I haven’t been excited about Halloween in years. Once I stopped trick or treating and the holiday became more about parties, I lost interest. In the past couple years, I’ve even been put off by scary movies. Not that I’ve ever been the biggest fan, but I much prefer suspense/thrillers to full on horror/gore, and that’s usually not the Halloween vibe. What I have been able to depend on the past couple years is Stranger Things. It’s exactly the right amount of scary and I-can-and-will-definitely-write-fanfiction-about-this, and I love it. I love the characters, I love the storylines, I love the era. I genuinely love everything about this show. This year, we were blessed with season three in July rather than October, and while I’m incredibly grateful (and may have already watched it three times… back to back…), that means that this Halloween season, I have to rely on rewatching my favorite episodes and reading fix-it fanfiction to get me through October. And oh boy, have I.
What I noticed as soon as season three ended was that the infamous Billy Hargrove had massive character potential, and it all remained untapped. When we met Billy in season two, the first thing you noticed is that he’s a jerk. He’s mean to his step-sister Max, he treats people like garbage, and, depending on how you interpret a particular scene (time stamp 2:14-3:34) between him and Max, he’s racist. (Side note: I definitely don’t think he’s racist, I think he heard his sister telling a boy that he treats her like garbage, and being a victim of abuse his entire life, he warned Max in the only way he knew how to stay away from someone who treats her poorly.)
Without a doubt, Billy is a bad guy. I hated him my first watch through season two, but the more I thought about it, saw how fans wrote him in fanfiction, and rewatched certain episodes, I realized I actually love him. He’s supposed to be a bad guy. We’re supposed to hate him. He was literally written to be the human villain. And as a person, I do hate him. If a real life Billy Hargrove dared to approach me, he’d be sorry. But as a character? From a writing perspective? He’s the character I aspire to write. Billy Hargrove is the Severus Snape of Stranger Things. There! I said it! He’s the character I love to hate, and in the occasional fix-it fanfic, the character I love to love. I’m by no means a Billy Hargrove apologist―he does horrible things, and him being abused explains but doesn’t justify his actions.
I love a good redemption arc. Or even just a good character arc. I was super excited to see Billy’s, because even though he was written to be the human enemy, I knew he couldn’t stay stagnant. All the main characters in Stranger Things develop in one way or another, so I knew we would have to see some sort of change in Billy. I (not so) secretly wanted him to have a redemption arc and at the very least see his relationship with Max blossom. He does love her, in his own twisted way. I didn’t think he would immediately, or maybe ever, become friends with Steve and the other older kids, but I wanted a redemption arc. The easiest way I saw this happening was by making Billy the new victim of the Mind Flayer. I said over and over again how that would probably be the plot of the third season, and was often met with eye rolls and disagreements. So imagine my delight when I watched the first episode of season three and discovered I was right! But as the season went on, I wished more than ever that I had been wrong.
The Duffer Brothers made a few major mistakes in writing Billy’s plot line. First, he was created to be the human villain, but the season after establishing that they intertwined him with the supernatural. There were certain aspects of this I liked, some of the highlights being Billy telling every one of the Mind Flayer’s victims, “Don’t be afraid. It’ll be over soon,” the iconic scene in the sauna where Billy begs Max to believe that it wasn’t his fault that he did so many horrible things, the flashback scenes we got to see when Eleven went into his mind, and the fact that Billy was the only victim of the Mind Flayer this season who was able to mentally overpower it and snap out of it, saving El―a girl he doesn’t know at all―in the process. I saw all the former incidents as the lead up to the last one. I loved that all of these incidents showed Billy in a positive light rather than the way we saw him all of season two. It really emphasized that he wasn’t born a monster, rather, he was forced to become one as a defense mechanism against his father’s abuse. While I did absolutely love this aspect of Mind Flayer Billy, I was disappointed that they threw all of his characterization out the window when he was possessed. This even deviated from Mind Flayer Will in season two, who was still himself for the most part (at least up until the end).
Billy’s death was another mistake the Duffer Brothers made. They called his death scene his “redemption,” since he dies to keep Eleven alive. I call it his sacrifice. We see Max cry over Billy’s torn up body, begging him to get up, and Billy manages to choke out, “I’m sorry,” before he dies. He sacrificed himself to save Eleven and all of the kids. His last words being, “I’m sorry,” doesn’t make up for all of the horrible, hurtful things he did to Max and everyone else. I was incredibly disappointed to see the Duffer Brothers belittle Billy’s “redemption” to his death, because it wasn’t a redemption at all! We didn’t get to see the real Billy in season three, aside from the very first episode. As Snape says in Harry Potter, it felt like the Duffer Brothers were keeping Billy alive so he could die at the proper moment―like raising a pig for slaughter. Even worse, after pulling all this bullshit, we didn’t even get a funeral! The next thing we knew, the Byers were moving out of Hawkins, and the only scene we could pretend to get closure from was Max sitting next to a window, maybe in Billy’s room, looking sad.
Finally, and the most serious of my issues with his death, is the fact that the Duffer Brothers could have used Billy to talk about abuse and the cycle of abuse. Stranger Things isn’t a terribly political show, nor are we supposed to take away any lessons from the episodes. But they had already shown us Billy is a victim of abuse, and we saw how he was repeating his father’s actions (breaking the plate over Steve’s head in their, dare I say, iconic fight, as well as they way he shoves Lucas against the wall in the season two finale). All of led up to what could have been an amazing way to talk about the cycle of abuse, but instead the Duffer Brothers decided to kill him off.
Photo from instagram @strangerthingstv
A fascinating, complex character was written, and his potential was entirely wasted. Billy Hargrove deserved better. Billy should have gotten a redemption arc. Billy should have been given the chance to grow, fix his relationship with Max, tell his dad to go to hell, move out, heal. Fans have criticized the show for moving away from allowing us to have an intimate relationship with the characters by showing us their backstory and development, to trying to be a more traditional horror/thriller television show. Billy Hargrove was the perfect character to move us back into character intimacy, but since he was killed off, we’ll have to wait to see how they handle season four in regards to fan complaints.