Drama
Stranger Things
The newest season of Netflix’s Stranger Things continues to blend ’80s nostalgia with ever-darker spiritual content and horrific violence.
In 1854, Washington is a territory, not a state. There is no railroad connecting it to the rest of the United States. The towns there are growing, but pressing matters are largely their own.
One such matter is Angel’s Ridge, a mining town experiencing a population boom. Much of that is thanks to the steady cash flow from the Vanderbilt family. Their investments in the West Hill and Summit mines keep the town on the family’s radar—and keep the town funded.
The only problem is that those mines are starting to dry up—in total, they’re down 27%. The wealthy Van Ness family, who owns those mines, worries that the Vanderbilts may pull their funding if they detect their investments faltering.
That’s why Constance Van Ness, family matriarch, is demanding the property rights to Jasper Hollow, where a sizeable silver vein lays untouched. Of course, Jasper Hollow is also where a plethora of families have made their homes. The largest of these homes belongs to Fiona Nolan, a Catholic rancher who has taken in several orphans.
Fiona refuses to budge, especially for the Van Ness family, whose ruthless reputation precedes them. After all, everyone knows the way the family coerces others into submission through vandalism and underhanded tactics.
“God gave us this home, and only God can take it away,” Fiona tells Constance.
Fair enough. That won’t stop Constance from trying anyway.
What neither side of the conflict expected was Constance’s son, Willem, to show up on Nolan property, drunk.
The last time Constance saw her eldest son, he’d been drinking away his sorrows in a saloon. The last time Fiona saw him was when she’d buried his corpse—after she’d killed him for raping her adopted daughter, Dahlia.
The rest of the families living in Jasper Hollow know what happened: Fiona asked them to vote on whether they’d keep Willem’s death a secret or bring it to the sheriff.
They chose to hide the body and act as if Willem’s disappearance was just another tragedy wrought out of living in the rugged Washington wilderness.
After all, with how ruthless the Van Ness family is, to tell the truth would mean war.
The Wild West was an untamed place. Netflix’s The Abandons follows suit.
If the first episode’s rape scene doesn’t turn you away, the content that follows surely will. Violence gets bloody and torturous, including domestic abuse and the occasional surprise cameo of someone’s entrails. Sexual content contains sex and nudity. Crude language finds an excuse to utter most of the words you’d consider “heavy.”
As for the religious element, it is safe to say that the tenets of Roman Catholicism are “abandoned.” Fiona’s faith plays into a number of plot points, but it does nothing to encourage her in the ways of grace or forgiveness: She’s just as foul-mouthed and violent as the Van Ness family is.
It seems the only silver lining here is the vein running beneath Jasper’s Hollow—and even that’s part of the reason why they’re all fighting to begin with.
(Editor’s Note: Plugged In is rarely able to watch every episode of a given series for review. As such, there’s always a chance that you might see a problem that we didn’t. If you notice content that you feel should be included in our review, send us an email at letters@pluggedin.com, or contact us via Facebook or Instagram, and be sure to let us know the episode number, title and season so that we can check it out.)
The families of Angel’s Ridge consider their options as the Van Ness family continues its push to control more land—until one Van Ness member oversteps his bounds, forcing conflict.
A man rapes a woman. He is interrupted when men and women come to save her. Afterwards, the woman stabs her attacker through with a pitchfork, and another woman stomps on and crushes his neck, causing him to bleed from his mouth. Fiona recounts how her husband beat her for suffering a few miscarriages—and so she beat him to death with a brick. Bandits attack people and rob them. A woman slaps her daughter. Someone stabs a man in the top of the head with a fork.
Members of the Van Ness family burn a rival family’s fence so their cattle will escape and fall off a cliff—which some do before the other family contains them. We see a bloodied dead cow wheeled away as a result of the vandalism. Someone kills a man’s dog offscreen, and we see the owner holding the dog’s body in his arms.
A man and woman kiss. We see a man’s bare rear. Someone excuses a woman’s absence by claiming it is that woman’s time of the month.
Someone prays. A man tells a woman she should be “thanking that Irish god of [hers].” Someone clutches a cross. When someone lays rosary beads on the chest of a corpse, someone else protests: “This animal deserves no piety.”
Following three miscarriages, Fiona says that she knew “conceiving was not in God’s will.” Instead, she says that “Providence brought on many orphans” for her to mother. “God gave us this home, and only God can take it away,” she says.
People drink alcohol. One man becomes inebriated. When a woman sees her son going to the bar, she comments that she’d rather him be drinking than having sex to settle his nerves.
We hear 11 uses of the f-word, two uses of “d–n” and one use of “whore.” God’s name is used in vain twice, including one use with “d–n.” Someone denigrates someone else for being Jewish.
Kennedy Unthank studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He knew he wanted to write for a living when he won a contest for “best fantasy story” while in the 4th grade. What he didn’t know at the time, however, was that he was the only person to submit a story. Regardless, the seed was planted. Kennedy collects and plays board games in his free time, and he loves to talk about biblical apologetics. He’s also an avid cook. He thinks the ending of Lost “wasn’t that bad.”
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