How To Create Cool Characters And Keep Them Cool Forever

What is cool?

Is Blade cool?

Is Neo cool?

Sure they have the long black coats and the sunglasses but their unchanging nature has left them seeming tacky and cheesy. What really gets people going is a little thing called character development. You can have the coolest character in the universe but if that character doesn't develop in some way at least by their third film or series, you lose the cool and go straight to corny, the character becomes a parody of themselves. The coolest character I can think of, in anything, is Harrison Ford's scruffy looking nerf herder, Han Solo. What makes

Han cool is how he's introduced in A New Hope but what keeps him cool is that he doesn't stay that way. Han goes from criminal to hero to lover and it's that development that's stopped the character from becoming stale through decades.

There has been one show recently that has really got the hang of keeping characters cool and that's Stranger Things. Considering the show's plot is pulled from every 80s movie cliche, stitched together into a pretty, 8-9 episode quilt, Stranger Things relies heavily on its characters to deliver anything surprising, gripping and new. This show cleverly separates the ensemble into smaller groups (the teens, the kids, the adults) in order to develop them and have them change, only to weave all their plots together for the finale, showing how the changes the characters have gone through affect each other.

That was season one, but this isn't a review of season one because that would be even later than this review is, no, this is about the second season. The challenge the Duffer Brothers faced when creating a second series for Stranger Things was that the first series ended by tying some lose ends up and leaving some things to the imagination, it would surely feel wrong to ruin the mysteries or to undo any resolutions the last series came to. The first idea was apparently to turn it into an anthology series in the vein of American Horror Story, which sounds like the best option until you start to think of all the amazing characters the audience would miss out on spending time with. The only option was to continue the story from series one.

The Duffers manage to succeed in creating a series that continues to ask new questions and answer those previously put to the audience without ruining the good work they'd already done. They do this by pushing the overarching plot into the background and leaning all the way into the development of the characters, which the audience collectively decided we're the best part of the first series. In season two of Stranger Things, every character at some point becomes the coolest character you've ever seen because the show refuses to let any of them stagnate. The events of the first series have changed everyone we've come to know and so we get to know them all over again, making them cooler than ever.

From Hopper and Eleven's father/daughter style relationship to the love square between Nancy, Jonathan, Steve and Billy (for I refuse to believe those homoerotic basketball scenes between the two walking hairstyles was for nothing) every character is constantly evolving and building new and ever more complex relationships with one another. Quite frankly the writing on this show when it comes to characters is genius, which brings me to the controversial seventh episode.

I feel I have to address this episode specifically because there has been some mixed reactions to its diversionary nature. I don't understand the negativity towards this episode, although it diverged from the main plot, my feeling is that the plot was secondary to the development of the characters in the show and this episode is the perfect example of that, sacrificing an episode that could perhaps have served the mystery of the Upside Down or the Shadow Monster to give Eleven a new direction and drive. I thoroughly enjoyed the episode.

Sean Astin gets a special shout out for his performance as Bob Newby and I hope Hollywood has some sort of Astin renaissance because he is truly brilliant, something I think we've known since The Goonies or at least his time as Samwise Gamgee in The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy.

This is a brilliant follow up to the first break out series of Stranger Things because it keeps its characters cool and if they keep letting them change naturally and convincingly then Mike, Steve, Joyce and the whole gang could stay cool forever, like the ensemble cast equivalent of David Bowie. Gosh darn this goose has teeth, a full set of gloriously 80s teeth.