Stranger Things Goes to the Mall in Season Three

I've now seen the first two episodes of Stranger Things 3 (because they have to be special and not use the word "season.")

So here's the things about 80s nostalgia:

I was born in 1986, one year after this season is set. The Duffer Brothers, creators and showrunners of Stranger Things, were born in 1984 (they're my sister's age,) which makes the first season's setting in 1983 kind of interesting: it's just far enough to be prior to their lives.

See, as someone born in the mid 80s, I only really started to become aware of popular culture and my place in an evolving environment once the 90s came about.

But decades don't swap over to a whole new culture in one go - usually you don't really start to feel a difference in a decade's culture until toward the end of it, when you have the perspective to actually see where things changed. I mean, Grunge sure as hell killed Hair Metal (thank God) but a lot of the cultural signifiers - and in this season of Stranger Things, it's very much the new Starcourt Mall - persisted.

What's interesting here is that the mall as this cultural touchstone and public forum is a species that now, as we approach the 2020s (I know it's only next year but it still looks futuristic,) seems to be kind of dying out. I mean, when's the last time you went to a Sam Goody to pick up some CDs?

Television and movies and especially books persist past these decade constructs, and so even if I was only a baby in the mid 80s, the small town horror vibe of Stephen King was very much a part of my cultural consciousness in the 90s (obviously, King has continued to write all this time, so it's not like he's gone away.)

But yeah, even if the (to my eyes) putrid 80s fashion doesn't translate to my childhood experience, there's a lot about Stranger Things, through its previous seasons and this one so far, that feels familiar. We were playing Super Nintendo or N64 instead of Atari, but things weren't too different.

There is one thing that we sure as hell didn't worry about though, and that was the Russians. (Ironic, then, that they're such a concern now.)

My very first memory of the Cold War - even though I'd been to Communist Hungary for by second birthday to visit family - was its end, when, as a kindergartener getting ready for school, I saw a picture on the newspaper of a Russian soldier sitting on a curb and some announcement about the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The scope of Stranger Things has generally expanded over time. In season one, we never got any scenes that took place outside of Hawkins Indiana or its Upside-Down equivalent.

As season 3 begins, we see what looks very much like the kind of experiments that were going on in the lab where El was imprisoned most of her life, and we might assume that the US Government is back to its old dirty tricks, despite seeming assurances that they were done with that last season. But of course, it's natural to imagine that if the US had discovered this other world, the Soviets might have as well.

With the rift closed at the end of the previous season, it's natural that our heroes would have assumed things were safe now - time to return to some degree of normalcy. But not only do we have those creepy Russians to worry about, but we've also got some genuinely fucked-up imagery as rats swarm into the basement of an abandoned steel mill and explode into puddles of disgusting ooze, which we later see is animate, very much like The Thing.

Last season, we were introduced to a few new characters, including Max - the cool redheaded girl that Lucas winds up with, and her abusive brother Billy. Billy is a monstrous bully, and while season one deconstructed the "rich asshole boyfriend" trope by making Steve Harrington actually a fundamentally decent guy when push came to shove, Billy was straight out of the Stephen King book of irredeemable douchebags, in the vein of Henry Bowers from IT.

His purpose in season 2 seemed to just be to be horrible, but in season 3, he's given a more prominent role - which at first seems like a bad thing, but again, taking inspiration from King, this time Billy is somehow possessed or indoctrinated by whatever new monster - maybe the "Mind Flayer" or some other evil presence from the Upside-Down. (D&D nerd aside: the Demogorgon is actually one of the most powerful demon lords in D&D lore (it's not a type of demon - it's a specific, particularly powerful demon,) whereas Mind Flayers, while certainly scary and dangerous, are not nearly as powerful individually. I kind of think that they should have used the term Beholder for the Mind Flayer, given its tendency to sit back and plan and observe from a distance. Beholders are also less powerful than Demogorgon, but whatever.)

The true nature of the Upside-Down remains fundamentally mysterious, but after being possessed (seemingly having some flesh-tube made out of dead rats shoved down his throat,) Billy has a vision of the Upside-Down in which a crowd of human-like forms approach him, their leader being a copy of him, but one that speaks with a deep and creepy voice. They want to "build" something, and I'm not really clear on whether Billy's eventually go the way of those rats, if he's going to start donating people to that fate, or if others are going to get possessed like he is.

Meanwhile, the rest of our regulars are just getting on with life. El and Mike have become an obnoxious teen couple, much to Hopper's chagrin (and as someone who has only recently stepped into the role of El's dad, he's been thrown into the deep end of being a single parent for a teenager - a role that even parents with a partner struggle with when they've raised a kid since birth.) Lucas and Max seem to have things figured out a lot better, despite Lucas' constant messing up (Max is just too good-natured, it seems, to let small mistakes ruin things.) When Mike makes some rookie mistakes with El after Hopper puts his paternal foot down around all this making out every day, El goes to Max for emotional support, and the two quickly develop a charming friendship.

Which, on one hand, almost seems like a course-correction after the two seemed to develop some kind of accidental romantic rivalry last season. But it's nice to see these two girls just be girls together.

Dustin returns from science camp with a questionably-real Mormon girlfriend from Utah, and is troubled to discover that his friends aren't as into the idea of contacting her via HAM radio. But when he stumbles upon some strange Russian broadcast, he brings it to Steve, aka his partner in the most unexpectedly delightful pairing from last season. Working with Steve's cool co-worker Robin (who manages to establish herself very quickly as a great addition to the cast) they figure out that it's some kind of code language, and that the broadcast was coming from the mall.

Finally, Will, a bit like Dustin, isn't so free of concern. Perhaps due to his horrible connection to the Upside-Down, he has a sense of the terrible things that are afoot, but not enough that he can say anything for certain.

God, there are a lot of characters to check in with. Joyce is still dealing with Bob's death, and though she gives some friendly advice, parent-to-parent, to Hopper, she isn't having his theoretically platonic but definitely not just platonic advances.

Basically, there's a lot of life going on, with the mall killing the old downtown businesses, and Cary Elwes as a douchey mayor who I'm sure will be involved in something disastrous later in the season. So far, only Billy and the unfortunate fellow lifeguard he has sacrificed (in one way or another) to this awful monstrosity are really aware of the oncoming horror.

Sidenote: I live in LA, and we've had a couple of big earthquakes over the last couple days (centered far away, so no major damage, but they've lasted pretty long each time.) Anyway, it's a weird place to be to start watching a show about terrible portals to a nightmarish otherworld.