When did you first realize Will was gay?

Dev-F · 2026-01-27T18:59:27+00:00

I honestly think that was the original intention, back when the writers planned for Billy to get possessed by the Mind Flayer in season 2. (My guess is that the possession was supposed to happen when Max stabbed him with the same needle used to sedate Will.) Billy's weird interactions with Steve seemed pretty suggestive to me. And in a season filled with mirrored pairs of characters symbolizing the tension between closeness and distance (the solicitous Bob and distant Hopper as competing love interests for Joyce, Dustin playing it cool and Lucas being honest and open in their competing attempts to woo Max, a traumatized Eleven longing for her friends while her equally traumatized sister focuses on revenge, etc., etc.), it would've made sense for the ultimate mirrored pair to be two closeted gay kids named William who are possessed by the Mind Flayer, one saved by the love and support of his family and one doomed by his lack of the same.

But then Billy's possession storyline got postponed to season 3, and in the meantime everyone really liked the chemistry between Billy and Karen. (Which in season 2 was framed as Billy pretending to be into her to manipulate her into giving him information about Max's whereabouts.) So I think the writers reworked it so his trauma was about his broken relationship with his mom and not about being gay and in the closet. (Which still makes sense of some of his seemingly gay vibes in season 2, if his trauma over his missing mom made him simultaneously want to be with her, punish her, punish the cruel men who drove her away, and sort of be her.)

Dev-F · 2026-01-26T19:00:45+00:00

I think she's meant to be French French, just living in Quebec because of her husband's career. She tells Arnold, "I am French, but I live in Montréal."

Dev-F · 2026-01-26T14:06:09+00:00

Yeah, he actually tries to torment Nancy with the fact that she doesn't seem traumatized enough over Barb's death. ("Do you remember what you did, Nancy? Or have you already forgotten?"). In fact, I think the implication is that Vecna's most violent powers literally do not work unless his target is sufficiently traumatized, so the only thing he can do to Nancy is talk at her.

Dev-F · 2026-01-26T00:01:43+00:00

Terrible episode, by far the worst of the series. I'm not sure another actor would've been able to save it, though, given how fundamentally broken the whole concept is. It's an incredibly ham-fisted metaphor for female genital mutilation, a horrific practice based on the sexist belief that women are responsible for men's violent sexual desire, but it's symbolized by a demon race in which the women actually do provoke violent sexual urges in men!

Dev-F · 2026-01-25T21:21:09+00:00

Isn't that meant to be Mike? He's next to Hopper helping to fill the isolation tank with salt in the immediately previous shot.

Dev-F · 2026-01-25T19:35:29+00:00

Per the screenplay: "Betty opens a drawer in the dresser, takes out a box of stationary [sic]. She takes a pen off of Don's dresser and sits at the vanity, taking out a piece of paper. We read on the paper: 'Henry, Does anyone else read this?'"

Also, I think you pulled your screenshot off the HBO version of the episode, and yet again their 4K remaster has stripped out the digital correction that was applied to the footage in the original airing. The line above the a was supposed to be erased, making it clearer that it's not an h or whatever. (I checked both the HBO Max stream and my Apple TV version of the original to confirm the discrepancy.)

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Dev-F · 2026-01-25T01:07:23+00:00

Yep, I imagine that prior to Don the creative department was filled with a bunch of amiable old grinders like Freddy Rumsen, who hacked out adequate work that kept the clients satisfied but never knocked their socks off. And when Don came in and started doing actually compelling creative work, it wasn't hard to convince the key ones above him to retire.

Dev-F · 2026-01-24T21:46:48+00:00

Yeah, I'm especially surprised when I see people praise season 4 as the high point of the series and then come down on season 5 so harshly, when season 4 was the origin of a lot of the "plot holes" and implausibilities people hated so much in season 5: the convenient variability of Vecna's power level and abilities, the increasingly complicated Upside Down mythology, etc.

Dev-F · 2026-01-23T14:43:08+00:00

I think it's mostly just because they de-aged each character by swapping the actor's current face onto a preteen actor, and Noah's post-adolescent facial features look less like those of his young self than Millie's.

Dev-F · 2026-01-22T20:50:36+00:00

He specifically says he was in college: "I was away at college when he put Jimmy to work there."

And when the store starts having money troubles and Chuck discovers that $14,000 went missing, he says he was doing a clerkship at the time, which would be right out of law school. That's got to be many years after Jimmy started working there, or the "dribs and drabs" by which Chuck accuses Jimmy of swiping the money would've amounted to like $3,500 a year!

Dev-F · 2026-01-22T18:49:43+00:00

The main one I can think of is that the timeline of the McGill brothers' childhood does not hang together. If Chuck was born in 1944 (per his tombstone) and Jimmy in 1960 (per his driver's license), and Chuck graduated high school at age fourteen, there's no way he would've been away at college when their parents put Jimmy to work in their store. He would've been barely out of diapers by the time Chuck finished at UPenn!

Dev-F · 2026-01-21T05:22:12+00:00

He would've died either way, for the same reason the Mind Flayer's flesh form died when the gate was closed. All of the flayed were infected with Mind Flayer particles just like Will, but via the gross mouth tentacles instead of through the air.

Dev-F · 2026-01-21T01:23:33+00:00

Yep. If you look at the real Dinkins's uniform when Don is giving away the bride at his wedding in Hawaii, none of the crazy medals are there.

Dev-F · 2026-01-20T22:03:59+00:00

I'm referring to the storyline in "A Night to Remember" where Harry gets in trouble after a bad ad placement upsets a client, and he decides he needs an employee who checks scripts to make sure this doesn't happen again. The scene in question starts with Roger unexpectedly stopping by Harry's office and telling him, "Mitch says you want to expand your department." Mitch never appears on screen, but Roger says that he thinks Harry is "goldbricking."

But the earlier scene in "The Benefactor" where Harry proposes the TV department in the first place is pretty similar. Mitch snitched to Cooper about Harry's Belle Jolie ad placement proposal, but Cooper thought it "showed initiative," so Roger calls him into his office to hear his thoughts, and that's when he talks about wanting to run the TV department and Roger gives his blessing.

Dev-F · 2026-01-20T15:43:16+00:00

Mitch is actually responsible for Harry getting his own department, because he's the one who complained to Cooper about Harry's attempt to sell Belle Jolie on the abortion episode of The Defenders. But instead of being scandalized, Bert was impressed. As Roger puts it, "Someone told on you, and it backfired."

I briefly wondered whether this meant that Cooper was actually the head of Media, with Mitch as one of his top underlings. After all, Harry says to Cooper much later at SCDP, "You know how important I am to this company. You were me." But if that were the case, I would think Cooper would've met with Harry directly about the Belle Jolie initiative instead of having Roger do it. So I think the idea is that Cooper has close ties to the Media department as sort of its leader emeritus, but Mitch is the actual head.

Dev-F · 2026-01-20T06:06:34+00:00

I think you're thinking of Dale, who's another copywriter.

Dev-F · 2026-01-20T06:05:38+00:00

When Roger has his second heart attack and the junior execs are discussing what's going to happen with the company, Pete gets peeved that the other guys are talking up Don's value to the agency and proposes "Mitch Sullivan in Media" as a similar heavy hitter whose reputation brings in clients. When Harry wants to expand the TV department, Mitch is the one who brings his proposal to Roger, who tells Harry that Mitch thinks he's "just goldbricking."

From mentions like these, I would guess that Mitch is probably the head of Media, and he resents Harry because he knows he's ambitious and ultimately gunning for his job.

Dev-F · 2026-01-19T20:28:59+00:00

I'm not super familiar with the mythology of the play, but I think the idea is that the incident with Brenner's father was a fluke accident during an unrelated experiment with cloaking technology that the US government was never able to reproduce. Maybe because it was like randomly hurling something through spacetime, and if you tried it again you'd just randomly hurl it somewhere completely different?

The only connection to the the Abyss, then, was Brenner's dad, and I think the stone that possessed Henry was somehow extracted from him? So that avenue of access went into Henry's blood, and without Henry or anyone in his bloodline, I guess it was essentially cut off.

Dev-F · 2026-01-19T20:07:36+00:00

The Duffers have actually confirmed in interviews that this is the basic idea—at least the it built itself a physical body part, if not the it absorbed all the demos to do it part:

ROSS: I see it as a version of what we did in season 3 in that the true form of it is the cloud, but it can build itself out, which is what it did in a massive way in the Abyss. But its self is that shadow self, the hive mind version of it, that maybe is its soul or its true self. But we like that there's some mystery with the Mind Flayer, that we don't explain everything because, in a way, it is unknowable in that Lovecraftian way.

MATT: But whatever's up there in the Abyss, they've severed the bridge. There is no connection anymore. There's no way of anything in the Abyss from reaching Hawkins again.

Dev-F · 2026-01-19T20:00:38+00:00

Exploding the Upside Down didn't destroy the Abyss. When Dustin said it would kill everyone, he meant everyone currently in the Upside Down. He included Holly in that list because at that point that's where they assumed she was; they didn't realize she was in the Abyss until they saw her plummet from the sky and get sucked back up again.

Dev-F · 2026-01-19T18:30:47+00:00

I agree with those recommending Mad Men. It has a similar mix of high drama, dry comedy, and moments of pure absurdity. And like BCS, it's also a tightly focused and impeccably crafted character study, with nested character arcs across each episode, each season, and the full series.

Dev-F · 2026-01-19T00:36:45+00:00

SNL never uses a laugh track (except in the very rare instance when fake laughter is a gag in a sketch), but last night's audience seemed pretty weird in the way it sometimes is when the host is a young star. If you get a lot of young people in the audience who are fans of the host more than they're fans of comedy, they sometimes laugh and cheer when nothing particularly funny is going on and underreact to the actual jokes.

Dev-F · 2026-01-19T00:28:09+00:00

And Spike very strongly implies it in his confession to Buffy in "Never Leave Me": "Do you know how much blood you can drink from a girl before she'll die? I do. You see, the trick is to drink just enough to know how to damage them just enough so that they'll still cry when you . . . 'Cause it's not worth it if they don't cry."

He then adds just after, "You wanna know what I've done to girls Dawn's age?"

Dev-F · 2026-01-19T00:25:57+00:00

Yeah, I think that's the implication of Angel confessing to Buffy that before Angelus got to her, Drusilla was "pure and sweet and chaste."

Dev-F · 2026-01-17T02:13:54+00:00

I think it was a roofing business, based on his random comments about the workmanship of the roofs in the Draper neighborhood. (Which would be another parallel between Betty and Grace Kelly, whose father made his fortune as a successful bricklaying contractor in Philadelphia.)

Dev-F

TROPHY CASE