Woman of the Month: Max Mayfield

Maxine “Max” Mayfield from Stranger Things

It was back in 2019 that I included Eleven on my annual retrospective of notable female characters that I’d watched across the year… which means I can stretch my rule of not having more than one girl/woman featured from a single story, since I haven’t spotlighted any other characters from Stranger Things in one of these monthly posts.

The Duffer Brothers were generally quite good with their female characters (not groundbreaking, but certainly not terrible either) though it interested me that Max ticks quite a few clichéd “tomboy” boxes when she’s first introduced, as well as getting pushed straight into a love triangle. They not only play around a little with the Seamus is a Girl trope considering she first comes to the boys’ attention as “Mad Max” on the scoreboards at the arcade, but have her ride a skateboard around town and be rather abrasive in the face of Lucas and Dustin’s interest in her. She’s a tomboy, but also a tough girl.

Thankfully the love triangle stuff passes pretty quickly, as her most significant relationships early on are with her stepbrother Billy (who is abusive towards her), Mike (who is antagonistic toward her simply because he perceives her as a replacement to Eleven) and eventually Eleven (who also gives her the cold shoulder at their introduction).

To be honest, I never had a problem with Eleven initially rebuffing Max’s overtures of friendship, as she had just spent a year watching turgid soap operas on cable television before seeing Mike engage in low-key flirting with Max after a year-long absence. I knew a friendship between the girls was forthcoming, and they get their own subplot in season three, in which they investigate the increasingly erratic behaviour of Billy and his possible connection to the Mind Flayer. Plus, their shopping montage to Madonna’s “Material Girl” is a delight.

By this point Max isn’t just there to be Affirmative Action Girl or to supplement the boys’ storylines, though it isn’t until season four that her story really starts to kick off. Her grief and depression over the death of her stepbrother makes her an emotionally vulnerable target to Vecna, who needs four victims to kill to open the gates to the Upside Down. Realizing what’s happening to her gives Max an edge, and I’d go so far to say the “Running Up That Hill” scene is probably the best sequence of the entire show. Still, that season ends on a harrowing note: Max ends up in a coma from which she might never awake.

Well, of course she does, and though I’m disappointed that more wasn’t made of her friendship with El at the time, her reunion with Lucas ended up being one of the big successes of the entire show. The scene in which she finally wakes up in his arms easily made it into my list of best film/television scenes of 2025.

I firmly believe that the Duffers did not have all five seasons of this show fully mapped out in advance – in fact we know this from various interviews and behind-the-scenes footage. But in that respect I find Max’s trajectory as a character rather fascinating. Her initial introduction as “another girl” designed to shake up the boys’ dynamic wasn’t hugely promising, and yet her bad girl persona is explained and explored in several interesting ways, and she becomes an absolute lynchpin of the narrative from season three onwards. Say what you will about the rest, but her increased presence in the plot feels very organic and elegant. Heck, I’d go so far as to say that she and Holly are more essential in defeating Vecna than any of the boys!

From a Sixth Ranger to an intrinsic member of the party with her own original moniker of “Zoomer,” Sadie Sink is now all set to become the Breakout Star of the franchise, especially since she’s next appearing in an MCU film. But I’m sure she’ll remember Max fondly, as this tough little redhead ended up being one of the understated highlights of Stranger Things.

Reading/Watching Log #125

To the northern hemisphere, April means springtime and sunshine. For us in Aotearoa, it’s the start of the grim march into the depths of winter. And though I’m fully acclimatized to Christmas being a summer holiday; can handle Halloween taking place while the buds are blooming, there’s something about Easter that demands daffodils and baby chicks, none of which are anywhere to be seen at the moment. In fact, this display at the mall caught my eye, demonstrating the incongruity of the season with the holiday’s symbols:

I’ve finally reached the end of watching Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland adaptations, having completed the last three this month – including the famous MGM film, which capped the whole thing off. I’ll continue with Baum’s books, as there are still plenty of Oz stories left to be read, but I’ve since moved onto a reread of Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea books. I’ve never read the very last one in the series, though for now I’m sticking to the original trilogy.

Another theme for April is Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde. Having seen both The Importance of Being Earnest and a Macbeth-inspired ballet at the theatre last month, I naturally had to seek out more performances and adaptations – plus, I dearly wanted to see Hamnet, especially after Jessie Buckley’s win at the Oscars.

BBC's Robin Hood: The Bechdel Test

It’s the twentieth anniversary of the BBC’s Robin Hood, which aired its first episode on the 26th April, 2006. In the leadup to this date, I’ve been trying to think up ways of commemorating the occasion, and along with linking last year’s ranking of the show’s thirty-nine episodes on Tumblr, I’ve edited together all the scenes of the show passing the Bechdel Test:

And because I’m anal retentive about this sort of thing, here’s a second video of female characters on the show not passing the Bechdel Test:

As I’m sure you know, the Bechdel-Wallace Test is a metric designed to measure the role of women and their interactions within any give media. For a work of fiction to pass the test, it requires a) two women who b) have a conversation about c) something other than a man.

It’s obviously not a fail-proof method of ensuring that your story will be a feminist triumph, as plenty of awful films can throw in a couple of superfluous lines between two women discussing local news, while superior films can fail the test by dint of having only a single female character. It is not a way to judge the quality of stories themselves, and was never designed to be in the first place. It’s no more or less than an interesting thought experiment, and a baseline gauge of how female characters are written.

I found it quite fascinating to parse Robin Hood through the requirements of the Bechdel Test, though you won’t be surprised to learn it wasn’t a sterling example of the test in action (it clocked in at seven minutes and ten seconds of women talking to each other in a show that ran for approximately 1,755 minutes altogether). Still, sometimes you have to be realistic about what a story is trying to offer. This was always skewed towards a young male demographic, and you could probably say the same for most Robin Hood adaptations.

Still, that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in the role of women in this show, which is why I put together this edit in the first place. And I have by necessity been very generous with the conditions of the test…

Top Twelve Best Film/Television Moments of 2025

Oh dear, it’s April and this post was meant to be up at the end of last year. Not that I’ve done one of these in a while, as I simply haven’t had enough material to fill up all twelve spots in a “best moments of film and television” list since 2023.

In any case, this is exactly what it says on the tin: my twelve favourite scenes, twists, moments or concepts from film or television media that was released in 2025 (though I give myself a little bit of wriggle room and occasionally allow some material from the year before)...

Woman of the Month: Nala

Nala from Sinbad 

One of my favourite things to do on these monthly posts is to showcase extremely obscure female characters, and this may well be the most obscure one I’ve ever written about. Nala, played by Estella Daniels, appeared in only seven of the thirteen episodes of Sinbad, a 2012 show that was cancelled after only one season. So, why bring her up at all?

Despite this take on the legend being all but forgotten about, Nala left an impression on me. I’ve seen the actress since then (Death in Paradise, Da Vinci’s Demons) and despite her limited screentime in this show, she’s the focus of its best episode. “Old Man of the Sea” is a variation on all those stories about Death and the Maiden, generally revolving around a plot in which the latter is forced into matrimony with the embodiment of Death (or a fey, or even the devil himself) only to outwit him at the last moment.

But Nala is also granted a sense of history and backstory the other characters don’t, as it’s clear from the very first episode that she and her father are running from something. She becomes part of the Providence crew as the requisite highborn and educated one (like Djaq or Toph) and is guided by a sense of morality and idealism. As well as her sense of entitlement, there is also duty – the very thing which prevents her from reneging on the deal her father made with Death when he finally catches up to her.

For whatever reason, Nala was written out of the show at about the halfway mark and promptly replaced by a white woman (the optics – not great), but while she lasted she was the heart of the crew. Perhaps she would have returned in time – we’ll never know.

Reading/Watching Log #124

Autumn again. It feels we’ve had two weeks of summer and six months of winter, and now things are turning back towards the cold. Still, there’s a beauty to fall, especially in clear weather. I was walking through the park in the sunshine the other day and was struck by the ambiance: there’s a strange sort of darkness to the light, the shadows felt deeper, and the leaves are just beginning to turn even though the sky was solid blue.

I’m still seeking out variations on the stories of L.F. Baum, J.M. Barrie and Lewis Carroll, and in doing so it was interesting to note that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz each have definitive versions (obviously, the Disney and MGM films). And yet that’s not quite the case for Peter Pan, even though there are more adaptations out there of his story than the other two – by quite a far margin. I suppose that makes sense; if you’ve got what’s considered the iconic version of something, nobody else wants to compete with it.

More to the point when it comes to the multitude of adaptations, Peter Pan has been staged and retold so many times that many of the latest versions are aware of the weight of their predecessors, and so end up musing on the nature of the story itself.

This is the thousandth time Hook and Peter have crossed swords, the millionth that Peter and Wendy have said goodbye to each other. She can’t go and he can’t stay, and the legacy of that is a bit like the underlying theme of Hadestown: the story taken on a life and tragedy of its own, and so every time we tell it again, we hope it might turn out differently. But no, Peter Pan is still out there somewhere, as young as he ever was.

There’s no understating how deeply these stories have soaked into our culture. Remember when Neo followed the White Rabbit at the beginning of The Matrix? Or when Ofelia wore an Alice dress and pinafore in Pan’s Labyrinth? Or that a vampire movie could be called The Lost Boys and everyone would know the reference? Likewise, we all know the connotations Kingo is making when he calls Sprite “Tinker Bell” in The Eternals – not just her eternal youth, but her unrequited love for Ikaris. The term “flying monkeys” is a recognizable term to describe people who submit to narcissists and do their bidding. Then there’s Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, which exists in a much more tragic context. These stories are everywhere.

Finally, I told myself that I would try and cut down on the length of these blog posts, as they’re getting increasingly long despite my lack of free time to actually write them. Then of course, I end up writing what amounts to three giant essays on Peter Pan. But for April, I really am truly going to try and cut back…

Standing Tall #36

Back to it!

This giraffe sculpture was a rather poignant one, as it was inspired by children who wear the Beads of Courage – that is, the unique strings of beads that children undergoing cancer treatment receive, one bead representing each milestone test or procedure they go through.

The name of the sculpture is Hero, which was decided upon after the Child Cancer Foundation put out a call for suggestions. One contributor proposed Hero as: “this is what all our children are to their loved ones.” Once again painted by Ira Mitchell-Kirk (his name pops up a lot; I can only assume he was commissioned to paint several of these giraffes) and sponsored by the Child Cancer Foundation, it depicts the large glass beads that make up these mementoes against a bright blue background.

It was situated in Merivale Mall, which was a bit of an odd venue for it (surely the hospital would have been a better fit?) but as you can tell from all the Christmas decorations, I visited during the holidays!