‘Stranger Things’ and The Case of The Too Many Side Quests

Sometimes too much of a good thing is a very bad thing.

The most terrifying thing about STRANGER THINGS is definitely the haircuts. I mean … bruh.

Stranger Things is many things: A deep slice of nostalgia, a collection of extremely weird and bad hair¹, and a delightful Scooby Doo-ish romp through nerdy horror. The show often feels like it was born during a writing exercise where the prompt was simply It was the 1980s, man and the only writing implement available was a mint condition Dragon’s Lair cabinet². Which doesn’t mean I don’t like it—I do! Hell, I grew up in the 1980s. Sure, Jersey City, New Jersey was a lot different (and a lot hotter) than Hawkins, Indiana, but the 1980s pre-dated today’s niche-ified universe. The 1980s were everywhere³.

Still, I’m rooting for the show. It’s pleasures are pure, from the fierce love and loyalty between its pre-teen and teenage friends to the way it black-and-whites good and evil. The writing and characterization are frequently fun and engaging, and who doesn’t like a Spielbergian story about plucky kids who fight monsters using information gleaned from Dungeons & Dragons manuals⁴? I mean, shit.

Still, in these transient modern times any show in its fourth season is already in decline. The buzz is gone, the actors are all 25 and not passing for 14 very well⁵, and the storyline is now so convoluted you need a conspiracy theory string board just to stay afloat in it. And all of these flaws are present in Stranger Things season 4, but none of them are really a problem. The problem is the length of the episodes—but more specifically the reason behind those running times: All the unnecessary side quests.

We Need a Left-Handed Smoke Shifter

Have you ever known a show more fond of carefully-arranged group shots?

Stories are fueled by conflict. Protagonists want something (to defeat the Mind Flayer, for example) but they cannot achieve it because they are opposed by people, forces, or demogorgons. Sometimes writers think their story needs more conflict, because their plot is looking a little too straight-liney and the protagonists are moving towards their goal too quickly. So they start adding in side quests.

Side quests, in this context, are complications that pop up to stretch out a sequence in a story. Say your protagonist’s goal is to cross the street. They step to the curb, but suddenly there’s a ton of fast-moving traffic, so now they have to side quest to find the pedestrian crossing button. When they finally locate the button, they discover it’s been disconnected. So they decide to climb a telephone pole and use the wires to shimmy across from above, but when they get to the top, a horde of angry birds begins attacking them⁶.

This is clearly a delaying tactic used when your conflict is just a bit too straightforward, and Stranger Things season 4 uses it to its detriment. Everything the kids in this season need to do is overly complicated. A prime example of this is when they discover a secret phone number hidden on the corpse of the federal agent who tried to protect them from other, evil federal agents. They expect to be able to contact someone in authority who can help them, but instead the number connects to a computer system. So now they need a hacker⁷. And the only one they know lives a long way off, so they head there, but when they arrive at her house her computer’s been taken away so they have to engage in a thoroughly unnecessary little caper to get it back.

It’s an exhausting little side quest that doesn’t add much to the story aside from time, which was obviously the Duffer Brothers’ goal for some reason. Were they paid by the minute? Perhaps. That might explain business like the bizarre Russian doll concealing a note or Nancy and Robin going through an elaborate charade that requires choosing outfits and several very long speeches while in character to pull off. These sequences might be entertaining in isolation, sure, but they’re also just ways of padding out a story. It’s complication for complication’s sake⁸.

How Many Children are You Friends With?

Eddie the Head has seen worse days. Is that a compliment or an insult? I don’t know.

Sometimes padding material like this is also done in order to spend more time with characters, which is also very possibly something going on with Stranger Things season 4. As a writer, sometimes you fall in love with your characters—or realize that your readers have—and so you start looking for ways to spend more time with them. This in turn leads to side quest writing because you’re coming up with strategies to have your characters hang out together and interact⁹.

And this is usually fun, so where’s the harm? It depends on your goals, of course, but the harm is that anyone who came to your story for something other than the gentle hangout vibes might not be as excited as you are about this. Sometimes what works in small doses—the chemistry between characters, for example—starts to fade when it’s overused. Having characters endlessly sit around and engage in all that chemistry also stops your narrative cold. And if your characters have no urgency about resolving their conflict, why should your readers¹⁰?

Of course, some of this is the algorithm. Somewhere a calculation gets made that what could be a one-off must be a series, what could be 45 minutes should be 90, and what should be minor background characters must ascend to main character status, and the end result is a season finale that is one hour and forty minutes long when it absolutely doesn’t need to be.

That being said, I enjoy Stranger Things, because I too once rode a Huffy dirtbike and owned a Dungeon Master’s Guide¹¹. There was a disappointing lack of hellgates in my childhood, however, which is why I became a writer¹².

Next week: Nick fuuucckkinnnng Cage!

1. There is no explanation for Will Byers’ hair in this show. None. It’s a haircut that aliens would imagine if they had never visited Earth or met a human being.

2. I never made it past the first screen in Dragon’s Lair, and that set the tone for the rest of my life.

3. Here’s how old I am: When Don Mattingly signed a contract with the Yankees for more than $1 million, Teenage Jeff argued that no baseball player was worth that much. Apparently, I was very, very wrong. Also, I remember when Don Mattingly seemed destined for the Hall of Fame.

4. What I want to know is why only the monsters and dark magics seem to be real in these shows. Why can’t someone come across a Bag of Holding or Baba Yaga’s Hut or something like that? No, it’s always demons and monsters.

5. Although I will admit the costume designers are doing a bangin job of making all these hot young kids look like sexless Lego figurines.

6. I will neither confirm or deny that this curiously specific example was culled from my experience walking home from a bar last week. But my bird-peck wounds are healign nicely, thank you for asking.

7. When I was a kiddo in the 1980s I had a Commodore 64 and a shit-ton of illegally copied video games on floppy disks, along with a load of cracking programs used to remove the DRM on these games. My grammar school had a whol subculture of kids who would figure out how to crack the copy protections on games and then swap them around. If someone in my family had a secret phone number from a sketchy government agent and needed a hacker, they would have come to me … and I wouldn’t have had clue one what to do about it.

8. You would think that a story that already needs a conpiracy theory string board to comprehend wouldn’t want more complication, but here we are.

9. To be fair, Side Quest Writing does offer the opportunity to split your characters up into unexpected pairings, which can yield character development gold.

10. Stranger Things does commit the usual sin of having characters pause in the midst of being chased by frickin’ monsters in a shadowy alternate dimension to have heart-to-heart talks about their feelings and such. When I’m being chased by monsters in alternate dimensions, my conversations is generally limited to “OH SHIT” and “I DON’T WANNA DIE,” but maybe I’m just crazy.

11. That thing was dense and me and my friends more or less stopped reading it and just made up all the rules and had a fine old time doing so. By the end my character was a demigod of some sort with like a billion hit points. I have no regrets.

12. So far none of my prose has summoned a hellgate, but one keeps trying.