Strangest

In the evening after work, Mary Beth and I did a quick run to CVS. Then at night we finished up Stranger Things. The final season kept up its momentum of each season being a little less good than the previous one. I'll try to sum up some things without getting into spoilers. The only real "spoiler" I had going in (and it's not a real spoiler) was that Linda Hamilton's character was completely wasted and pretty pointless...this was accurate! I'd say it was like the most stretched-out cameo in the history of moving pictures. I felt all the characters had really lost much of their character, especially in the first half, I thought it got better in the second half (with some unevenness, pasting in speeches instead of real character development/delivery). And it's always less good the bigger and more epic and bombastic it gets. The big and ridiculous gun battles and the giant epic cgi monster battles lose me (big reason each season decreased in value as more of that was added each time). The Henry/Vecna thing was a big reason season four lost something for me, one of my least favorite plot points. I thought maybe the way that played out in this season was better than I thought it'd be. Anyway, there was some good in the season, overall it was a bit messy. While the Coming Up With A Plan sequences could be fun in the earlier seasons, it was a little ridiculous during the first half of this season when they had one like every five minutes. Okay, and this one is hard to talk about without spoilers but I'll try: Eleven. Another reason I felt that each season got a little less good was diminished focus on her character. Maybe that's because of where it was all heading? So where her story goes, I think overall I disliked it. At first though, I was appreciating the ambiguity around it. But the more I thought about it, the more it really feels not really ambiguous but a having-cake-and-eating-it-too thing, where they can have the definite ending they want but also an out for fans who want this different definite ending. And a big thing about it is that it's not a case of there being two plausible possibilities, but two options that are both available because both are implausible (though one is much less plausible than the other). Anyway, the season was okay. Mixed bag but happy it's over. Now I'm off to work which is sure to be frustrating. We got stuck with this project where we have to recreate this integration for this sub-company we've never heard of before because the thing currently being used is going away and we have the insanely ridiculous need to do it in like two weeks. Just started working on it recently and I'm very likely going to be working over this weekend (to be comped later, but still not looking forward to it).