Upside Down 5

We did not post in this space during 2025, having last written on the occasion of the Beetlejuice revival. Our Noni's inclusion in the latest gasp of Stranger Things has brought us back to this diversion. Fortunately, her Lego figure was still on hand for the occasion and is included in this glimpse from the closing credits.

The final season of Stranger Things with Our Noni reprising her role as Joyce Byers and saving the world from the Upside Down. Almost ten years after the first season aired, but with only three years having passed in the storyline, Noah Schnapp as Will Byers (Joyce's son) is a hard sell as a young child now. The bowl cut just doesn't do it. Will does, however, do a totally 80s thing in the final episode when he shares with his family and friends that he is gay. Joyce, having experienced some serious trauma involving her children, takes the coming out in stride.

Revisiting the Upside Down

  

See our National Lego Day, Belated post for the
the story of this Winona action figure.

When we started watching Season 4 of Stranger Things at the end of May, we did not think we needed to restart the series. However, we spent much of June scratching our heads as we watched the plot twist and turn, with Winona's scenes appearing increasingly disconnected from the rest of the action.

When we got to the "end" and realized that we weren't really at the end, we decided to reboot. In other words, we took a running start so that we could get caught up to whatever Netflix would dropping later this summer, with some of our Upside Down wits about us.

Our Noni had a front-row seat to all the action. Since friends had gifted us two sets of the Winona-as-Joyce-Byers Lego kit we were able to set her up in front of the television at both of our houses without having to worry about transporting.

Now that we have seen all of season 4 (nine episodes) we are finally able to post about this season of many facets. A recap:

Joyce and Murray are in Russia trying to rescue Hopper. Nobody else knows where they are.
Nancy, Robin, Steve, Dustin, Max, and Lucas are tracking down a demon in Hawkins. Nobody else knows where they are.

Eleven returns to Dr. Owens and "Papa". Nobody else knows where she is.

Natalia Dyer

Mike, Will, Jonathan, and Argyle search for Eleven in the desert. Nobody else knows where they are.

Really, in most of these cases not only do the other characters not know where anyone is, they don't actually know the others are missing.

Our Noni as Joyce Byers demonstrates a range of emotions with aplomb.

And, finally, honorable mention to Natalia Dyer and the makeup crew. Her headshot on IMDb gives no hint that in her role as Nancy Wheeler, she wins the prize for "most like Our Noni as a teenager," hands down.

Natalia Dyer as Nancy Wheeler

Stranger Things - Season 3

She's baaack!

Along with all the analogies to '80s movies (including Alien - which is a bit meta since our Winona had a part in Alien 4-Resurrection). And remember when everything was about how much we hated the Russians? That's there too.

This season was a lot more of the same. Lots of danger, lots of monsters, lots of wondering why these people still live in Hawkins.

Maya Hawke as
code-cracker Robin

The best part of this season was the not-so-subtle message on the importance of learning another language. This is a slight digression since Our Noni was not involved in the Russian-language storyline, but it is a very important facet of the story for us. In public life and even on university campuses -- including our very own -- it has become common to treat the learning of a second or third language with disdain. The difficulty the characters have in finding a speaker of Russian is one part of the lesson; the heroism of a character willing to apply rudimentary language skills is equally important.

This season can be summed up best by our (Indiana) friend Ben who posted this transcript of a conversation he had with his teenage daughter on Facebook:

Daughter: Doesn't Mrs. Wheeler ever wonder where her other kids are?
Ben: It's the 80s. They're fine.

We were fine. And our parents knew that we were always at the mall. It's where we worked, played, and dated.

Final Verdict: Four Croquet Balls

Stranger Things 2

The first season of Stranger Things was tidily wrapped up, so there really was no reason to have a second season. It was, therefore, a stunning feat that the second season was better than the first. All our favorite characters returned (except, alas, poor Barb) and some new ones rounded out the cast.

Our Winona played the role of the ever-anxious single parent Joyce Byers with the necessary intensity, even as we see her character let her guard down a few times with Sheriff Jim Hopper (David Harbour). The Stranger Things project may be the first one in which Ryder has settled in as a thoroughly post-adolescent actor. A younger Noni so thoroughly embodied a series of roles as a brooding, sardonic teen that she and her audiences have had trouble letting go of that persona. (Example: we still sometimes call her Noni.) As the anxious mother of teens, Joyce Byers has made a clean break with Veronica.

Good spooky stuff.

Final Verdict: Four croquet balls

Alien: Resurrection

We saw this film some years ago and felt almost the same way about it as we did about Black Swan. We really didn't want to watch this crappy film again, but it had been so long since we'd seen it that we couldn't write about it without watching it again and we did recall that at least it didn't make us squirm uncomfortably for its entire duration, something we can't say about Black Swan. 

Sigourney Weaver reprises her role as Ripley (really her clone), and as the title indicates the nasty alien is also resurrected.

I was surprised to see that Joss Whedon was one of the writers. This was clearly before he found his groove with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It appeared there was some attempt at levity, which actually might have worked if it hadn't been so subtle but it didn't come off well at all. The story was hard to follow, as was keeping the good guys and bad guys straight. Our Winona does have a special surprise twist to her character (no spoilers here, though).

It gets two croquet balls instead of one simply because it passes the Bechdel Test. Sigourney Weaver and Our Winona actually have several conversations, including the last words of the film.

Final Verdict: Two croquet balls

Stranger Things - an 80s-gasm

Pam writes:

James and I had different views on this one. I doubt I would have watched past the second episode of this mini series if it weren't for the fact that Our Winona was starring in it. James was more interested from a D&D perspective, and will write about that below. It did keep my attention from literary, and nostalgic standpoints, but the story itself really didn't pique my interest. The show takes place in the magical year of 1983 (the year James and I met). It has some cool, 80's props and plays on a lot of '80s film motifs, starting with Poltergeist. We also picked up themes from ET, Stand by Me, Firestarter, The Goonies (honestly, I cannot understand why so many people love that film), with a sprinkling of Fast Times at Ridgemont High thrown in. 

Natalia Dyer as Nancy and Charlie Heaton as Jonathan in some ways echo
the Heathers characters of Winona and Christian Slater. 

I did like that there was a juxtaposition of the horror show meme in which the virgin always survives. In this upside down story the virgin (Barb, who the directors must have modeled on my sister's yearbook photo) is made toast while her best friend (Nancy Wheeler) gets busy (and survives to tell the tale). I also really want to believe that Nancy's character was named for the best friend in that great American novel, Judy Blume's Are You there God? It's Me, Margaret, the character I would have voted "most likely to be the first to lose her virginity".

The show also made good use of the "four smart friends motif" in which there are two white boys, one black boy, and one white girl. Well done Duffer Brothers.

The Four Musketeer nerds. Not sure which one would have been James.

James writes:
Pam is right -- I liked this miniseries more than she did, and Dungeons & Dragons had something to do with it. I was thrilled to find D&D featured in the very first scene.  It brought me right back to those days when -- several years older than these kids -- I played for hours on end, sometimes five days a week. I did not realize until hearing Ethan Gilsdorf's interview on Radio Boston that the D&D scenes were a Spielberg reference; I thought they were just a reference to my adolescence. (Free new word I just invented for nostalgia lovers: adolreference -- things relating to one's long-ago teenage years.)

In our recent Noni's Return post, we set the context for Noni's role in this series, the first in which she plays a mother that is not a "mom" in the way that word is generally used these days. In his Salon article about this series as a nostalgia trip, Ethan Gilsdorf hints at why this role may have been so successful for her -- she plays a mother from an analog era, before the launch of helicopter parents. This seems a better fit for her than some mothering roles set in the present would be.

Millie Bobbie Brown shines as Eleven.

In addition to Ethan Gilsdorf's article and interview about nostalgia in general, we read an interesting article about the props in particular. Writing for Wired, Tim Moynihan describes the care taken in buying or making all of the props used in the series on a budget of just $220,000. The film is set during that brief window in telephone history when it had become possible to buy phones (not an option when I was a kid), but not yet impossible to buy a rotary phone. The props people could have reached out to my family. Perhaps because my grandfather worked for the "real" telephone company, this is not just the phone of my youth; it is the phone I still use when visiting my grandmother.

Final Verdict: Four balls


Pam did not like this much more than a three-baller, but we agreed that ties are decided in favor of Noni. And we agree that her role in this was strong.