Stranger Things Season 3 Review: Grow Up, Already!
Like many a rich high school kid, popularity might be the worst thing that ever happened to Stranger Things. Arriving to initially very minimal fanfare on Netflix in summer 2016, it took a few months before the zeitgeist really caught on and blew the show up to its place as one of streaming's most identifiable hits. Its first season was a charming if derivative little mixtape of creature features and John Hughes-era coming of age movies. With a season 2 renewal, an expanded budget, and a newly-minted star in Millie Bobby Brown, I anticipated an all-out sophomore effort where the show could really make its mark.
Instead, it did more of the same, and unfortunately, the third season of Stranger Things, even after a two-year gap, hasn't seemed to evolve much beyond that.
To business: It's summer in Hawkins, Indiana, and our "Stranger Things kids" are now officially "Stranger Things teens." Eleven and Mike make out nonstop, Dustin has a girlfriend he met at camp, and there's a new giant-ass mall that neon-covered youths flock to every day of the week. The upbeat summer setting is a welcome change from the moody, bleak falls of previous Stranger Things stories, and helps Hawkins feel more lived-in, like it's out there, somewhere, existing all the time while we drop by occasionally to check out some drama.
And what drama! Bad Boy Billy, the irredeemably racist bully from Season 2, is a hot lifeguard now, and his deeply-entrenched and vile prejudices are simply... forgotten. Billy finds himself on the wrong end of the Mind Flayer (that swirling black smoke kaiju from Season 2) and all hell breaks loose in the small town once again, with dimensional rifts, exploding rats, and an army of zombified Hawkins citizens in tow this time around.
Once again, it's up to our ragtag children to nullify the new (actually, old) threat. This time, they're split up into groups for extended periods, which presumably was to help alleviate the child actors' increasingly busy schedules, but also serves to fracture the main thing this show has going for it, which is the interplay between the kids.
Elsewhere, Winona Ryder's Joyce Byers (the first name on the cast list but, three years in, still the show's most frustratingly under-baked character) and David Harbour's Hopper continue their strange, occasionally charming courtship amidst the sci-fi chaos. The two have chemistry, but it's hamstrung by The Duffer Brothers once again deciding to take a character in an entirely different direction for no reason. This time, Hopper has to have the very concept of safe communication and boundaries explained to him by Joyce when he agonizes over telling Eleven to stop getting to first base with Mike in his own house. Stranger Things has a hard time moving forward, but watching it and its characters actually regress is another thing entirely.
Similarly, the otherworldly threat this time out is... nothing we haven't seen before: Nondescript CGI flesh monsters emerge from the shadows, ones that are neither creative nor are they frightening. The addition of Soviet Russians as the season's Big Bad is a fun nod to the action movies of the era, but, again, it's nothing we haven't seen before. Beat for beat, Stranger Things goes through the expected motions with seemingly zero ambition to tell a larger story. And that's kind of fine! At its core, this will always be a coming-of-age love letter before it's ever an unpredictable genre show, but there's only so much charm it can bleed from its talented cast before we realize that, while we're watching these kids grow, change, and discover themselves, they're in a show that's absolutely terrified of doing the same.
Originally Appeared on GQ
