for a confession. I've long pushed back against criticism of serialization in new Trek. That's just how TV is now, okay? Might as well complain about it being in widescreen. But I'm backing down a little, because I've realized there is something about Star Trek that's inextricable from at least a partially-episodic format. And while Picard was telling a different kind of story, I can't deny that my favourite episodes of Disco have been the ones with a mostly self-contained A-plot. After 10 delightfully episodic instalments of LwD, its focus on long-term development of characters instead of a season-spanning puzzle-plot (okay, mostly just Mariner, but we only have 10 × 22 minutes and she is the star) has been downright refreshing.

So here we are, at the end of the most consistent and well-executed Season 1 of a Star Trek series since, arguably, Those Old Scientists. And sure, if they'd had to produce another... yikes, 42 episodes? Then sure, they probably would have dropped a clunker or two—but they didn't, and winning on a technicality is still winning. I'm practically vibrating with excitement for Disco to come back next week, but damn, I'm going to miss this little show while it's on hiatus.

Spoilers below:

Something I've been keeping track of finally paid off this week! (Which never happens to me, lol.) The destruction of the USS Solvang marked the first present-day death(s) of any Starfleet officer on Lower Decks, the only other on-screen killing at all being a flashback in "Cupid's Errant Arrow". Which makes sense, being (a) a comedy, and (b) about typically "expendable" characters: it hasn't been afraid to flirt with a little darkness here and there, but killing people off at Star Trek's usual pace wouldn't just be wrong for the tone, it would be downright bizarre.

But... people die on Star Trek. That's one of the core themes of the show, really: space is full of knowledge and beauty, but also danger and terror, and believing that the former is worth the risk of the latter is (according to Trek) one of humanity's most noble traits. I'm the least bloodthirsty TV watcher I know, but the longer we went with a body count of nil—ships completely evacuated before they were destroyed, main characters hilariously maimed without permanent consequences, etc.—well, I didn't mind per se, but the absence of truly deadly stakes was definitely getting conspicuous.

Turns out they were saving it up for maximum impact. And holy fuck, I've never felt such a pit in my stomach watching a ship get destroyed that wasn't named Enterprise. It felt grim and brutal and somehow both much too quick and dreadfully inevitable—and yeah, it looked extremely fucking cool—and I'd like every other Star Trek property for the rest of time to take notes under a large bold heading labeled RESTRAINT.

Comedy doesn't need to do this, but my favourite comedy does, and in a way that few other art forms can even approach: lower my emotional defences by making me laugh, endear character(s) to me with goofy-but-relatable antics—then BAM, sucker-punch me in the motherfucking feels. M*A*S*H is probably the classic example on TV, Futurama was notorious for it, and even Archer has pulled it off a few times; it's also a staple of some of my favourite standup. I wasn't sure if Lower Decks was going to go there in Season 1—and wasn't sure if they'd earn it—but I knew if they did, that they'd nail it, and damn. Feels good to be right.

Last batch of notes for the season!!! I rambled enough already, so let's do it liveblog-style:

I fucking KNEW they were going to use "archive" visuals from TAS at some point, I KNEW IT :D

"THOSE OLD SCIENTISTS" ahahahahahahahahahahahaha

I like chill and confident Boimler a lot? You can really see—

oh bRADWARD NOOOOO

That opening shot of the Solvang tracking down to the red giant was extremely Discovery-esque... minus the motion sickness, that is

A lady captain AND a lady first officer? That's—oh hey, it's Captain Dayton's brand-new ship. Hahaha, that means they're totally fucked, right?.

Yep! They sure a—umm, wh—shit, okay, but—oh no—no, you can't—wait DON'T

...fuck

FUCK.

Narrator: "And then Amy needed a five-hour break."

[live-action Star Trek showrunner voice] "Gee, Mike! Why does CBS let you have two cold opens?"

Okay, yes, the bit with Rutherford cycling through all the different attitudes in his implant was transparently an excuse for Eugene Cardero to vamp while waiting for something to do in the story, but as far as I'm concerned they can contrive a reason for him to do a bunch of different silly Rutherfords in a row any time they damn well want, because that was classic!!!

EXOCOMP EXOCOMP EXOCOMP EXOCOMP

AND THE EXOCOMP IS PAINTED LIKE THE EXOCOMP IS WEARING A LITTLE EXOCOMP-SIZED STARFLEET UNIFORM

EXOCOMP!!!!!

The slow burn and now the payoff of the Mariner-is-Freeman's-secret-daughter plot has been executed so well. I'm beyond impressed with this writer's room, y'all—they are threading a hell of a needle here

"Wolf 359 was an inside job" would have been a spit-take if I'd had anything in my mouth

...how many memos do you think Starfleet Command has had to issue asking people to stop calling the USS Sacramento "the Sac"?

CAN WE TALK ABOUT HOW THEY'VE DECORATED THE SHUTTLECRAFT SEQUOIA THOUGH

Is, uh, is it weird if I'm starting to ship Tendi and Peanut Hamper a little? It is weird, isn't it. I knew it was weird...

Coital barbs??? I take back everything I said about wanting to know more about Shaxs/T'Ana.

The "good officer" version of Mariner is... kind of hot, tbh! But Tawny Newsome has done such a great job of building this character all season that her voice getting uncharacteristically clipped and martial and "sir! yes, sir!" is also deeply, deeply weird

Ah, so this is literally exactly like when TNG (and DS9) would bring in, and then blow up, a never-before-seen Galaxy-class ship, just to underscore that we're facing a real threat this week, baby. And hey, it fucking worked—my heart was in my throat, omg, for the reveal of the—

PAKLEDS?????????

The fucking PAKLEDS have been gluing weapons to their ships for the last 15 years. GREAT.

(We interrupt the SHIP BEING SLICED INTO SCRAP for an interesting bit of world-building: on Earth, the traditional First Contact Day meal is salmon!)

"I need a dangerous, half-baked solution that breaks Starfleet codes and totally pisses me off! That's an order." I'm starting to think Captain Freeman might actually be overqualified for the Cerritos, y'all—she's REALLY awesome

OH SHIT IT'S BADGEY, this is a TERRIBLE IDEA

"How much contraband have you hidden on my ship?" "I don't know! A lot!"

Awwww, Boims!!!

AHAHAHAHAHAHA, FUCK THIS, PEANUT HAMPER OUT

BADGEY NOOOOO

AUGHHHHH WHAT THE CHRIST DID HE JUST—BUT—RUTHERFORD'S IMPLANT????

RUTHERFORD!!!!!!!!!!

SHAXS!!!!!!

F U C K ! ! ! ! !

ahaIOPugdfhagntpgjrq90e5mgu90qe5;oigoqgw4ouegrw5SP;IAEHURVa IT’S THE TITAN???????????

IT'S CAPTAIN WILLIAM T. RIKER ON THE MOTHERFUCKING TITAN??????????

i'm screaming I'M SCREAMINGGGGGG​TGGGTGQER;​LBHAOIBVNV;​OAPBIJNVagr;h;​oagruipuwtnaetbaetgq35ghqet

I'M SO GLAD THIS WASN'T SPOILED FOR ME WTF

I AM WEEPING LIKE A CHILD

...

(Just a brief 20-minute pause this time)

And oh wow, seeing Will and Deanna hits different after Picard too, in a few different ways, which I may even get into later now that my heartrate is back to normal, lmao

Oh, I am always here for some jokes at the expense of the Sovereign class. The Enterprise-E sucked. They should have built a new bigger model of the D and new Galaxy-class interiors for the TNG movies, and I will die on that hill

OKAY, FINE, YOU GOT ME, RUTHERFORD × TENDI WOULD BE ADORABLE AND THIS IS ACTUALLY A PRETTY GOOD SETUP FOR IT

Awwww, Shaxs though :( Congrats on the single most badass death in Star Trek history, dude. The Prophets would—well, the actual Prophets would probably be slightly confused about most of it, but Kira Nerys would be proud of you and I feel like that probably counts for more. RIP, Papa Bear

I am here all damn DAY for the Mariner–Riker parallels, ahahahahaha

Pausing it to record my prediction that Boimler's commitment to not caring about rank anymore is going to last 3... 2...

Yep.

Bradward, how DARE YOU.

"Those guys had a long road, getting from there to here." OH FOR THE LOVE OF—

What a brilliant way to resolve and renew the various character arcs and relationships moving into Season 2! The writers could easily have brought everything back to status quo—chaotic Mariner fighting with her mom and being a bad influence on Boimler, etc.—and done another 10 just like these, but I suspect that wouldn't have been ambitious enough for these writers. What a blast. I cannot wait for more.

Thanks for following along, friends! Stay tuned for my (similarly patchy and amateur) coverage of Discovery, starting next week!