The newest season of Stranger Things find our players scattered geographically, battered emotionally. Almost a year after the battle of Starcourt mall, Joyce moves her kids, including newly orphaned El, to California, away from the site of her grief. Meanwhile, those left in Hawkins get to try and put the pieces back together, and across the sea, Hopper fights to stay alive in the hopes that he might see his family again one day. It's not an ideal time for Hawkins to come under attack from the forces of the Upside Down, but when the Mind Flayer unleashes his newest threat, the cancerous Vecna, our heroes are all that stand between their home town and bottomless evil.
I'll acknowledge I miss the levity of the ten-year old players, but maturity looks really good on this cast. (The emotional depth, that is. I will never get used to Noah Schnapp's booming tones.) The best parts of this season feature our characters finally sowing wisdom from their experiences. They're not just getting older, they're growing up, and not just the kids. It's nice to know that all this time we've spent raking them across the monsters has given them some perspective. (Most of them, I guess. They apparently couldn't think up a better storyline for Nancy, one of their strongest characters, than to have her regress back to her sophomore love triangle.)
It's a token of the series' writing that the tension runs rich even when the monsters are nowhere in sight. While less graphic than last season, which literally saw human bodies being melted into flesh puddles, the monster violence plays more sadistically than seen with previous agents of the Upside Down.
Speaking of which, this arc devotes more time to worldbuilding than any season past. Questions we might have had about the Mind Flayer and the terrifying hellscape he reigns over all the way back in 2016 are beginning to be answered. In doing so, the series risks taking away what was arguably its funnest story element. One thing that separated this show from other fantasy shows was that there was no ambassador of the Underworld springing up to outline the terms and conditions, allowing the characters, and the audience with it, to take real ownership over the fantasy.
But even as various facets are finally defined and mapped, and even as its child stars begin to move past their grade school years, the show preserves its unique whimsy, a loyalty to a mindset that champions a childlike methodology. Gamers and nerds will stay standing long after the rest of us are gone.
A lot of the dialogue leading up to this season's premiere has centered around simply how big it is. The available episodes come in at about nine hours, and we haven't even hit the two-and-a-half hour finale yet. What's interesting is that the extra volume actually feels well-spent during the early half of the volume (the first third of the season overall). The extra time helps carve out the emotional intricacies of our heroes, which helps tether the action to a place that feels vulnerable. The latter-half, admittedly, feels a little bloated. Three episodes go by and you realize you've been spinning tires trying to break through problems that surely shouldn't be taking this long to resolve. From this side of the pay-off, it's difficult to say with much confidence whether the setup has been well-spent.
And yet, despite the darkness and despite the extra stuffing, the show remains loyally dedicated to the heart which has always set it apart. Episode 4 in particular culminates in a sequence which ranks as emotionally charged as anything else we've seen from this series.
With the season's final two episodes still hanging over us, much of this season's impact and success is still up in the air. With all the seeds this first batch of episodes has planted, it's not like that golden peak isn't within reach.
--The Professor
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