Ten minutes into the second episode of Stranger Things’ third season, I breathed a sigh of relief. It was just after Dustin barrels into the ice cream shop where Steve now works, to tell him that he’s overheard a secret Russian radio transmission.
“What does that mean?” asks a blank-faced Steve. Dustin looks him dead in the eye, his goofy perm spilling out beneath a baseball cap from his recent camp trip. “It means, Steve, we could be heroes. True. American. Heroes.”
This is the moment when season three of Stranger Things truly lays its cards on the table. While the previous season went heavy on brooding peril from the very opening episode, drawing out Will’s slow decline across the entire season, the third installment of Netflix’s nostalgia-laden sci-fi series isn’t afraid to have fun. A lot of fun.
The opening scene sets up entirely new stakes for the show, with Russian scientists attempting to pry open the creepy world of the Upside Down. The sight of so many Russian engineers grappling with mid-80s machinery will give fans of Chernobyl a sinking feeling in their stomach, but the show undercuts this geopolitical tension with a season that plays out like an extended adventure movie laden with a healthy dose of teen drama.
And that is where Stranger Things has always excelled. You might come for the metaphysical horrors, but you’ll stay for the teenage awkwardness. This latest season finds the group of friends just making the uneasy leap into adulthood. Mike and El spend every waking hour necking in her room, much to Hopper’s chagrin, while Dustin has fallen in love with a girl he met on camp, although she isn’t returning the messages he sends her from his ham radio.
These fledgling relationships drive a wedge between the group, which culminates in an emotional confrontation between Mike and Will in episode three. “I mean, what did you think, really? That we were never going to get girlfriends, we were just going to sit in the basement all day and play games for the rest of our lives?” Mike asks Will. “Yeah. I guess I did. I really did,” says Will as he cycles off in the pouring rain and thunder. Clearly he has learned nothing about pathetic fallacy from the previous two seasons.
Even the older characters are stuck in the horrible void between childhood and adulthood. Despite being a surrogate dad for the younger teens, Steve is stuck in a dead-end job serving scoops of ice cream to demanding kids while Nancy’s dreams of being a reporter are constantly rebuffed by the misogynistic management at Hawkins’ local newspaper.
All of these minor dramas are balanced by the genuinely scary moments in each episode. Season two opted for a looming, ethereal horror, but season three is more upfront about its nastiness. There are kidnappings, car crashes, gunfights and all kinds of exploding things that really ramp the horror up a couple of notches from the previous two seasons. While the last season started on a scary note and slowly increased the intensity, Hans Zimmer-style, over nine episodes, season three is more like a Pixies album – chaotic, unpredictable and brilliant.
This is thanks, in a large part, to a set of excellent performances across the board. Although it’s hard to imagine cramming even more talent into the cast, the core crew from the previous two series is supplemented by Robin (Maya Hawke), Steve’s eccentric and sarcastic colleague at Scoops Ahoy, who helps the show plumb new emotional depths in the final couple of episodes.
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What else can you expect from season three? There will be monsters, or some other creatures with lots of teeth and no manners. Hopper will be inept, Joyce will be intense. The residents of Hawkins will remain weirdly nonplussed about the apparent destruction of their town. You’ll recognise all of this from the first two seasons – but you won’t really care.
And that’s because Stranger Things never was about the monsters. It’s a series about growing up, about the confusion of childhood and the pain of leaving it all behind. The show seemed to forget that at some point during the last season, but season three has put things back on track again with episodes that pirouette between real horror, swashbuckling adventure and perfectly-pitched drama with astonishing ease.
Of course, fans expecting a season of tension, terrifying monsters and strange moments in the Upside Down will be more than satisfied with this season. One of its creepiest – and most successful – elements is how much of the horror happens above ground. For the first time in the show’s three seasons, it feels like the link between the Upside Down and Hawkins really is breaking down, with truly terrifying consequences. For the first time in Stranger Things it's the humans that are really terrifying, not the denizens of the upside down.
The show’s writers, Matt and Ross Duffer, have hinted that the Stranger Things team has sketched out a story arc that will take the show to four or five seasons in total. In season two, the brothers misstepped by taking us away from Hawkins and back into El’s past, leaving behind the best thing about the entire show: the chemistry between the main cast. Season three makes up for that misstep in spades.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
