Stranger Things

Geek Punditry #158: No More Hidden Tracks

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Before we start, I want to assure you that this column will NOT spoil the final season of Stranger Things. I do my best to avoid spoilers in general, but it will be particularly easy in this case because I have not yet watched the final season of Stranger Things. A lot of people around me have, though, and a lot of people have opinions about it. This week, as my students filtered back into my class after their Christmas break, I heard them discussing the series finale and I had to kindly request that they refrain from speaking about specifics in my presence. (I believe my exact words were “If you spoil anything for me I’m going to make it my mission to see to it that you never graduate.” It’s good to teach seniors sometimes.) 

“These kids were in high school for ten years, don’t think I won’t do that to you, too.”

One of the non-spoiler things I heard them discussing, though, was something people were calling “Conformity Gate.” I don’t know exactly what this is a reference to or where the term comes from, other than the generic tendency ever since Nixon to append the -gate suffix to any sort of scandal or conspiracy because people are too lazy to come up with something original. From what I gathered, the “Conformity Gate” discussion centered around an internet theory that there was a SECRET NINTH EPISODE of the final season, that the episode that dropped on New Year’s Eve was NOT the actual series finale, and that on the evening of January 7th, Netflix would surprise us all by dropping the TRUE series finale of the epic and long-awaited sci-fi/horror series Stranger Things.

And I gotta tell ya, when I heard this theory, I lauuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuughed…

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard such a thing. Last fall, there was supposedly a secret episode of Peacemaker season two. At one point I recall hearing such a theory about Game of Thrones. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard it for certain series of Doctor Who. And just like with those other series, Jan. 7 came and went and there was nothing except an announcement for the (previously-announced) Stranger Things animated spin-off series. 

These theories are simply never true. And honestly, the way that TV and movie production is handled in this day and age, such a thing would be virtually inconceivable.

Not impossible. In fact, it would be relatively easy to do. It’s just that the studios would never let ’em do it.

Now I’m going to preface this by saying that these theories are almost always spread by people who are upset about the final episode and unable to accept that what they just saw was the “real” ending. It’s a stubborn, childish insistence, and even in those cases where I happen to agree that the final episode was disappointing, it’s kind of an insult to the people who actually made the show. (I can only imagine what would have happened had this sort of speculation been common when How I Met Your Mother wrapped.) I’m not saying that it’s unfair to be disappointed in how a show ends – that is of course a matter of personal taste and nobody has the right to tell you that you’re right or wrong for your tastes. But it IS pretty darn childish to have the attitude that what you watched was somehow SO bad that it MUST have been an intentional misdirect. 

Think about it just for a second: is anyone who works on TV – writers, directors, actors, showrunners – ever going to DELIBERATELY make a bad episode? Would they take such a risk? That’s not anyone’s goal. They want to build interest and anticipation with each installment, and having people trash your work doesn’t do that. There’s an old adage that the only “bad press” is “no press,” and I’m here to tell you, that’s a straight-up lie. Just ask the people who made the Spider-Man quasi-spinoff Morbius.

If you didn’t share 19 “It’s Morbin’ Time!” memes were you even ON the internet in 2022?

That movie was the talk of the town. Everybody was discussing it, making memes about it, and pushing it to the forefront of the conversation…but the buzz, deserved or not, was all BAD. And then the movie came out and completely bombed. Then when people kept talking about it, Sony took a shot at re-releasing it, and it bombed AGAIN. I’m not saying that without the bad buzz the movie would have been a hit, but it’s undeniable that heavy internet chatter surrounding the film did NOTHING to help its numbers.

Then there’s the other reason that such a thing would be virtually inconceivable today: the studios who make movies and television shows are utterly adverse to surprise. Everything – and I mean EVERYTHING – has to be dumped out onto the public far ahead of time. Casting news, romantic subplots, climatic battles, full songs are all spilled out onto the internet weeks, months, even years before the movie or TV show actually makes it to your screen. Movie trailers have become particularly bad about this. I love a good trailer. Making a good trailer – essentially a short film intended to get an audience interested in watching the FULL movie – is an art form in and of itself. But the studios seem to have forgotten that, and rather than doing something artful to engage the audience and make people want to head to the movie theater, their strategy seems to be to just give away every surprise and plot point in the hopes that it will accomplish the same thing. 

I get why they do this, of course. Whether you’re talking about a theatrical release or a streaming show, in the 21st century it seems like the only numbers that matter are those that we get in the first few days of a release. Let’s use the recent slate of Avengers: Doomsday trailers as an example. In the last few weeks, we’ve started to get teaser trailers that show a glimpse of a character or two, followed by the announcement that “Steve Rogers will return in Avengers: Doomsday.” Or Thor. Or the X-Men. And by the time you read this, there will probably be teasers with everyone from the Fantastic Four to Spider-Ham to Millie the Model.

This is the one that broke the Internet.

None of these (except Millie) would be much of a shock. Last year Marvel had a huge streaming event which amounted to showing us – one at a time – director’s chairs with the names of assorted cast members, their way of telling us who was going to be in the movie. Some of them were a surprise at the time, and that was (I admit) kind of cool. But wouldn’t it have been cooler if we had NO IDEA that Patrick Stewart and Kelsey Grammar were going to be back as Professor X and the Beast until we were in the theater, watching it, and then they showed up out of the blue?

I think so, anyway.

Would in-theater surprises get people excited? Would it make them engaged? Absolutely. If an audience is excited and energized about a movie, they’ll walk out talking about it, they’ll tell their friends they have to see it, and the movie can grow legs. But the problem is that the studios no longer CARE about legs. This strategy – keep it a surprise and build word of mouth – is the way to get people excited about a movie in the long-term. That’s not how movies are evaluated anymore, unfortunately. All that matters is that opening weekend in a theater or the first 48 hours of streaming. If you don’t get massive numbers up front, a movie is declared a failure. There was a time when a movie might not have had an enormous opening weekend, but positive word of mouth would allow it to stay in a theater for weeks or even months until it became what they called a “sleeper” hit. 

The studios don’t care about that anymore. An ad that says “the number one movie in America!” is way sexier than one that says “we made back our budget in the fifth week of release!” So they do everything they possibly can do to frontload the audience and get everyone to see the movie right away. This, by the way, is one of the approximately 3,972 reasons that I’m very nervous about the prospect of Netflix buying Warner Bros. Netflix is a streaming platform, and the head of the company has frequently expressed outright disdain for the theatrical release model that I personally hold so dear. I’m very much afraid that if this deal is eventually allowed to happen, it will be the final chokehold on the already-dying movie theater experience.

But that’s a whole different topic. What does this have to do with “Conformity Gate” and the potential for another episode of Stranger Things? It’s simply this: Netflix (any studio, really, but we’re talking about Netflix specifically at the moment) would simply never take the risk of hiding such a thing. They are ADDICTED to telling you EVERYTHING. Remember, this is the studio that tells its writers that the characters have to ANNOUNCE WHAT THEY ARE DOING OUT LOUD because they assume that most of the audience will be scrolling on their phones instead of really paying attention when they’re watching a show. Do you honestly think they’ve got a high enough opinion of you to drop a surprise like that?

The tragedy of it is that I actually think it WOULD be a great thing to attempt, kind of like a hidden track on a CD. (Those don’t really exist anymore either, so kids, ask your parents.) It would be amazing if Netflix, or anybody for that matter, was capable of keeping a secret of this magnitude and then executing it. Now they obviously couldn’t do it all the time. It would need to be used sparingly, and only for exactly the right project, a story for which that kind of surprise ending would be both structurally and tonally appropriate. And let’s be honest here: they would not hide the existence of the episode right up until the moment it drops. It’s far more likely that the episode we EXPECT to be the finale to end with a “To be continued” card or something to that effect. But if executed properly, it could be a really thrilling moment.

The funny part is that Netflix actually did do something like this once. Anybody remember the Super Bowl in 2018? Like most Super Bowls, the biggest draw was the commercials. I was there to see what Doritos was up to, or Pepsi, or something dot com that probably doesn’t exist anymore. And most of all, I’m there for the movie trailers. As far as I’m concerned, every Super Bowl commercial should either be really funny, or a kick-ass movie trailer. In 2018, one of those trailers hit us with the Netflix logo, then scrolled into scenes from some sort of outer space thriller that we hadn’t heard of before. It wasn’t like getting a Marvel or Star Wars trailer, where we knew that the movie was in production and we were just hoping for our first glimpse. This was something totally new.

And at the end of the trailer, we got the title: The Cloverfield Paradox. Holy crap. It was the new Cloverfield movie, the one that had been rumored ever since 10 Cloverfield Lane. And it wasn’t going to theaters, it was gonna be a Netflix movie.

Then came the biggest shock: the announcement that the movie was NOW STREAMING. It wasn’t telling us that the movie was dropping in a year or a month. It was ON NETFLIX AND WE COULD WATCH IT RIGHT NOW.

“If it’s HALF as good as the first two Cloverfield movies, this is gonna change everything!”

I thought then – and still think now – that it was one of the most brilliant marketing moves Netflix could ever have done. It was an incredible surprise and it got me more enthusiastic about watching that movie that I think would even have been possible otherwise. And it’s a shame, really, that as a movie The Cloverfield Paradox turned out to be…well…not great. Because if it had been, that would have been checkmate. This could have been an annual thing. We could sit down for the Super Bowl every year, wondering what movie Netflix was going to announce during the game that we would have the option to watch as soon as the game was over (as opposed to the random episode of Matlock that they usually show for some reason). 

But it didn’t pan out that way, and now Netflix is more risk-averse than anybody. Remember, this is the studio that cancels entire series if they aren’t a smash hit in the week after the first episode drops. Do you really think they’d take a chance at a whole surprise episode?

It would be cool, don’t get me wrong.

I just don’t see it happening.

So the next time you’re unhappy with the finale of a Netflix show and someone floats the idea that there’s a special “hidden” episode waiting for you, ask yourself if the streamer that killed The Santa Clarita Diet would actually do such a thing before you pass that rumor along.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. He’s planning to start his own Stranger Things conspiracy theory. Now that Netflix has Sesame Street, they’re doing a miniseries that will reveal the hidden connection between Eleven and all her siblings to the terrifying and legendary Count Von Count. You heard it here first.

Geek Punditry #84: Playing Favorites With School (Part One)

blakemp Geek Punditry, Playing Favorites , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

It’s August, gang, and across this great fruited plain of ours, Americans are gearing up for that most turbulent of seasons: back to school. Many of us are already back in session, and the rest are getting ready to eke out those last bits of summertime fun before the doors fly open. Stores are stocked with pencils, students are picking out their first day outfits, parents are trying to get them to answer questions for their “Back to School” social media posts, and teachers are doing their best to keep the economy of Columbia solvent by buying all of the coffee. And what better way to commemorate this change of seasons than with another installment of everyone’s favorite Geek Punditry feature-within-a-feature, PLAYING FAVORITES? 

If you’re new, here’s how it works: a couple of weeks before a playing favorites column, I go out on social media and give my peeps a topic, such as SCHOOL, and ask them to suggest different categories for me to talk about. Then I select my favorite categories from your suggestions and tell you all what I think are some of the best of the best in each one of them. It’s a good time for everybody. So let’s see what kind of back to school shenanigans were on your minds this week, shall we?

Dawson Casting

Steven J. Rogers asked for some of my favorite examples of actors who are a little “long in the tooth” for their role as a high school student. The experts in this phenomenon (by which I mean the editors of TV Tropes) call it Dawson Casting, the practice of using actors in their 20s or even 30s to play high school students, named for the TV executive who invented the system, Herringbone Q. Casting.

No, seriously, it’s named for the show Dawson’s Creek, which is one of the most well-known examples of the trope, but it’s by no means the FIRST and certainly not the WORST. The trope goes back hundreds of years. Even Shakespeare is likely to have indulged in it – Hamlet, for instance, is supposed to be a college student, but there are lines in the fifth act that indicate that he used to get piggyback rides from his father’s court jester, who has explicitly been dead and buried for 23 years. Unless ol’ Yorick was playing games with Hamlet as a zygote, the math don’t math. 

There are two ways to look at this question: am I trying to figure out who did it BEST – as in, which older actors were most convincing as teens? Or am I trying to figure out who did it in the most ENTERTAINING fashion, as in making me burst out laughing when a guy who could be doing commercials for Metamucil saunters into homeroom? I’ll answer both.

Most of these kiddos are older than they look. Especially the one in the glasses.

As far as who was the most convincing, I think the crown has to go to the TV version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When that show launched in 1997, Sarah Michelle Gellar was 20 playing a 15-year-old – and to be fair, that’s a much smaller gap than many Dawsons have had to contend with over the years. But she was the YOUNGEST member of the main cast. Alyson Hannigan was 23 and Nicolas Brendan 26, and all of them were pretty convincing as teenagers. The only one who you couldn’t really buy was Charisma Carpenter (27 at the time). And while you aren’t really shocked to hear that these actors were in their 20s, it’s not nearly as blatant as some of the more hilarious examples of this trope. 

In general, the shows that get away with this the best are the ones that don’t try to get away with as much. The high school students in Cobra Kai were mostly in their early 20s when the show began, and not noticeably too old. On Smallville, I don’t think that Tom Welling was really successful at convincing anybody that he was 14 years old in season one (the actor was 24 at the time), but the rest of the cast was mostly in their early 20s and far more convincing. I suppose the trick with pulling a Dawson is to not press your luck.

You know who DID press their luck? Stranger Things. It wasn’t a problem in the first couple of seasons – with the five main kids played by actual…y’know…KIDS. And even the teenagers were pretty convincing: Joe Keery (Steve) was 24 playing 17, Natalia Dyer (Nancy) was 21 playing 16, Charlie Heaton (Jonathan) was 22 playing 16, and all of them were believable as high school students. But the long gaps between seasons were starting to strain credulity even in season four, and Keery is going to be 32 playing 19 or 20 in the show’s upcoming final season. He may be able to pull it off, but the likes of Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin) and Finn Wolfhard (Mike) playing 15 at the age of 22 are going to be a harder sell, especially since we’re all so familiar with what they looked like AS KIDS. 

No really, it’s just two and a half years later.

But I don’t think any show has ever been as hilariously Dawsoned as the 70s sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter. When the show began in 1975, you had high school students played by John Travolta (then 21), Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs (23), Robert Hegyes (24) and Ron Palillo (26) and frankly, I would have guessed older for each of them. While they were around the same ages as many of the other “teenage” actors we’ve already discussed, they were nowhere near as successful at hiding their age. Alyson Hannigan could pass as a high school student, whereas Ron Palillo looked more like somebody’s podiatrist. Gabe Kaplan was once quoted as saying that the reason the show’s ratings collapsed after three seasons is that the cast was getting too old to convincingly play teenagers, which made me ask the obvious question: at what point DID he think they were convincing? 

“Signed, Epstein’s chiropractor.”

School Sitcoms

Rachel Ricks asked for some of my favorite school sitcoms. This is an interesting subject for me. Like so many of us, I grew up watching shows like Saved By The Bell, and I loved it. And while I never really thought that show was a documentary on the lives of high school students (I must have tried that “Time Out” thing a hundred times before I got hit by that marching snare drummer and decided to call it quits), I at least thought that it would get the SPIRIT of being high school right.

Damn, was that off. It’s almost hard to watch that show now, especially as a teacher myself, not only because of how inaccurate that show is in regards to how a school actually works, but because it casts virtually every adult as a total blithering idiot. Seriously, go back and watch that show sometime – it’s a miracle Mr. Belding can even tie his shoes. 

New drinking game: take a shot every time someone does something that should have gotten a teacher fired.

So when it comes to “school sitcoms,’ showing actual respect for teachers is a high priority for me, and that’s why I can’t stop talking about Abbott Elementary. It’s the rare school show that makes the teachers the stars rather than the students AND treats their characters with respect AND does a pretty accurate job of showing what school life is like. Granted, the teachers on that show have a bit more free time away from their students than a real elementary school teacher ever would, but I’m willing to allow that for the sake of comedy. What’s more, the characters all have real depth and charm, and most of them are very good at what they do. Plus the show deals with real issues such as government funding, parental involvement, and other issues that teachers fight against every single day, but does it in a way that’s entertaining. I can’t say enough good things about this show.

This is honestly my favorite comedy on TV right now.

I mentioned how the adults in Saved By the Bell are all buffoons. This is true, but it’s hardly exclusive to Bayside High. If you look back on the annals of TV shows in a school setting, I would guess 90 percent of the teachers (and parents, for that matter) are portrayed as morons. And for that reason, I have to have a special place in my heart for Boy Meets World. The show traces Ben Savage’s character (Cory Matthews) from elementary school through college, and although there were goofy grownups on occasion, that was by no means the norm. In fact, the show gives us William Daniels as Mr. Feeny, probably the Gold Standard against which all TV teachers should be measured. He’s compassionate, wise, understanding, but firm when necessary. He’s almost as much a parent to Cory as he is a teacher. Is it really realistic that he taught the same group of kids from fifth grade until they’re going for their undergraduate degrees? Absolutely not. But it’s an acceptable break from reality in the name of keeping such a fantastic character front and center in the show.

What Bandit Heeler is to fathering, Mr. Feeny is to teachering.

And although it’s not a television show, I love Archie Comics. I mean CLASSIC Archie Comics, their teenage sitcom romcom years, not the way they were adapted on Riverdale. I’m talking about the eight decades of comic strips about Archie Andrews struggling to choose between Betty and Veronica and going to Riverdale High. As a kid, I loved reading the stories (Jughead was kind of an icon for me) and as an adult I’ve come to appreciate the fact that the faculty of Riverdale High School – Miss Grundy, Professor Flutesnoot, Coach Clayton, Mr. Weatherbee – are usually portrayed as good, caring teachers who are doing their best for their students, even if they’re doing so while trying to avoid whatever catastrophe Archie is pulling along in his wake. 

To date, not a single one of my students has prompted me to write a bestseller. Get your act together, kids.

High School Superheroes

Lew Beitz wants to know who some of my favorite high school superheroes are. It’s an interesting question – in the early days of comic books, there weren’t a lot of teenage superheroes. The kids were relegated to the sidekick role for most of the Golden Age, and it wasn’t until the 60s – specifically with the introduction of Spider-Man – that having a teenager as the main star of a superhero series started to come into vogue. Spidey eventually went off to college and became an adult, but he remains the template for superheroes that are still in their high school years. Everyone from Firestorm to Invincible to Ms. Marvel (the current Kamala Khan version) has drawn inspiration from those early Stan Lee/Steve Ditko comics, and none of them are shy about it.

I’m going to try to limit my response to characters for whom school – or at least their classmates – are a major factor in their stories. Teen Titans, for example, isn’t going to work because the vast majority of those comics don’t include school as a setting at all, instead being the stories of kid superheroes who hang out independently of their own lives. So keeping school in mind, it’s hard to think of anybody who has done it better than Peter Parker’s DAUGHTER (in one corner of the multiverse, anyway), May Parker, the amazing Spider-Girl. Created by Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz in 1997, this storyline comes from a world where Peter Parker aged more or less in “real time” from the 1960s and, at this point, had a teenage daughter who inherited his powers. Originally intended as a one-off character in an issue of What If?, “Mayday” Parker proved wildly popular and spun off into her own long-running series. And just like her dad, the supporting cast was largely full of her high school contemporaries – friends, rivals, potential love interests and so forth. Few comic books since those early days of Amazing Spider-Man had made such good use of the cast of teenagers, and I think it’s one of the reasons that this series remains a fan favorite, even though these days May herself only pops up once in a while during a “Spider-Verse” thing.

What I love about this cover is that it’s bold enough to ask “Who is she?” and dumb enough to answer the same question at the top.

And although Lew specified HIGH school, I have to give a special shout out to a series about ELEMENTARY school superheroes, Aaron Williams’ PS238. This comic book featured a cast of preteen titans, many of them the children of adult superheroes, who attended a special school deep beneath a “normal” elementary school where they were all ostensibly students. The book is really funny, and does a great job of picking apart many of the tropes and cliches of superhero comics. One student, for example, has the amusingly dull superhero code name “84,” because she is the 84th person registered with the standard FISS (flight, invulnerability, speed, and strength) powerset. Although the book IS very funny, it’s also a solid superhero comic book, creating a rich world with a fascinating history and a lot of secrets to uncover. The comic lasted only 51 issues, which wasn’t nearly long enough, although Williams has continued the adventures of the characters as a webcomic. 

One of the best comic books you’ve never read.

High School Horror

Finally my wife Erin – who absolutely understands her brand – wants me to talk about my favorite high school horror movies. And naturally, there is one that leaps right to the forefront of the mind, a chilling, terrifying tale that will ring out through the annals of academia from now until the end of time.

Project ALF.

Highly educational.

Actually, this might not be as easy as it sounds. Sure, there’s no shortage of horror movies about TEENAGERS, but how many of them actually have SCHOOL as a dominant setting? Friday the 13th, of course, is set at a summer camp. Some of the other stalwarts of the slasher genre like Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream, may incorporate a school into the story (especially in the earlier installments), but the school is largely incidental. If the characters weren’t teenagers, you could have them all going to work and not much else would need to be changed.

So for horror that’s actually ABOUT a school, I’m going to give a shout out to a movie that I really think is underrated – Robert Rodriguez’s sci-fi/horror movie The Faculty. In what is essentially an updated version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Frodo Baggins and a group of high school students start to see signs that the faculty of their high school have become overcome by parasitic alien invaders, conquerors from beyond the stars who are coming to take over the Earth. Of course, it’s only this band of high school misfits that have a hope of stopping them. The Faculty came out in 1998, riding a wave of post-Scream teenage horror movies, and it somewhat got lost in the mix. But it’s a good movie, one that defies the surge of slasher knockoffs that it was swimming amongst, and has its own identity that’s pretty darn entertaining.

And this time it didn’t take Elijah Wood twelve hours of movie time to save the world.

Carrie, of course, is another classic of this particular subgenre. The movie is based on Stephen King’s first published novel, so the story of Carrie White really is what made his name in two different mediums. Sissy Spacek is Carrie – a teenage girl who has lived a sheltered life with a brutal, unforgiving fundamentalist mother. A rather late onset of physical maturation brings with it a telekinetic power of great destructive potential, and when her crueler classmates push Carrie too far, the blood flows. It’s a great movie, although I’ve always felt like Carrie was less a villain than a victim – an innocent who is beaten and berated until she actually breaks, and when someone with her kind of powers break, the consequences will be devastating. 

Finally, as someone who enjoys a good horror/comedy hybrid, I want to give a shout out to the 2020 film Freaky, directed by Christopher Landon and written by Landon and Michael Kennedy. This film is a slasher movie crossed with the body swap comedy of Freaky Friday. Millie Kessler, a bullied high school senior (Kathryn Newton), is attacked by a serial killer called the Blissfield Butcher (Vince Vaughan), who has gotten his hands on a cursed knife. The attack winds up swapping their minds, placing the Butcher’s consciousness in Millie’s body and vice versa (which is another example of a body swap comedy). A lot of the fun of this movie comes from watching Vaughn’s performance as a teenage girl, trying to get Millie’s friends on his side while Newton goes on a killing spree. It’s a really good movie, and helped Newton blow up to a point where she’s showing up in Marvel movies, while still doing indie horror like Lisa Frankenstein.

I’ve watched this trilogy seven times and it still doesn’t make a damned bit of sense.

That’s it for this week, guys. There will be more Playing Favorites next week, and if you’ve got some more suggestions, they’re welcome. In the meantime, a reminder for those parents who have yet to get their kids back-to-school supplies:

There is no excuse for Rose Art crayons. Ever. Just don’t. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. Have you ever tried to color an entire page with one of those stupid Rose Art sticks? You may as well be using a candle.