I’m late to the party, I know, but I just recently finished watching “Stranger Things 3” on Netflix. And while I’m overly distraught at Hopper’s death vaporization whatever it was (and, weirdly, a little sad that Billy had to die, too), there’s a different part of the third season of the wildly popular sci-fi show that’s eating at me more than Mrs. Driscoll ate her plant fertilizer.
You’ll remember that in the first few episodes of season 3, Nancy and Jonathan, now officially a couple who did normal couple things like carpool and bicker, worked together at the local newspaper, the Hawkins Post. Nancy was a budding journalist who couldn’t get anyone to take her seriously and subsequently had to do the coffee runs, and Jonathan was doing something with photography.
The two of them get fired from the Post after further investigating a lead that they were told not to (or, you know, because misogyny). But before that, Nancy pesters Jonathan time and time again, either about her rude AF boss Tom -- we assume he dies at the end of the season, too, a casualty of the gross Mind Flayer blob thing being taken down -- or to convince him to go search for more clues into the strange happenings in Hawkins.
Every time she does so, though, Jonathan is developing his film in the darkroom. Now, I may have very limited darkroom photography experience (in that I took a single class in college), but even I know that any -- any! -- stray light that a strip of film gets exposed to is destructive, unless it’s the red or orange darkroom-specific lights. So, when Nancy bursts into Jonathan’s darkroom, and Jonathan lets out a “Oh, c’mon!” but then moves right on, let it be known that she blatantly and callously ruined whatever hard work her boyfriend had put in that day or week.
What if Jonathan had gotten the perfect shot to accompany a front-page story, a photo that couldn’t be recreated, and Nancy just waltzed in talking about rabid rats and wrecked it? If we’re looking for reasons to fire Nancy around here, shouldn’t that have been the biggest?!
The bit happened more than once, and never did Jonathan scold his clueless (if a great shotgun aim) girlfriend about irreparably damaging his film beyond a little squeal of, “No!”
Jonathan, man, get your girl. No one should be messing with your art like that.