The Times - UK (2022-05-28)

(Antfer) #1
the times | Saturday May 28 2022 saturday review 7

I


t’s possible that you’re either too
young to remember or were too
old to care, but in the late 1980s
there was a band, after a fashion,
called Jive Bunny. What they did
was splice together clips of classic
pop hits from decades gone by. If
I remember correctly, their first hit started
with Chubby Checker and Bill Haley, and
then threw itself into the Everly Brothers
wailing about Susie, and Elvis, and Eddie
Cochran, and so on. Everybody bought it.
Why would we not? It was all brilliant, and
we’d never heard it before.
Stranger Things is Jive Bunny. Just not
for classic pop. The first couple of series
started with Firestarter by Stephen King,
mixed in a bit of ET, and doused itself liber-
ally with a bit of Gremlins and The Goonies.
Series three, just before the pandemic,
threw in a dash of Dawn of the Dead too.
Now, with season four, the same magpie
approach raids a bit of The Exorcist and a
whole lot of Carrie. You can’t call it a rip-
off, though, because it doesn’t so much raid
the past as bathe in it. It’s not a crime. It’s
a tribute. And yet, I expect, the people who
love its unabashed nostalgia the most are
probably people a little too young to prop-
erly remember all the stuff it is being nos-
talgic about.
The thing is, if you thought this ap-
proach would lead to diminishing returns,
you’d be wrong. Four seasons in, I reckon
it has never been better. This, even though
the core idea — that of the Upside Down,
a parallel world of creepy horrors — is
still not a terribly good one. Never mind
how scary it is, why is it even there? By
what internal logic does it, alongside its
starfish-mouthed Demogorgons, also
have bats and ruined houses? If it contains,
for example, a broken grandfather clock,
does that mean it once, formerly,
contained a non-broken grandfather
clock? What, basically, are the physics
here? Handled differently, could it present
real estate and mining opportunities? And
yes, I know it’s supposed to be Lovecrafti-
an chaos, but Lovecraftian chaos is sup-
posed to be a metaphor for existence.
Whereas here, it’s just the same idea as up
above, but all stinky and uninhabitable.
Like south London.
All of that, though, feels increasingly ir-
relevant. It’s all about the characters.
Largely kids, who we’ve watched grow up
over the past six years. You feel protective
towards them. You yearn to see how they
will turn out. It’s like Harry Potter, but they
can actually act.
There’s a classic sketch from the comedy
show Burnistoun in which two Scots fruit-

lessly shriek the word “eleven” at a voice-
operated lift, and I still find myself shout-
ing “Uhlihven!” every time Millie Bobby
Brown appears on screen. She’s still the
show’s centre, a kid with psychokinetic
powers, raised in a lab by evil scientists.
Now, though, her powers have left her and
she’s moved to California, along with the
family Byers, led by Winona Ryder’s Joyce.
Here she is being bullied, but she doesn’t
want Mike (Finn Wolfhard; still hasn’t had
a decent meal) to know. Yet here he is now,
visiting her, and finding out.
Meanwhile, back in Hawkins, Indiana,
teenagers are dying again. On the case are
the many characters we know and love,
but now they’re in high school. This leads
to tensions.
Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) is now the
star of the inexplicably shortest school
basketball team you ever saw, while Dustin
(Gaten Matarazzo) is the heir apparent of
the Dungeons & Dragons club. Nancy
(Natalia Dyer) is still a reporter; Steve and
Robin (Joe Keery and Maya Hawke) have
relocated their double act to a video rental
store. Max (Sadie Sink, closely tied with
Hawke for being the best actor here) is still
grieving her stepbrother. Hopper, who you
may have thought had died in series three,
is actually in a Russian jail.
I could go on, talking you through
everything that happens in this new half-
series (the next half is coming in July), but
it would take for ever, not least because the
action is split between Hawkins, Califor-
nia and the Alaska/Russia border, and
none of those three streams as yet particu-
larly connect.
And also because Netflix made me pro-
mise not to reveal a huge list of plot details
in return for seeing a preview, and I’ve
largely forgotten what was on it.
All you need to know is that it is great.
There are new characters, principally a
drug-dealing Dungeons & Dragons geek
called Eddie (Joseph Quinn) and a jock

Hugo Rifkind on TV


The strangest thing is that this


spooky series only gets better


ley said, “and the Devil is wandering
around your church.”
Gendered paranoia was at the heart of a
lot of it. The trappings of witchcraft such as
cats, cauldrons and broomsticks, Worsley
noted, were the trappings of femininity it-
self. Demonology books depicted women
as having “insatiable carnal lust” already,
“as if”, said the historian, “there aren’t
enough men to go around, the Devil will
do”. Sampson herself was a healer, but she
was caught up in the desire of James VI
(and I) to show himself to be a serious and
godly man.
And so, held in Holyrood palace, she was
pricked with pins until her torturers found
“the Devil’s mark”; the part of her that —
according to them — felt no pain. They
found it on her genitals. “Horrid sexual
torture,” Worsley said.
Scotland killed two and a half thousand
witches, more per head than anywhere in
Europe. Next week, she’s on the Black
Death, although they’re all on iPlayer
already.

Prehistoric Planet was every bit as
amazing as it promised to be, but troubling
too. Basically, it’s David Attenborough
does dinosaurs. A fake nature docu-
mentary, done for real.
If you feel this has been done before,
you’d be right. Way back in 1999, Kenneth
Branagh narrated Walking with Dinosaurs,
which was essentially the same thing.
Technology has marched on since then,
though, and while WWD was a good effort,
this one was frequently breathtaking. All
the big names were there, from tyranno-
sauruses and triceratops to pterodactyls
and plesiosaurs. No, he didn’t wrestle any
of them. But you felt he could.
Why, then, was I troubled? Partly
because you just couldn’t know how much
was a bit, well, made up. Is it definitely true
that baby tyrannosauruses were hairy, for
example? Are we sure the pterosaur had
that coathanger on its head? Sometimes,
also, the Disneyfication felt a bit much.
Did dinosaurs really look so recognisably,
anthropologically sad when other dino-
saurs ate their young?
The problem was the fakery. I mean,
sure, they obviously weren’t going to show
us real dinosaurs. Knowing these ones
were fake, though, tarnished everything.
When a wee hatchling bird jumps off a
cliff, we can marvel at its bravery. When
a CGI pterosaur does, it’s sort of different.
There is no pterosaur. There is no cliff.
There is no jump. Thus, no bravery either.
And, once you realise that, the originals
are somehow retrospectively tarnished
too. You start to wonder why we have
any programmes like this; why we have
real lions instead of fake lions, when
the fake lions will do exactly what they
are told.
There are no more boundaries, that’s the
thing. When all wonders are possible, you
inevitably start to wonder why you haven’t
been given more. Or to put that another
way: sure, yes, it’s exciting to see virtual di-
nosaurs in the virtual wild. But I couldn’t
shake the feeling that it would be even
more exciting to see them chasing Jeff
Goldblum and Laura Dern in a jeep.

called Jason (Mason Dye), who is as weird-
ly short as the rest of the basketball team
(seriously, what is that?) and seems des-
tined to turn into an evangelical preacher.
There are more drugs than in the past,
with weed played for laughs, and there’s a
brilliant undertone of that almost for-
gotten 1980s panic that D&D was going to
turn kids into Satanists.
Altogether I’ve never enjoyed it more,
despite all the monstery woo-woo. Which,
given the streaming era’s ability to make
even the most exciting of shows feel bloat-
ed and tired after three seasons, is really
saying something. I even find myself look-
ing forward to the inevitable reunion
they’ll have in about 20 years, when we can
all be nostalgic for now.

Shifting, nonsense, parallel horrors, after
all, are no match for reality. In the tremen-
dous first episode of Lucy Worsley Investi-
gates, the historian found herself in East
Lothian (as it happens, my own personal
Hawkins, Indiana) investigating the trials
and murders of witches.
I took part in a BBC Scotland debate a
few months ago, and the subject of a par-
don for witches came up. I was unprepared
for the topic and made a joke about it,
because debating witches after you’ve just
been debating war or tax felt inherently
absurd, and it was all but half a millennium
ago, anyway. Remembering that, and
watching this, it was hard not to feel a little
sick. The focus here was Agnes Sampson,
strangled and burnt by order of a Scottish
court in 1591.
Pondering the shrill lunacy that led to
her killing, Worsley started off half
amused and half horrified, and ended up
only the latter. The urge to find witches,
she told us, sprang from a religious Top
Trumps between Catholicism and the up-
start Protestantism of John Knox. Religion
was all that mattered. “People start to
think it’s a matter of life and death,” Wors-

I’ve never


enjoyed


it more,


despite all


the monstery


wo o -wo o


creepy kids Eduardo
Franco, Charlie Heaton,
Millie Bobby Brown,
Noah Schnapp and
Finn Wolfhard in
Stranger Things

COURTESY OF NETFLIX

Stranger Things


Netf lix


Lucy Worsley


Investigates


BBC2


Prehistoric Planet


Apple TV+

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