Find shady newspaper articles

>find shady newspaper articles
> find out state troopers were ordered to go to the quarry by some government or military body
>punch out a state trooper and find out that state troopers/government have faked a young boy's death with a fake body
>instead of driving to nearest town/city with the body and telling the press, or alerting a large enough number of people that the government won't be able to cover it up, you go alone to the government base,
>even though the state trooper is abou to regain consciousness and report what happened.

Pretty shit writing if you ask me.

It's basically The Strain-tier writing where the main characters do absolutely nothing to alert the authorities about the vampire virus even though they easily have the means to

use spoilers

Who is he going to report it to? Everyone is compromised by the people he's reporting

Please tell me what he should have done instead, genius. The writing is fine. Hop is a fucking badass.

Shit cop desu. I would stab him in the eye.

the following are much better plans than going by yourself to a government base where CIA you suspect a cover-up is occuring.

1. go to a place where there are too many people to silence and show them, like the school. steal teh body, hide somewhere until the next morning, go to the highschool, go into the staff room and show all 30+ teachers and alert press.
2. take the fake body go straight to press. we have seen that the laboratory is constantly monitoring all phone calls listening for calls related to their experimens, so this plan is likely not to have worked, but he has no way of knowing that the government is listening to all phone calls relating to their experiments so it still would have been a more logical plan than going to the government base by himself.

ESPECIALLY when he should know that the state trooper he punched out is going to wake up in a few minutes and alert the shady government agency.

given that he knows he only has a few minutes until the government is going to start looking for him, he should try to spread the word and raise awareness as much as possible sine the government is much less likely to try and silence him if his death won't do anything to stop the truth getting out.

They could easily attack Hop's character and make people disregard his evidence. He knows this, there's a reason he looks at the alcohol and meds laying all around his house when he wakes up.

Additionally, he is not trying to expose their operation, he's trying to find Will, look at with that motive in mind instead.

>and then they leave him alive after he has broken into the base and knows about your coverup, even though you were willing to kill a cook and make it look like suicide simply for encountering the escaped kid.


even shittier writing.

Can anyone think of a single reason why they would leave the sheriff alive rather than killing him and making it look like suicide?

This gets posted a lot. My idea at this point is that 1. they had to establish Brenner & Co. as a credible threat early on in the story. And, 2. the diner owner had direct contact with Eleven, where Hopper didn't. He saw the gate though, but would have no idea what it is. Who would believe him anyway?

1. is still bad writing. why would an organisation become less threatening after a couple of days? "oh we were willing to murder US citizens and over up their deaths before but not now".

2. is marginally better but still really weak. Hop knows far more than the diner owner did and has shown that he's willing and able to break into their base, sneak into restricted areas, overpower or threaten their staff. he clearly has huge potential to ruin their plans and expose them in the future and they don't really have a single reason to need to keep him alive, and we know that they've killed other US citizens for less.

So really, it's just plain bad writing.

More could have been explained directly, but having every detail spelt out to you is a very dry style of story telling. Speculation and hint drops are more fun and they keep people talking. Maybe that was what they intended. Hard to say.

the best and most sensible explanation I've heard is that they didn't kill Hopper because they didn't know how much he knew.
If they had killed them they could have easily set themselves up to getting exposed in a way (like Hopper telling everyone at the police station what he found, and if he didn't come back alive he would have been killed by the government)
They bugged his house so they could find out how much he knew and if he had told anyone, and as a form of intimidation (they set up pills, beer and his gun on the table right next to him) saying that if he pulls that shit again they'll arrange his death.

Not to mention that some small town diner killing himself won't draw as much attention as a police chief who suddenly winds up dead as well in the midst of an investigation which suspects a suspicious branch of the government.

There's also speculation that there's more to Hopper's background that would give reason to him not being killed off early (he's clearly intelligent and well trained, he could have been part of an organization or something before)

what's being asked for isn't for every detail to be explained but for logical writing.

it is not logical to kill the diner owner but keep the sheriff alive.
Any explanation provided for this is in terms of story telling tropes "Oh they needed to establish the bad gys as a threat early on" , "Oh but it wouldn't be satisfying for his story arc if he died"
rather than what actually makes sense and is plausible for the plot and for the characters in the story to do.
-lots of reasons to kill the sheriff
-no reasons to keep him alive
-previously established as being willing to kill anyone who might expose them or who knows about their experiments

This struck me as odd too, but I don't think they had a good option for dealing with Hop. He was a much more important figure as a sheriff of the town than the diner owner and there were already so many strange things happening they were trying to coverup. To fake the death or disappearance of a high profile member of the community like a sheriff, especially one who was in the middle of investigating two really freak cases (The "suicide" and Will's disappearance) would have raised even more questions.

I'm more surprised they didn't try to bribe or threaten him into doing what they wanted.

Probably didn't like the idea of being found after committing suicide via 2 gunshots to the back of the head.

This reminds me of something that happened in real life, but i forgot who.

I didn't notice the gun as a potential form of intimidation, nice catch. About the bugging, I have made similar assumptions in other threads and I agree with them.

The only reason I can think of for them to keep Hopper alive is that they don't actually need to kill him, and would probably like to avoid having more people die and bring even more media attention to the town and themselves.

When the diner owner dies, Will is the only one missing, and only his family and Hopper know he might be gone (they're still not sure). So, Brenner etc. believed one random suicide wouldn't be too noticeable (no missing kids yet as far as they know). When hopper enters their lab, there is already a lot of media attention around the town, so the circumstances are different.

>Maybe that was what they intended
This is from an interview with the directors

>but what we wanted to do with the show — and this season specifically — was mostly seeing the mystery and these extraordinary things through the eyes of these ordinary characters. By the end of the show they don’t know or understand everything. That is purposeful.

Seems like it.

He did what you're supposed to do in this situation and disclosed the story to somebody at a major newspaper (with orders to leak the information if he dies) while he continues his investigation.

>instead of driving to nearest town/city with the body and telling the press, or alerting a large enough number of people that the government won't be able to cover it up, you go alone to the government base
That's just fucking gullible, you must be young.

>He works for the government now.
>Falsifying a chief police officers death isn't easy.
>Having him under their influence allows them to manipulate the police in the area.
>He's a potential lure for Eleven (if she's still alive).
>He's one of only two people to survive a trip to the Upside Down. This makes him valuable to them.
>He's proven himself to be extremely capable, if he's cooperative (which he has proven to be) he's better off as an asset than dead.

Lots of reasons.

More from an interview with directors

>With the first episode we wanted someone to die very quickly — which was the Benny character [the diner cook played by Chris Sullivan] — someone set up who looks like a substantial character and dies. And then Barb who looks like a substantial character. We wanted it to feel unsafe.

I don't think this is inherently bad writing. There is intent behind their deaths from the writers, and internal logic if you look for it in the story. I'm going to stop bumping this dead thread now.