Lords Of Dogtown (2005)

Lords of Dogtown (2005)

thoughts and questions and plot holes:

the air in the upside down is supposed to be toxic. the creators forgot will’s birthday. el didn’t know what will was painting but now she “practically commissioned” it for him. mike said that the best day of his life was when he met will but now he’s saying that it was the day will went missing. will was barely in this season at all and, once again, was just used as a supernatural sensor in the last five minutes. mike and el legit do not talk to each other for the rest of the episode after he says he loves her. nancy and jonathan still aren’t communicating. why was noah in a harness. why did they post pictures of a mixtape that said “for will”. there were a shit ton of press shots in general that just didn’t show up and didn’t make sense. they said that who everyone was looking at in the posters was important. is vecna now supposed to be the mindflayer? they never said why the upside down was frozen on the day will went missing. i feel like they hyped up nancy being connected to the upside down somehow and then just never explained it. robin did not explore nancy’s room earlier to just not be able to find music to help her. they said there were five deaths and then there just weren’t. why did caleb mclaughlin say that he would describe this season with the word “traitor”. mike’s behavior makes no sense without him being a repressed gay, it just makes him a jackass. THAT was mike’s monologue? in the press shots, the hug scene really looked like will was hugging two different people and then it just… wasn’t. noah gave some really emotional performances but the scenes were written WAY too fleetingly and made way too short to be believable. the duffers said that will’s sexuality would be directly addressed, where was that? the cast all said that relationships were changing and that mileven was growing apart. mike saying “it wasn’t destiny, it was dumb luck” about him and el meeting and making that sound like it meant something when it didn’t. what ever happened to owens, is he alive, dead, or still handcuffed down there, they totally left that plotline with sullivan wide open. what was the point of that cabin scene being so last minute and feeling so rushed. what about that letter thing that the stranger things twitter posted a while ago that said stuff like “i’m sorry this is late-” with all the dashes and blanks. why doesn’t mike care about his best friend in the world, he can’t hug him, he can’t talk to him, he can’t write to him, he can’t do anything. making el only be able to fight when a boy says he loves her in such bullshit, she’s strong as fuck without him and we do NOT support the idea that she needs to be dependent on someone else to be successful. did all of the d&d parallels and theories mean nothing? the whole reveal at the end that vecna wasn’t dead made no sense and seemed to just be thrown together really hastily. every emotional beat in these episodes felt rushed. how the fuck did max survive and why didn’t vecna rip her eyes out? how did the russians get access to the upside down? does the rift and the particles mean that the upside down and hawkins are now merged? where is murray at the end of all of this? why didn’t el tell them that she went in and saw max and tried to help her? what happened to the rest of the basketball team? why didn’t dustin get any fucking medical attention, he’s still limping around on his leg at the end. dustin rolled an 11 and it was a miss, but now apparently she was strong enough to hurt him or kinda kill him but not really kill him? we’re just not gonna address henry drawing like will? if they planned for that to be more, they could’ve done more foreshadowing with will.

there are a million other criticisms and thoughts i have but i really cannot find the words. byler aside, this plot just wasn’t it.

this season deadass feels like it’s not finished. where the fuck is the rest of it. there are too many fucking plot holes and unanswered questions and not in a way that makes theorizing fun, just in a “what the fuck” way.

this couldn’t been the best season yet. and instead, it’s just shit. genuinely. every plot point and little thing we noticed just ended up being surface level. i seriously do not understand.

reasons vol. 2 makes me really believe the duffers are just bad at writing characters

mike wheeler. now they have mike be super caring about will in s1 & s2 only in s3 to have be suddenly be kind of a dick. this would have made a lot of sense if mike was meant to be written as queer. but obviously he wasn’t. he was just a dick for zero reason at all. also fuck them for making mike say that he doesn’t think his life really started till he meet el. that’s so fucking stupid.

will byers- here’s the thing with will, they seem to not know what to do with him if he’s not being affected by the upside down. they just seem to make him sad but he loves his friends so he’s gonna support them! they don’t know wtf he would be like if he’s not sad and suffering so they just make him sad and suffer.

eddie munson- eddie was great character this season. like he fit right into the groups dynamic and him steve robin and nancy were a super fun group. but the duffers refuse to touch the main cast even if it would make sense for those characters to die. how did him dying help? how was that in anyway a good way to end his story? what they killed hik just because they couldn’t think of a way to clear his name? honestly wouldn’t be surprised!

steve harrington- they jsut don’t know wtf to do with steve if he doesn’t have a love interest. i thought part of steve’s develop would be realizing that he don’t need romantic love in his life all the time. that he can still be loved by his friends but no. once again the you need a love interest to be happy trope!

them making lucas, the one black person in the party, join basketball even if he’s showed zero interest in it before

them having robin’s, the one explicitly queer character, love interest be a side character that we get to know basically nothing about

nancy staring at steve and having multiple scenes where it looks like they might kiss and have her cheat on jonathan even though s3 made it seem like nancy and steve didn’t have feelings for each other anymore

As much as I love the Queen’s Gambit, some aspects could’ve been updated to fix the story better. The most important one, in my opinion, is the use of the magical black best friend trope that Jolene embodies. She’s probably the most important person to the protagonist, but she only shows up as soon as Beth needs someone at her lowest point to save her. The show tried to lampshade it by having Jolene tell Beth she’s not there to save her when that’s literally what she’s there to do.

Another thing is how Beth’s romantic and sexual feelings for women aren’t given the same attention and focus as her relationship with men. Yea, she flirts and has sex with Cleo, but after that’s done, she’s never even mentioned again and has no lasting impact on Beth’s story. Beth’s romantic feelings for Jolene are meant to be understood in a platonic sense when Jolene is the only person in the entire novel who Beth says she loves. I love the show, and Beth Harmon is so important to me, but I don’t know why we have to have the same tropes from a book written in the ‘80s in a show made in 2020 :(

How I’m feeling now I’ve had time to process the bullshit I just watched

wicked