Along with consistency-seasons that keep scaling up the original concept, like sequels, instead of broadening and deepening the ongoing story, like good TV-it offers the salve of nostalgia. To some extent, Stranger Things has always been in the comfort business. There’s something comforting in knowing what to expect. Before you buy tickets for a Marvel movie, you have a pretty good sense of how it will unfold before you walk into a Burger King, you have a pretty good idea of how your burger will taste.
Summary of stranger things season 1 tv#
What’s notable is that it makes Stranger Things more than just a TV show. None of this is shocking in 2019, even for those of us who’d rather watch the occasional ad than have them seamlessly integrated into our entertainment. And the Duffers’ take on female puberty is embarrassingly clumsy: Are El and Max really the kind of girls who’d pore over Tiger Beat and cheer themselves up with shopping sprees at The Gap? Lots of excessively long action sequences not only get repetitive, but also push most character beats to the beginning and end of the season. Especially in the first few episodes, there’s just too much happening. That complexity does create some problems for the show. An ever-growing cast gives them the bandwidth to establish roughly five simultaneous storylines that feel novel for the show, if not for ’80s-nostalgia culture at large. Creators the Duffer Brothers wisely sidestep the narratively exhausted Upside Down. Though it still doesn’t have the freshness of the first installment Stranger Things, the new season marks an improvement over its predecessor, which essentially rehashed the original plot with a bigger budget and an absurd episode that sent El to Chicago. Kids (particularly Lucas’ flamboyantly pro-capitalist 10-year-old sister Erica, played by Priah Ferguson) say adorable things. Battling supernatural forces turns out to be the perfect catalyst for various adolescent rites of passage. It is, in other words, exactly what we’ve come to expect from a season of Stranger Things: Like the family-friendly ’80s horror and sci-fi touchstones they brazenly plunder-er, celebrate-eight new episodes juxtapose coming-of-age arcs and life-or-death consequences, real relationships and fantastical monsters, the sweet and the gross (season 3 favors Gremlins-style body horror). Poor Joyce (Winona Ryder) is leaning on Hopper in the wake of Bob’s (Sean Astin) death. Max’s hot, cruel stepbrother Billy (Dacre Montgomery) is a lifeguard at the local pool, obviously.
Steve (Joe Keery, still a very good sport) has a gig scooping ice cream-in an extremely silly sailor suit-at the mall his inevitable love interest is mouthy co-worker Robin (Maya Hawke). Now high-school graduates, his brother Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) and Jonathan’s girlfriend Nancy (Natalia Dyer) are interns at The Hawkins Post. With Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) still seeing Max (Sadie Sink) and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) pining for his nerd-camp girlfriend Suzie, who may or may not be real, only Will (Noah Schnapp) would rather play D&D than go on dates. For those who’d prefer our entertainment to challenge us a bit, at least season 3 improves upon the recycled plots and warmed-over Upside Down mythology of season 2.Įleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and Mike (Finn Wolfhard, better every season) are now an item, terrifying her surrogate dad Hopper (David Harbour) with their hilariously chaste kissing. The same predictability makes these properties a safe bet for those who stand to profit off them as well as those who consume them like so much audiovisual comfort food.
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And that pattern has, in turn, made the show as predictable as any of the movie or comic book franchises its young characters treasure. Of course, by now Hawkins’ annual showdown with the supernatural has itself become routine. In fact, when we rejoin the gang for season 3, which comes to Netflix on the Fourth of July, in the summer of 1985-less than a year after season 2’s Halloween-set adventures-it seems that they could use yet another crisis to shake up the lovey-dovey monotony. But there would be no Stranger Things without Hawkins, an intimate community steeped in ‘80s Americana, where geeks, cool kids, parents, cops, science teachers and one telepathic, psychokinetic girl can be relied upon to put aside their differences for the good of humanity.
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