Stranger Things Season 3
We completed our rewatch of the first three Stranger Things seasons ahead of season 4’s release next week. With each season I’m writing a quick post about what interested me most: (Season 1, Season 2).
D&D Marvel Super Heroes Pieces: It’s a small detail but one that I noticed both the first time I watched season 3 and again now. Will has set up a game board for his D&D campaign, and rather than having all the perfect miniatures, he’s broken out the cardboard pieces for Marvel Superheroes. I love this because this is exactly the sort of thing we did as kids. Very few of us had large sets of minis, but we had plenty of pieces from other games which would work just as well because the majority of the game is imaginative.
Hopper remembers what he’s good at. There are many moments where Hopper gets frustrated and reacts with brilliantly timed violence. My favorite is in the finale when he mows down a line of Russian soldiers with a stolen submachine gun.
The Terribleness of Adolescence: One of the most difficult things about watching a show so steeped in nostalgia is I have to witness characters I identify with behaving badly, often in similar manners to the way I behaved at that age. It broke my heart to watch the way Mike snottily acted to Will because Will wanted to play D&D rather than mope about relationships. I remember acting a lot like Mike at that age, where I’d go from one extreme to the other regarding games and nerd hobbies. I think there’s an adolescent tendency to feel like “if I like this, I musn’t like that.” It took me a long time to get over that tendency. On the plus side for the show, these things hurt because they feel real. On the double plus side for the show, Mike’s attempts to apologize, to Will and then later to El, also felt real, perhaps completing a circuit of nostalgia, providing me with the apologies I wish I had made.
“You did it! You won a fight!” I wrote in my season 2 post about how much I liked Steve and Dustin’s relationship. In season 3 I love how Dustin has recognized Steve’s less than stellar record with the fisticuffs, and this reaction when Steve beats down a Russian soldier is priceless. It’s seconded a moment later when Dustin says something like, “That was before I knew Steve could knock out a Russian.”
Suzy is real! When Dustin returns from camp, everyone sort of assumes he’s making up this story about a girlfriend, so in the finale when everyone has the shared reaction about her being real, is priceless. Also I’m a big fan of juxtaposing the ridiculous along with the super serious (probably why I like David Lynch so much), so I love the Never Ending Story duet in the middle of final battle.
Women are strong. The series does a great job portraying strong female characters throughout. This is elevated further in season 3. In the beginning of the season in particular most of the men are concerned about everything getting back to normal and being fairly obtuse to the possibility that there’s a new threat. Meanwhile the women are quicker on the uptake. Joyce figures something weird is happening with the magnets and goes to see Mr. Clarke (more on that below). Nancy is eager to investigate for her paper but finds herself getting the brunt of sexist bullshit in the workplace. By the end of the season, the women are basically in charge. Joyce gets Hopper to go in and save the day with her, El and Max were onto Billy ahead of everybody, Nancy is driving, shooting, and generally being a bad ass, Robin breaks the Russian code, and Erika steals every scene she’s in.
I’ve said in the previous posts that Mr. Clarke, super-heroic science teacher, is one of my favorite characters. He only gets one scene in season 3, but boy does he make the most of it. The garage door opens and he’s listening to Weird Al, which is perfect. He then puts together a demonstration for Joyce and tells her, “It’s like I tell my students when they open a Curiosity Door…” It sounds cheesy, and yet it made me wish I’d had such a teacher in junior high. One of the things I love about Stranger Things is the commitment to science and learning. Dustin is returning home from “Camp Know Where” the best named fictitious science camp possible. All the characters research, something that makes me happy since I’m basically an overzealous researcher who occasionally writes novels as a by product. And the kids often reference what they’ve learned from Mr. Clarke. I both hope and doubt that Mr. Clarke is in season 4, I fear that if he’s not my horrible temptation to give up my own stories and write Mr. Clarke fan fiction will be too damned tempting.
Saying goodbyes, Peter Gabriel’s “Heroes” cover. The ending of season 3 is incredibly moving. Watching Joyce, Eleven, Will, and Jonathan pack up the U-Haul and drive away from their friends is crushing. Then to drive home the pain, they have Eleven read Hopper’s speech to her. And then if that’s not enough they play Peter Gabriel’s cover of “Heroes” the one where he seemed decide “a lot of people find Heroes uplifting, what if I sang it in a way to be as heart wrenching as possible?”
That’s it for season 3. Can’t wait for season 4.
