Stranger things S3 thoughts
assembled from notes made as episodes happened - spoilers ahoy
From the start, Will's exasperation and frustration at suddenly finding himself surrounded by hetero romances is a mood
Nice of Steve and Dustin to warn Robin when she got involved in the whole Russian broadcast things that this wasn't their first freaky conspiracy and some seriously weird shit happens in this town... Oh wait...
Being possessed is shitty but I still found it hard to care about the ultimate fate of Billy considering what an asshole he was last season, he was only interesting so far as Max’s complex feelings towards him and the possibility of being been killed as part of the destruction of the flayed
I feel like the narrative positions us to side with Nancy over her firing what with her ultimately being right, but honestly I agreed with Jonathan grunt work and not being taken seriously is how internships work and she doing unethical shit like lying and breaking in, of course they fired her.
While the different groups parallel investigations of strange and ultimately connected phenomena format worked for the last two series, here I found it frustrating that they were so disconnected for more of the season given they all know about the conspiracies and dealing with the last one was a collaborative effort, I mean at the very least no matter how much them not believing him about his girlfriend Dustin still should surely have shared the whole Russian spy thing with his friends as soon as he found out. But Max and El bonding away from the boys was great, both in terms of moving them past the awkward ‘the two girls of the group are rivals for the for the boys friendship’ of S2 and in giving El some room to develop as a person in society rather than a lab experiment and then a superpowered secret.
Feels kind of harsh saying this given how things ended but I liked Hopper a lot less this season. Him playing overprotective father of El to the point of lying to Mike about his grandma being sick to get him alone and yell at him into spending less time with her wasn't funny or cute. Repeatedly asking Joyce for a date then re-framing it as a friends thing to get her to agree while clearly treating it as a date felt sleazy when she'd already been clear she wasn't interested/ready and police brutality, even against corrupt politicians, sits ill with me. I'd need to rewatch earlier seasons to compare but I feel like he lost some heart in favour of being written as a stereotype of a gruff cop dad type character and only regained that in the finale in a way that felt cheap.
(Joyce doesn’t have much luck with love interests and finales does she?)
Bauman was irritating and I didn’t find his obnoxious commentary on Joyce and Hopper any more amusing than his remarks about Nancy and Jonathan last season.
As much as I like each element of the ensemble cast (including the new mains) their growing number is getting unwieldy, which I suspect is why they get separated by contrived circumstances, and the redundant actions (such as the scoop troop’s whole plotline being cancelled out by Joyce and Hopper also learning about the Russian operation in their plotline) made for frustrating viewing. Especially when all the plots finally converged in Ep8 only for them to immediately split back into the same groups even though there was no reason not to mix things up. And keeping them so separate means certain relationships get a lot of development while other characters never interact to an implausible degree (I’ve already commented on Dustin’s distance from his friends and like, as much as I didn't like the whole Steve/Nancy/Jonathan as a love triangle approach, it seems odd for them to go a whole season without any conversation, and why didn’t Nancy or Jonathan mention what they were investigating to Joyce and Hopper?).
Speaking of new members of the core cast, Erica was delightful and her growing up from her earlier minor appearances into a major character felt like a really well done natural progression and a reminder of the way the main cast links into the community (except Steve, where are your parents Steve?). And I was honestly so braced to find Robin forced and uninteresting because it looked from the promos that she was being thrown in as a replacement girlfriend for Steve but she was really fun and honestly I came around to liking her even before the revelation about her sexuality that made me love her.
Which also leads nicely into (and I'm showing my biases here) that's two seasons that have given Steve a serious beating and while I'm not saying I don't enjoy that, he could probably do with a checkup and not everyone acting like getting beaten and drugged is no big thing. I feel like his character is mainly played for laughs and that’s okay but still, a little acknowledgement of the fucked up shit would be nice.
And lastly, I’m okay with a lot of ‘just go with it’ in my fiction but seriously, why the fuck were there so many russians under hawkins, how the fuck did they get there, and why the fuck did they want to open the gate other than ‘because evil russians’?
Overall I did enjoy it but I feel elements that worked in S1 are now growing tired and while I’ll definitely be watching S4 if/when we get it I’m also pretty glad it looks like 4 is gonna be the upper limit and they’ll stop before they drive what they have into the ground.
