TV Saturday ANGELA’S BASHES
She’s got nasty stuff: meet the new mean girl on Season 4 of ‘Stranger Things’
IF there’s one thing you can trust “Stranger Things ”to deliver on, it’s ’80s movie tropes. And that’s exactly what the Netflix series does in Season 4, with the introduction of Elodie Grace Orkin’s perfectly hatable mean girl, Angela.
Spoilers for Stranger Things Season 4 past this point.
In the new season of the series, Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) is seemingly living a perfect, normal life in Lenora Hills, Calif. Or at least, that’s what she’s telling Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard) in her letters to him. In fact, she’s living a perfectly terrible life, mostly thanks to a severe case of bullying from Angela.
Angela, herself, is California perfect. She’s blonde. She’s pretty. She’s got tons of friends who are just as mean as her. And unlike
Chrissy Cunningham (Grace Van Dien) back in Hawkins, she doesn’t seem to have any extra depth to her, layers that reveal the real humanity and pathos behind her character.
When Eleven (called Jane at school) presents a sweet diorama depicting Jim Hopper (David Harbour), who El thinks is dead, as her hero, Angela calls out that the assignment is supposed to be real heroes, not some sheriff from a small town in Indiana. The teacher, somewhat trapped by the logic, can’t help much, and Eleven ends up finishing her presentation through tears, and laughter from the class, led by Angela. And the way Orkin delivers the lines — hey, she’s just asking the questions we’re all thinking! — are so loathsome, it makes you root for Eleven even more.
…And that’s the purpose of this type of villain, right? We’ve had years of finding out bullies have hidden depths, need help themselves, and ultimately are redeemable on TV and in movies. Angela is not that. She’s gross. Orkin revels in scenes, like when she “accidentally” crushes the diorama in the school, leading to the currently powerless Eleven trying — and failing — to psychically push Angela away with her mind.
The worst of it is at a skating rink, though. Eleven takes Mike there, telling him that Angela is her best friend, and she goes to parties there all the time. And when Angela catches wind of the lie, she leans into it, forcing Eleven to skate with her while she and her friends surround her, doing the hand gesture, laughing, and ultimately splashing her with a milkshake.
The punctuation to this plotline is that enraged and unable to hit back at Angela with powers, Eleven walks up to her and smashes her in the face with a roller-skate, breaking her nose. Orkin, again, plays this perfectly… She doesn’t start screaming immediately; she pauses, stunned as the blood pours down her face. It’s not that she doesn’t feel the pain, it’s that she can’t believe her actions had an actual, negative result. For Eleven, this only doubles down on the idea she’s wrestling with all season, whether she’s a monster or a superhero. The skate attack seems to display that she’s the real monster. But it’s Angela who is the actual monster, through and through.
We don’t see Angela again after that, though her parents do have Eleven cuffed and arrested in front of the whole neighborhood. And given the way the rest of Volume 1’s episodes go down, chances are we might not be headed back to Lenora Hills in the season’s final two episodes, which premiere
July 1. But if we do, hopefully Angela gets her comeuppance, once again. Getting skate-slapped isn’t enough of a punishment for how flawlessly Orkin plays this reprehensible teen.
Orkin is a relative newbie to acting, having previously appeared as “child singer” on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” Young Charlie on “Saving Paradise” and as Kyle on Brat TV’s “Stage Fright.” The best fun fact about Orkin is that seeing Mille Bobby Brown act in Stranger Things was what inspired her to go into acting. Just a few short years later, Brown is smacking her in the face with a skate, every actor’s dream.