#since they obviously can handle multiple interwoven storylines anymore

[hargrove-mayfields]

Getting real tired of the duffers and their split-second coincidences.

If Murray hadn’t gotten the code wrong, and Suzie hadn’t made Dustin sing with her to get the right code, thus forcing that ridiculously long montage, they could’ve closed the gate before the Russians arrived, so Billy wouldn’t have died and Hopper wouldn’t have been captured. If that random guy hadn’t walked past the Creel house and seen Erica, if Jason hadn’t responded to that tip and crushed the Walkman during the fight, if Mike's speech had taken just a few seconds less, Max wouldn’t have died. If Murray hadn’t been in the right spot at the right time with his flamethrower then Joyce and Hop would’ve died. Actually all of Russia was just one massive predictable chain of events, starting from the moment Joyce got the package, to Enzo conveniently being at the phone when they call back, to Yuri's betrayal conveniently happening in enough time to get them in the prison right before the demogorgon fight, to them finding a grate in the floor that lead to the middle of nowhere but was still close to Yuris hideout, etc. Also the California crew finding the Nina Project at the same exact time it’s being busted so they can take El away before the government realizes she wasn’t killed. The timing of every single moment is way too practiced and forced.

They’ve been doing this shit since season 1, the earliest I can think of being Jonathan taking an extra shift so he conveniently wasn’t home to notice Will went missing overnight or to give him a ride home from the Wheelers. One (usually) implausible thing after another building and building until it’s just over in the end and you feel empty because nothing really happened. It’s honestly getting boring. You can’t make a good show out of pure tension with no big pay-off. They drag out these sequences just for the outcome to be exactly the same. Hopper was in Russia for all nine episodes, and then he gets like five minutes to reunite with his family. Talk about rushed. We all knew he was going to survive, so putting him in these situations that were never going to end badly for them just made the Russia sequences feel long and unnecessary. And later, if Mike hadn’t said anything and El gave up, Max still would’ve died because the Walkman was broken. So what did the love confession add? They already created the setup, we could’ve skipped the middle entirely because it didn’t actually change anything in the long run. This is how they end up with details that they forget completely and it’s honestly just a frustrating way to write a story.

But they keep doing this over and over, crafting these extremely high stakes situations that they think are plot twists, where the predicted outcome still happens in the end, and there’s loose ends left over. That’s why I think the ending of the Piggyback felt so flat. Because it was the first moment in the season pretty much that wasn’t pinballing off of another. It felt like the start of the next season instead of a meaningful conclusion to everything that had happened in this season. Because after killing off two characters, their tension was used up, and they had to find a way to start over and fill in all the gaps they’d left in the storytelling while they were chasing those high-strung, coincidental plots. At some point, they realized they’d written themselves into a dead spot by beating this tactic to death and just went with a spongebob time card to fix all their narrative problems for them while they dumped all of the plot exposition into a half hour block of dramatic shots, which very much just felt out of place as a conclusion to this massive season with multiple episodes the length of films.