When Stranger Things first popped up on Netflix, it came out of nowhere. These days any major show or movie tends to get a massive hype lead-in, with a year or more of promotions, speculation about casting and other details. But somehow, Stranger Things slipped in. Of its regular cast, Winona Ryder was probably the only one most people would recognize, and at a point in her career when she wasn't really at the center of Hollywood awareness.
But the show absolutely nailed spooky 1980s style as a hybrid of Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, and probably most directly Stephen King. After all, while King's Losers' Gang was from the '50s, many of us who grew up in the 80s or 90s imagined those groups of kids to be from our time - indeed, see how the recent film adaptation of IT placed the childhood period in the '80s so that the modern era could be the present.
Stranger Things nails a certain authenticity - not necessarily to the actual midwest in the 1980s, but the way that it felt as portrayed in movies from that era. Suburban streets at night, damp from rain or condensation, lit by the occasional streetlight but flanked by shadows.
General Spoiler Warning!
In season three, the mall is made a central location - the behemoths that destroyed the old small town main streets and today have become desiccated husks as people have started to do their shopping online.
As someone who was born in the '80s, it's been strange as I get older to see time periods I used to think of as just what things are like "now" starting to feel shrouded in nostalgia. A lot of the cast of Stranger Things wasn't even alive in the 90s, the decade I most firmly associate with my childhood.
And one day, people will look back on this current period with a mix of nostalgia and criticism (hopefully more criticism. I sure hope no one has nostalgia for putting children in cages.)
The thing is, even if the movies aren't totally accurate to how things feel - take, for example, the hypercompetent super-Russians who manage to create an entire underground facility on US soil without anyone noticing, say, guards with AK-47s outside a mall's loading docks, despite the fact that this was the same Soviet Union who would, one year later, so profoundly fuck up at Chernobyl. The Soviets in this season are not the real ones - they're the movie ones. Ultimately, they're a blank slate on which to project national anxieties.
And the movies, in their inaccuracies, still sort of form what we remember of those decades. It's a cultural touchstone. The production design is so well done that it makes me wonder if some kid will mistake this in the future as a genuine show from the 80s much as I, when I was very young, didn't realize that Young Frankenstein wasn't actually from the same period as all those 1930s Universal horror movies.
The monster of this season is actually the same big bad from the last season - who was also presumably behind the Demogorgon in the first one. The Mind Flayer is cut off from this world after Eleven closed the gate last time, but there is a fragment that lingers. And just as some rogue scientists experimented with the gate before, now the Soviets are trying to do so, using the apparent thinness of whatever barrier exists between worlds around Hawkins to continue working on it.
Unable to enter fully, the Mind Flayer becomes something like a body-snatching virus, first infecting several rats, who horrifically melt into one solid mass of flesh, giving the Mind Flayer a body to operate remotely.
Billy, Max's abusive older brother, becomes its first victim, becoming the Mind Flayer's slave as he finds more and more people to indoctrinate via fleshy tentacle-mouth thing. Eventually, once the Mind Flayer is ready to make its move, most of the "Flayed" - those who have been enslaved by it - return to the main body and, in probably the most disturbing image in the whole series to date, melt themselves like those rats, contributing their goopy, bone-filled mass to the whole.
Like the other seasons, the cast is divided into different units, each picking up a mystery thread and following it. Thankfully, we get more of El and Mike together, whose relationship I felt was the heart of the first season. Mike is a bit of a dick, entering his true teen years and having to learn that having a girlfriend does not mean having her all to himself. Eleven is still very much getting used to living a normal life, and things start to get a lot better for her when she and Max become friends - even if that leads her, accidentally, to stumbling upon Billy's corruption by the Mind Flayer.
I will confess that I'm hoping the next season will give us a little more detail on the ecology of the Upside-Down. Like, is the Mind Flayer basically the god of that realm, or are there other things? The Demogorgon and similar creatures don't seem the same as it, nor do they seem to be flesh-constructs like the monster this season.
But naturally, what really matters are the characters.
This season saw a bit of an expansion in the cast. Robin, Steve Harrington's co-worker at "Scoops Ahoy," the ice cream place that forces them to wear absurd sailor outfits, is a lot of fun, giving Steve a foil. Lucas' sister Erica, who charmed her way through a couple of scenes early on, gets a much bigger role, though I think it's not quite as rich as Robin's. Carey Elwes is the town's corrupt mayor who has been compromised by the Soviets, though his arrest in the epilogue makes me wonder if he'll actually be appearing again.
The season is very much about change, and the fear that brings. Just about every character is dealing with it - Will is watching his friends becoming more interested in girlfriends than their old D&D games while his own sexuality remains a bit ambiguous (we do get an explicitly queer character in Robin, though perhaps true to the time period, her coming out to Steve is clearly only something she could do after going through a harrowing experience being tortured by the Soviets together,) Hopper has been thrust into fatherhood once again, but right at the point where El is starting to explore her own romantic feelings with Mike. Dustin returns from summer camp feeling cut off from his friends (and indeed, he spends most of the season with Steve, rather than his original crew.) Hawkins itself is being transformed by this mall - ironically a symbol of crass capitalism (even if we now feel nostalgia for it) that serves as a cover for the operations of a regime that at least claims to be socialist. Joyce seems the only one who realizes that change is necessary. There's too much trauma and fear, between Will's disappearance in season one and losing Bob in season two.
In fact, the season ends with the Byers, now taking care of El after Hopper's apparent (though for the genre-savvy, almost certainly not actual) death, moving out of Hawkins. It's a sad change, putting the relationships of Jonathan and Nancy as well as Max and El's in long-distance limbo, but it also might be the best thing to do.
Not all changes are good, though. Because while the changes going on among friends and family members can be alienating, there are also people like Billy who are literally being taken over by an extradimensional alien force that wishes to wipe out humanity.
And while it's good that El doesn't have to be the one who saves the world yet again, the Mind Flayer's theft of her powers - which haven't come back after three months - both makes her more vulnerable and robs her of part of her identity.
We also see how Billy went from a sweet boy who liked surfing to impress his mom and turned into a cruel bully, paying forward his father's abuse onto others. In the final hour, El's identification of the redeemable part of Billy gives him the strength to resist the Mind Flayer, sacrificing himself to buy a little more time for El. It's a redemption, but it's also maybe the first thing we've seen him do as an adult that wasn't kind of horrible.
I'd be really curious to see Max's reaction to all of this in the next season. Billy was undeniably abusive to her, but he was also a fixture in her life, and her brother. I think having an opportunity to explore that trauma would be a great way to give her character a little more depth.
This was a strong showing for the show, and while I still mostly liked season two, this felt like a return to form. I'm certain a season four is in the works. There are definitely some teases for upcoming stuff - a mid-credits scene (what are they, Marvel?) shows that the mysteriously disappearing Russians have an "American" whom they decided not to feed to a Demogorgon monster. I'm not saying it's Hopper, but it's definitely Hopper.
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