Category: Stranger Things

In story telling, it’s crucial that characters act according to their own motivations, and not because the plot requires it of them. There is an elegant way to make the character serve the plot when it doesn’t really make sense, what Michael Byers (no relation) calls the Sure-But-And-So, but that’s a discussion for another time…

In this post, I’m going to go through each of the three seasons of Stranger Things and analyze them in terms of basic story structure and pacing. Before jumping in, I want to first get some of the jargon out of the way. For purposes of this discussion an “A Story” is the central conflict…

It’s almost become expected that as a series continues the quality will trend downhill; it doesn’t always happen, but it’s so common as to become cliche. I suspect the reason for this is because the lead up time to the original film or TV season (or novel) can often be years, while the turnaround for…

While overall I enjoyed Season 2, it certainly was not as strong as Season 1. In this post I want to critique the season in terms of technical story telling mechanics. I know I’m a bit late to the Season 2 criticism party, but hopefully you’ll find it interesting to look at the season not…