When it comes to my specific thoughts on the first two seasons, I thought season 1 was an excellent setup to this universe. There was a lot of mystery and intrigue that all paid off with the revelations at the end. Add to that an excellent cast of characters in a perfect combination of Steven Spielberg meets Stephen King and boom. We've got ourselves a show. With season 2 I was ready to jump right and explore this world in more depth. Turns out they decided to use the same exact formula as the first season, that being spending a lot of time with the mystery and intrigue as they set something new up and waited until the end of the season to reveal what was going on. This kinda threw me off a bit because I was ready to jump in from episode 1 in picking up where we left off. I didn't need three or four episodes setting things up again, especially since these seasons aren't that long. Well, as it turns out, the Duffer Brothers are treating each season like a movie rather than a season of a TV show. They all need to have a beginning, middle and end, while preferably being able to stand on their own. I honestly roll my eyes at this. I like the idea of everything being interconnected rather than each season only being loosely connected to the previous one. But whatever. Life moves on.
Thus while I did enjoy season 2, I thought the first half was kinda boring. While the last few episodes were phenomenal, I finished the season not feeling 100 percent satisfied. I was also fine with the little spin-off episode setting up a family of other laboratory experiments. It gave me a bit of an X-Men vibe as they seemed to be setting up a bunch of people with powers like Millie Bobbie-Brown's Eleven. Or El. But I suppose that's a conversation for another day because everyone else hated it, so the Duffer Brothers seem to have completely scrapped that idea. It was also nice to have El there with the rest of the gang for the whole third season instead of just showing up at the end due to a series of events that pushed her away in season 2. Going into season 3, I didn't really know what to expect and that made me happy. I purposely avoided all trailers, which is what I try to do when it comes to my TV shows. If I'm already invested in the show, I don't like previews of what comes next, especially since a lot of those give away way too much plot. In this instance, I'm glad I didn't because I just now went back and finally watched those trailers and, yeah, now you know why I don't watch TV show trailers. There was WAY too much that they showed, plenty of which from the final episode.
That's the essence of it, anyways. Instead of Will being the one controlled by the Mind Flayer this time around, town bully and hottie Billy Hargrove gets caught at the wrong place at the wrong time when trying to go on a weird and scandalous date with Mrs. Wheeler and becomes the Mind Flayer's new host, seemingly having no control over his own humanity, that possibly because he has no genuine human connection to help him out given that he's either trying to angrily push everyone away or seduce older women. Karma, I suppose? Dacre Montgomery certainly does a great job at possessed Billy. He's one of the highlights of this season, excelling in his expanded role with more to do than just being an idiot. In the meantime, the rest of our cast ends up getting split up into three groups. Dustin, Steve, Steve's new friend and coworker Robin, and Lucas's little sister Erica discover the secret Russian hidden base under the mall and investigate that. Joyce Byers drags police chief Jim Hopper around as she's trying to figure out why all the magnets in the town aren't working, while ending up getting chased by a Russian Arnold Schwarzenegger ("Terminator" anyone?). Meanwhile, the rest of the gang are trying to hunt down this Mind Flayer that's starting to cause issues.
As I said, I liked the flow of this season better than season 2, but again there is a whole lot of setup. We start early on with Billy getting possessed, then a slow chain reaction begins, with each of the individual parties picking up on a slightly different piece of the puzzle. It was kinda frustrating to me that the season was taking its sweet time for everyone to fully connect the dots. We were in episode four or five before things really started to pick up and come together, which is fine if this was a 10-12 episode series, but there was only eight episodes here, meaning that there was only a few episodes left in the season when I felt like we had just begun. If I'm not mistaken, it was the final episode when all parties finally came together. I would've liked three or four episodes after that, but instead we just had the finale. I think what helped me overcome these specific complaints is that I was invested in each of the individual story arcs. I ended up feeling bad for Billy being controlled by the Mind Flayer. The chemistry between Steve and Robin was hilariously perfect. When they were joined by Dustin, then later Erica, their little band was a romp. I liked all the bantering between Joyce and Hopper because it felt real. Then all the teenage drama with the rest of them was engaging.
This is what really makes this show work. They've built up these characters so well that I find myself invested in them well enough that I can watch them interact. And our main group of kids have all arrived at the stage of life where they're trying to figure things out. They're not really kids anymore. But they're not old enough to be fully mature, thus they all make mistakes. Mike doesn't know how to handle things when Hopper takes him for a drive and yells at him for essentially doing nothing but make out with El all day. Thus Mike lies to El the next day, which hurts her. She's even less aware of how to deal with things given her past, which is why I liked all the girl time with her and Max. Then we have Mike, Lucas and Will trying to figure out what in the heck to do, so they resort to complaining like teenage boys. Will then wants to distract everyone by playing their games, but Mike and Lucas act like snobby teenagers, basically calling Will's ideas childish, causing a rift there. And even though the actual plot with the Mind Flayer is only inching along, there was a lot of character growth. Then we have the likes of Nancy, Jonathan, Steve and Robin being too old for the high school stuff, especially given the actors' ages, trying to figure out how to manage life after high school.
To that resolution, though, I'm a bit conflicted. Yeah, the actual action sequences were a ton of fun, but they did one thing that kinda bothers me. They killed off a character out of the blue without there really being the need to do so. Given what I said earlier, I never felt our main characters were ever in danger. None of them ever got captured by a monsters. No one we cared about got infected and turned into monster goop. No one was ever really in a situation where you feared for their life. But then in the final battle they randomly decided to kill Hopper, one of the show's best and most popular characters. And it didn't seem necessary. He was out there fighting the Russian Terminator. In said fight, he acted a bit careless and put himself in a position to go kaboom when the machine blew up. Even though he ended up beating Russion Terminator, he just stood there and gave Joyce the OK to blow him up when she blew up the Russians' weapon. I felt like she could've waited 10 seconds for him to walk back to her so they could turn the switch together. Thus his death didn't feel like a necessary sacrifice for the plot. It felt like the token death. Like the writers sat in a room and said, "Who are we going to kill this season?" Thus it felt a bit cheap to me. Not properly planned out.
At the same time, though, is he really dead? The final scene of the season, the one that teases the next season, is the one where the Russians feed the random Russian dude to the Demogorgon. Surprise! The Demogorgon is still alive! Either that or the Russians have a second one captured. However, before that's revealed, one of the Russians says something to the effect of, "No, not the American." That in response to them picking out which prisoner to feed to the Demogorgon. Said American is Hopper, right? It has to be. We didn't actually see him explode. He just kinda disappeared and it was assumed he died, especially after the newspaper headline said he died. But we didn't see it. He's coming back next season? If not, that's dumb. But if so, that's acceptable. I guess we'll have to wait for season 4 to figure that out. And I'm fine with a cliffhanger ending like that. As far as the rest of said resolution, that all made sense. After Joyce's second boyfriend gets killed in two years, she's had enough of this town. Her moving away makes sense. That means Will and Johnathan are leaving with her. And since Hopper is "dead," El gets adopted into that family and she's leaving, too, thus splitting up the gang. But that didn't feel forced. That felt real and emotional.
In summary, what I've always said about "Stranger Things" is that it's 80's nostalgia vomit. And I don't necessarily mean that in a negative way. It's just that bringing back the 80's is one of the biggest fads of our modern era of media. If a TV show or a movie can just shove 80's nostalgia down your throat, then we'll all eat it up. Can you call that a gimmick? Perhaps. But I often am just as guilty of buying into it. I loved "Ready Player One" and that was mostly just 80's nostalgia vomit as well. That's why I think "Stranger Things" become so popular. It was 80's nostalgia vomit done right. Yes, it shoved all of the 80's down your throat, but it also captured the spirit of why we all love that era. It was more than just a show of references and gimmicks. There's great characters. Strong themes. Good stories. Fun monsters. Plenty of suspense. Pretty much everything that makes Steven Spielberg and Stephen King stuff enjoyable, without either of them being involved. And they're still going strong because they've kept up the consistent quality, which doesn't miss a beat in season 3. I don't give grades to seasons of a TV show. Grading individual episodes I feel is the right way to go, but I'm not going to do that here. Just know that each episode would get at least a GOOD rating.
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