Nancy, you're out of your mind if you
think I'm babysitting again.
OK, first of all, they're not babies anymore.
And Max is in real danger.
She needs people around her.
I know.
But why does it always have to be me?
Oh, my God.
He's got a point.
And it's a pretty iconic one because back
at the beginning of Stranger Things,
Steve Harrington seemed like the last person
you'd ever want to put in charge of some nerdy kids.
He was a cocky high-school bully, an a-hole jock,
rich kid right out of a 1980s teen movie.
And he didn't seem to care about much
beyond getting inside Nancy Wheeler's pants.
But that's just what the writers wanted
us to think because they had a trick up their sleeve
that was going to set Steve Harrington on the road
from bully to babysitter.
I promised to keep you [BLEEP]-heads-heads safe.
And that's exactly what I plan on doing.
But before we get into this theory of evolution,
why not take a moment to subscribe
to the Nerdstalgic channel?
The first season of Stranger Things
dropped on Netflix in July of 2016.
Although certainly evocative of modern serialized mystery shows
Lost or The 4400, the series was primarily a tribute
to iconic media of the 1980s and late 1970s.
Obvious influences include the films
of directors like Steven Spielberg, John Hughes, Rob
Reiner, and John Carpenter, as well as books by Stephen King.
And as a remix of elements from the '70s and '80s
most beloved classics, pretty much everyone and everything
in Stranger Things was drawn from a trope
that belonged to that era.
Wide-eyed Mike Wheeler, for example,
shares a lane with Elliott from ET.
Eleven has echoes of superpowered creepy
kids from Firestarter's Charlie McGee.
And Joyce Byers is more than reminiscent
of Close Encounters of the Third Kind's Jillian Guiler.
Played by actor Joe Keery, Steve Harrington
was built from the DNA of characters like Better Off
Dead's Roy Stalin, Pretty in Pink's Steff McKee,
and any number of '80s movie jerks played by William Zabka.
Did you just break my radio?
Yeah.
Don't touch it punk!
And while Steve was more nuanced and likable
than most of those characters, it
was pretty clear to anyone familiar with those tropes
that he probably wasn't the guy we were
supposed to be rooting for.
We first hear about Steve from Nancy Wheeler.
The formerly nerdy and plain suddenly pretty and popular
girl is relishing the attention she's
getting from her high school's most handsome star athlete.
You're going to be so cool now it's ridiculous.
No, I'm not.
But it's clearly driving a wedge between her and her
still nerdy best friend Barb.
We like Barb.
And we've all seen enough movies to know
that when good-hearted kids forsake
their friends for the popular crew, it rarely works out well.
So we're immediately a little concerned for both of them.
Then we actually meet Steve.
He's a suave, confident pretty boy
who is clearly way more experienced than Nancy.
He easily charms her into letting
him study in secret with her in her bedroom,
something she was reluctant to do at first.
Later, he pressures her into drinking,
which in turn causes her to pressure Barb into drinking.
As anyone who's ever seen Scream knows, in 1980s horror movies,
this kind of thing usually equates with sin and results
in death.
There are certain rules that one must abide by
in order to successfully survive a horror movie.
And here it's Barb who will pay the price
at the hands of the demogorgon.
Now, obviously, Steve didn't know that was going to happen.
But he's clearly a bad influence,
who applies peer pressure to get what he wants.
So we don't really trust him or his intentions toward Nancy.
Steve is also positioned as the romantic competition
for quiet oddball Jonathan Byers in a love triangle centered
around Nancy.
Along the way, Steve bullies Jonathan.
And the two eventually have a showdown,
where he rips into Jonathan, insulting
his mother, his family, and insinuating
that they were somehow at fault for his brother
Will's disappearance.
It all leads up to Jonathan punching the bully
in a moment that hearkens back to similar punches
from '80s films, like George McFly slugging Biff
Tannen in Back to the Future.
The two fight, and Steve loses.
Full of regret and defeat, he goes
to talk to Jonathan and accidentally stumbles
into Jonathan and Nancy's planned confrontation
with the demogorgon.
After he gets a look at the monster,
a stalwart Nancy orders a confused and terrified
Steve to go.
And he obeys, leaving them behind in a moment that
can only really be described as cowardly.
It seemed like the ending that was always
coming to Steve Harrington-- the big, tough bully scurrying away
in fear.
But at the last moment, he looks back at the house.
Inside, the demogorgon has Jonathan pinned to the floor.
And Nancy isn't in a position to do much about it.
And it is here, at this exact moment,
that the writers reveal Steve Harrington's high-school bully
persona was something of a misdirection
because the charming but cocky jerk he's really inspired
by turns out to be the one with a heart of gold--
Han Solo.
Yes, like Solo, even when he's free and clear of danger,
Steve comes back to save the day.
And it's an incredibly effective moment
because the show did such a great job of convincing us
that he was just a cocky a-hole bully trope.
Yet a rewatch shows that Steve was never really as bad as we
tend to remember him being.
The show just cleverly took advantage
of the expectations of him we formed
based on the tropes he most obviously resembled.
And he resembled them so closely because the character
was, in fact, originally an antagonist.
According to Keery, it was only due to his intervention
with the show's creators that Steve, who was originally so
bad he forced himself on Nancy, was reconceived and rewritten
as an aloof and jerky but ultimately
well-intentioned hero.
That's why, all along, the writers
were careful to make sure Steve never crossed any lines that
would make him irredeemable.
For example, his confrontation with Jonathan,
when he broke his camera, was in response to Jonathan
taking a lewd picture of Nancy without her knowledge.
Steve arguably goes too far.
And he shows off the practiced moves of an experienced bully.
But he's also not wrong.
And his angry attack on Jonathan in the alley
is clearly motivated by his mistaken belief
that Nancy had cheated on him.
His jealousy makes him look and act like a jerk.
But it's also very human and understandable,
a far cry from just a bully picking
on a weaker kid for sport.
Also, unlike most of the characters he's based on,
Steve is genuinely charming.
This is greatly a function of Keery's natural charisma.
But we have no trouble understanding
why someone like Nancy could be so into him.
Steve is also repeatedly shown in the company
of his more aggressive and sneering buddy, Tommy Hagan,
often pointing out that Tommy is being too harsh with someone.
Barbara, she's not here today.
I seriously have no idea who you're talking about.
Come on, don't be an ass, man.
Did-- did you see her leave last night or not?
It implied that, unlike Tommy, Steve had his limits.
But it was never clear if he was being sincere in those moments
or posturing for Nancy.
Steve's return to the house to fight the demogorgon,
however, tied all of those beads together
and proved that he had a conscience all along.
It was incredibly well earned.
And it instantly made him a fan favorite character.
The masterful way this transformation is handled
makes a striking contrast to the similar transformation
undergone by the show's other bully, Billy Hargrove, who also
eventually has a heroic turn.
Unlike Steve, Billy is genuinely scary from the first moment
we meet him.
He yells at his sister, Max, to intimidate her,
terrorizes her by speeding at her friends in his car,
and becomes enraged that she's interested in Lucas,
even making some comments that imply his racism.
I'm older than you.
And something you learn is that there
are certain types of people in this world that you stay away
from.
Season three gives Billy a traumatic past
but no redemption arc.
So all of the genuinely disturbing things he did
are left unresolved when he makes his heel-face turn
and fights the mind flayer to help save Eleven.
The moment isn't completely ineffective,
but it feels unearned, especially when
compared to the care and planning that clearly went
into Steve's season one arc.
And that arc started paying dramatic dividends immediately
in season two.
Overshadowed in school by Billy and on the outs with Nancy,
Steve finds himself increasingly hanging out with
and bonding with Mike, Lucas, Max, and especially Dustin.
Drawn into their adventures, he protects the kids
from demogorgons and comes to act
as something of an authority figure, leader,
and guardian to the party, or, in other words, a babysitter.
Fans called him Mom Steve.
And Keery very much took that role to heart.
Hey, hey, hey!
This is not happening.
But the pairing of the defanged bully with the kids
worked so well.
It became Steve's main shtick moving forward.
And by season three, he's about as far
from the arrogant, stylish rich boy of season one
as he can get.
Cut off by his family, he's forced
to work at a mall ice cream shop, where
he has to dress in a goofy sailor suit
and take orders from the quirky band nerd Robin.
And when the action gets going, he
finds himself watching over Dustin and Erica,
once again cast as the babysitter.
In season four, Steve watches over Dustin, Lucas, and Max
once again, acting as the protector.
But the season also reveals that all the babysitting stuff
wasn't just for fun.
It was always going somewhere.
Steve's connection to the kids becomes
the thing that shows Nancy he's become a better man.
Later in the Upside Down, he explains to Nancy
that he's capable of change.
And the thumb she gave him when she broke up
with him made him a better man and that he still loves her.
It's an incredibly moving moment that
pays off four seasons of carefully
plotted emotional storytelling.
But more fundamentally, Steve Harrington's arc
showed the dramatic power that can
come from subverting tired old tropes,
like the 1980s school bully.
Patiently playing into and then finally pulling the rug out
from the audience's expectations made Steve's story
one of the more memorable and moving threads
of the entire series.
He learned from his mistakes and became a better man
in a believable way, exactly the kind of guy
you'd be happy to have looking over your kids
when demogorgons are about.
So what do you think?
Are you a Steve Harrington fan?
And did you find his arc from bully to hero convincing?
Let us down in the comments below.
And if you enjoyed this video, you'll
definitely find others you like if you check out
the rest of the channel.
As always, thank you for subscribing to Nerdstalgic.
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