Chapter 3: Hell

Stranger Things season 3’s opening scene is of scientists in a gulag-laboratory being run by Soviet Darth Vader. With a backdrop of booming Cyrillic chants, it ends with a dramatic shot of the Communist flag blowing in the frigid Russian wastes.

I like to think I approach most things with an open mind. I’m very protective of the creative process and the labor that goes into it, even for things I don’t personally like. I don’t think even something being bad is a barrier to being enjoyable— there’s usually at least something good you can strip out of them. It is with sincerity that I report that Stranger Things season 3 is one of the worst things I’ve ever watched. I don’t understand how any of this happened.

It was incredibly difficult to write about the first and second seasons despite literally just having watched them, because this third one sits so far below on the bell curve it makes them look like fucking Shakespeare. Everything is worse immediately. It’s a tangible drop— in tone, in quality of dialogue, in IQ points for every single fucking character. The characters are so, so stupid. They’re cartoons. The first main cast thing we see is Hopper getting into a sitcom grumpy overprotective dad routine because Mike and Eleven— rather, Jane Hopper, in her civilian guise— won’t stop making out in the room next to him, and he don’t want that good for nothin’ sunnovabitch Mike Wheeler anywhere near his baby girl, dadgummit! Also he’s always drunk. Also he ends the first episode by threatening Mike, canonically 14, in his station wagon. By the way, two actual years have passed since the last season and all the children are frighteningly large and old.

I have to go on a quick rant, because I need to highlight how much I fucking despise Hopper, seriously. What a loathsome, wretched character. I hate him. I watched every episode wishing he would die, knowing he wouldn’t. Thinking about him right now makes me mad. He ruins everything he touches. He infects every character associated with him with his mediocre pestilence. I hate what he does to Joyce’s character. I hate what he does to Jane. The show wants us to care about him sooo bad because it thinks it’s done a good job writing a multifaceted, gritty, badass antihero with a soft side, when what it’s actually succeeded in creating is someone’s actual shithead dad, who is an alcoholic, who yells at his girlfriend and adoptive children, who thinks he can make up for every moronic thing he’s done by doing one kind of nice thing every thirty years, who is petty and spiteful, who is incapable of saying a single positive thing in any given interaction, who has a toddler’s emotional maturity, who deepthroats the US government’s boots when they literally tried to kill him and his adoptive daughter, whose single approach to conflict is indiscriminate violence, who is a sad, flaccid puppet for the state sanctioned department of violence who thinks that his uneagerness to carry out orders to inflict police brutality on nonviolently protesting citizens absolves him of complicity. I need God to kill him. I wish he were real so I could strangle him with my bare hands, and I wish Hell were real so I could drag him down with me and keep him there where he belongs. I fucking hate Jim Hopper.

Anyway, this season is about Russians or the mall or some bullshit like that.

Yeah, I dunno. This season makes Red Scare-era commie infiltration real. They’re building a hell portal underneath a mall and powering it with vials of green Goosebumps juice. As you may have noticed, each season of Strangethings surrounds a US holiday; the first was Christmas, the second was Halloween, and this one is Independence Day, which gives the show a really great excuse to fellate the boot for four hundred and fifty one minutes. It thinks its stupidity can be excused by raising an eyebrow at the audience and firing out one-liners lampshading the absurdity, when in reality all it does is insult the audience for continuing to watch. Apparently, the Duffers began writing this thing before season 2 even premiered^{1Liptak, Andrew. “Stranger Things Season 3 Might Not Debut until 2019.” The Verge.} , which I can barely believe. The stated inspiration is Fletch, a movie about drug smuggling that has nothing to do with the USSR or communists or anything the season concerns itself with. From what I gather, this season is about Russians for no real reason except paying off the Duffers’ intentions from the beginning: a consistent fixation on the Cold War, with some of the show’s earliest inspirations citing “bizarre experiments” like Project MKUltra. Even the show’s starting year, 1983, is a year before the release of seminal Cold-War-hysteria movie Red Dawn, which seasons 3, 4, and 5 take blatant cues from^{2Ahr, Michael, et al. “Stranger Things Season 3: Complete Easter Egg and Reference Guide.” Den of Geek.} .

Do you notice something incongruous here? Maybe the fact that Project MKUltra was backed by the fucking CIA? Also that Red Dawn sucks^{3Knipfel, Jim. “When Patriotic Movies Go Awry.” Den of Geek.} ? If you wanted to pull from real life to inform your story about government coverups and conspiracy, you have actual mountains of incidents to pull from. The CIA has admitted to most of it. When and how did this get twisted into “Soviet spies are making bombs opening portals to hell in our glorious homeland”? It’s here that Strangethings’ complete inability to assess its own political and social mores collapses into a black hole and sucks its head irrecoverably into its ass. It wants to say both something and nothing; enough that the audience can be convinced that what they’re watching is baseline progressive, but not too much that their story could be said to have a point, or heaven forbid, pushing an agenda. As is the case with lots of squishy, centrist media, the resultant narrative wouldn’t be out of place on Fox News.

The weird thing is, it doesn’t even go all the way in on the conservative propaganda. This is the season where Robin Buckley debuts, one of the only god damn good things about it, and she gets a coming out scene that is widely agreed to be tasteful, well-done, and not a travesty (foreshadowing). The Starcourt mall is being protested by townsfolk for stealing business from smaller shops, run by a mayor who’s basically a Resident Evil villain. It's just self aware enough to have a character point out that, um, there probably aren’t Russians lurking within Hawkins, Indiana, and if they are, they're probably normal and not evil because they’re humans. Except there absolutely are evil Russians lurking within Hawkins, Indiana, they built a Breaking Bad meth lab under the mall, and by the internal logic of the show they’re basically not human; Hopper straight up murders a dozen of them with a machine gun without repercussion. There’s one Russian scientist who defects— see, there are good ones!— who gets to enjoy the US-specific, banned-in-Russia pastimes of “carnivals”, “cotton candy”, and “New Coke™”. Only once shown the joys of the American Way is he gunned down to cheaply pull at the audience’s heartstrings, like a runaway pet being mowed down by a Honda Odyssey.

This show clearly believes that because it holds mildly progressive social values, it is absolved of holding agendas, period, not understanding that its implicit pro-USA stance has its own tangled history of biases, propaganda, and abuses. That’s how you get the cartoonish differences in framing. Compare the supposedly evil mall, which gets loving, neon-lit montages of Max and Jane having the time of their lives clothes shopping, and every shot of Russia being bathed in a Breaking Bad Mexico-level blue filter to indicate that it’s a frozen, barbaric wasteland. It’s a given that the communists are evil because they’re evil in the movies that Strangethings masturbatorily covets. Strangethings knows big words like “capitalism”, but has no idea what they mean and little interest in doing even cursory research on them.

There is no character focus. The POV just rattles around the groups endlessly. Will isn’t the emotional core this time around, because they didn’t want him to be at “rock bottom” for three seasons in a row^{4Radloff, Jessica. “‘Stranger Things’ Season 3 Is Further Along Than You Think.” Glamour.} . Really succeeded there. He’s not at rock bottom, guys! He only gets completely shafted by the narrative, has his sexuality thrown in his face by his childhood best friend, and treated so badly by everyone in his life that he goes out in the rain and destroys his childhood fort with a bat. You know, the same one from the first two seasons that was a beacon of safety from his abusive childhood and otherworldly hell monsters. Somehow that doesn’t count as rock bottom, though by what metric I couldn’t say.

Speaking of rock bottom, it might be time to start mentioning Byler now. I wish I didn’t, but it is going to be relevant to discussing the finale. Sorry.

What Byler? What is? In short— it’s Mike and Will’s weird little gay thing that technically has roots since the first season, but didn’t come into prominence past mainline Strangethings ships (namely Mileven, which by the way has its own Wikipedia page) until this one. Why? Well, there is circumstantial evidence for Will being gay in earlier seasons (mostly other characters calling him slurs), but this season ramped it up enough that people began to notice^{5White, Brett. “‘Stranger Things’ Has Always Had a Gay Character: Will Byers.” Decider. 6Walrath, Holly Lyn. “Will Byers’ Canonical Queerness.” Medium. 7McDermott, Jim. “I Was A Gay Kid Growing Up In The 80s. Will Byers' Coming Out In Stranger Things Was Just As Awkward As I Remember.” Popverse.} . Official social media was fanning the fire. Not only does it really double down on making him actively avoid women, but the narrative gives its first indicators that he’s gay for Mike specifically. Protagonist man Michael Wheeler does not signal a whole lot of reciprocation for these feelings— “it’s not my fault you don’t like girls”— but then again he kind of does, in a weird, roundabout, emotionally-stunted-man sense. For the amount that Mike macks on Jane, he sure tends to treat her like shit, then run off to his best boy friend to whine about it. He spends the entire season unable to apologize to Jane, then over the course of one episode, bikes across a town in the rain to do the same for Will.

It’s genuinely easier to read the whole thing as some sort of repressed bisexual tango than your average “gay guy falls for straight friend, straight friend doesn’t feel the same way” case^{8For examples of such cases see: Kurt and Finn (Glee), Isak and Jonas (SKAM), Matteo and Jonas (DRUCK), Mathias and Eric (Rykter), Amy and Karma (Faking It), Ximena and Callie (The Fosters), Henry and Dean (Big Eden), Mike and Scott (My Own Private Idaho), Mulan and Aurora (Once Upon A Time), Nico and Percy (Percy Jackson), Riley and Peter (Degrassi), Fiona and Holly J (Degrassi), Marco and Griffin (Degrassi), Marco and Craig (Degrassi), Tristan and Cam (Degrassi), Zoe and Grace (Degrassi), Lem Billings and John F. Kennedy, Cyrus and Jonah (Andi Mack), et al.} , because if the showrunners wanted that, they would have just written it. Unbeknownst to us, something much more evil and sinister was afoot. It doesn’t resolve at all in this season, though, so we’ll leave it for now.

New characters! Lots of them! Just what this show was missing, there weren’t enough fucking characters! Lucas’ little sister Erica tags along^{9Technically, Erica was previously present in the second season, but she was a bit character who only appeared occasionally in Lucas’ scenes. Here, she becomes a prominent protagonist tagging along Robin, Steve, and Dustin.} , one of two women of color in the entire series! The other one was Kali from season 2 who was immediately put on a bus out of the narrative because people fucking hated her (to be fair, the episode is ass, but her being brown did not help). Erica helps the protagonists break into an underground top secret facility full of armed guards and somehow does not get captured or shot because this is a Scholastic book in the guise of a television show. Russian Darth Vader and his cronies are antagonists I’m supposed to actually take seriously. You know how the first season had an immaterial monster that stalks people, and how the second season had a nightmare behemoth the size of several football fields looming over the town with intentions of annihilating the entire place? Well, this season’s got forty or so Russians and a big goopy guy. And Billy.

Okay, there is one almost good thing in this mess of a season— Billy and the possessed doppelganger army. Billy was present in season 2 as an antagonist, and a pretty good one, but in the end he was just sort of a guy. The show rectifies this at the beginning of season 3 by having him get immediately pod person’d by the Upside Down. After almost fucking Mike Wheeler’s 43-year-old mom. Billy Hargrove is 18 at this point, by the way, canonically just graduated high school. Same age as Karen Wheeler’s eldest daughter. Moving on.

Billy becomes the vector through which an army of doppelgangers spreads through Hawkins. His demeanor instantly changes, to the immediate alarm of his stepsister Max. Max, who is a survivor of physical and emotional abuse at Billy’s hands, knows something is wrong, but all the adults see is a young man who’s finally cleaned up his act. He meets a nice girl (who he kidnapped and mind raped at a pool), settles with her right into the plastic roles of dutiful USAmerican domesticism. They’re easily able to infiltrate the crust of suburbia because they’re exactly what society wants them to be. Other than Robin’s coming out scene, this is pretty much the only part of the season that works at all, and as a bonus feels connected to themes from the first and second.

People-replacement plots have been a thing in horror for decades, especially during and post-Cold War— see They Live— so turning the trope to be about the poison of middle America feels like a stupidly obvious move and theoretically fitting. But at odds with the rest of the season, it becomes clunky and confusing, almost too good to match the rest of it— what is a subplot like this trying to say when the rest of the season is about literal Soviet spies? In that light, doesn’t it just reinforce the whole “infiltration of our glorious homeland” narrative in an even more insidious sense, that the poisons of Western civilization are actually all the fault of Russian interlopers making it just so in order to undermine the American way? I mean, that’s pretty much text with the Resident Evil mayor. He’s being paid off by the Russians to do all this, so, see? Capitalism would work out if those nasty commies weren’t trying to pervert it with their grubby little fingers!

God, this season blows. Every aspect that’s even mildly good is weighed down by the rest of it, and you can’t even give the Duffers credit for them. Robin Buckley was going to just be another fucking love interest for Steve Harrington until Maya Hawke said “heyyy, something’s up” and they changed it mid-filming^{10Gomez, Jasmine. “Steve and Robin Were Originally Supposed to Get Together in “Stranger Things” 3.” Seventeen.} . The marker of a truly great show, after all, is when the actors are the ones contributing the only well-written scenes and character dynamics to it.

The finale is a CGI nothingburger. Jane loses her powers because we need something of note to happen. Billy dies because we need every male abuser in this show to have a final redemption arc and kill themselves before they can take any real responsibility for their actions. Neverending Story musical sequence^{11This sequence is a point of contention for a lot of people because it apparently breaks the mood and pacing, but I enjoyed it. At that point I thought, “this might as well happen”.} . The mall blows up. Hopper blows himself up and I can’t even get excited about it because I know his ass is surviving. The Byers fuck off to California cause why not. Needle drop with whatever 80s song the Duffers chose for this season. Roll credits.

Bafflingly, this season received generally positive critical and audience reviews. There were some criticisms of its overreaching reliance on 80s references and “cornball humor”, but by the metrics that mattered— monetary ones— the show was stronger than ever. Netflix partnered with 75 fucking companies for promotional tie-in products^{12 Koblin, John. “New Coke Was a Debacle. It’s Coming Back. Blame "Stranger Things."” The New York Times.} . New Coke™ is back, baby! One of the world’s most famously reviled drinks! It’s just what everyone was asking for! Upside Down-themed Whopper with nosebleed-themed ketchup. Lifeguard ad with Billy’s actor modeling for H&M, because if there’s any character we want you to associate with our clothing brand, it’s racist abusive man who dies and explodes. I was not plugged into the Strangethings fandom at the time, but pretty much everything I heard was gushing about Robin and surreptitiously no mention of anything actually plot-relevant. From anecdotal evidence, most people were enjoying themselves. I don’t know what it was about 2019 that set everyone’s bars so low, maybe because that year also generally sucked— though because of what exactly I couldn’t tell you, despite literally being there.

As I asked my friends verbatim, “did something happen in 2019?” The answer: lots and nothing. It was Trump’s third term. I would have been in my junior year, not watching Stranger Things; too busy being solitary and miserable (transgenderly) and getting into other properties which were gay and bad. I had no real life friends in close proximity, stuck in my third year of a pro-Trump, conservative high school where the white boys loved to say every slur under the sun, embroiled in online drama and militant Tumblrisms, steadily developing obsessive-compulsive tendencies. At this point maybe we’d all given up on the idea of the Bad Years being an identifiable period of time that would ever end, but we had no idea how much worse things were about to get. The first documented human case of COVID-19 was in December. Most people thought it was some sort of new strain of flu that would blow over— there would surely be bigger things to worry about.

It took about two days to finish season 3. I took a lot more breaks, yet it was hard to look away; it was so terrible it almost crossed the threshold into being enjoyable again. I thought to myself deliriously multiple times, is this actually awesome?? because its sheer badness was kind of captivating. If it had kept up the delirium it might have reached Riverdale levels of camp, KJ Apa fighting ant men and whatnot. But I couldn’t scrounge up any enjoyment by the end. Not only had it sucked away many hours I’d never get back for some of the worst TV I’ve ever experienced, it retroactively clouded my views of the first two seasons so much that it was going to be hard objectively quantifying them.

But hey, I was out. I had successfully struggled through and there’s only 2 more seasons to go. It’d be a waste not to finish it by now. I actually knew much more about season 4 than season 3— that there would be a guy named Eddie Munson whom everybody agrees has done crazy things to Steve Harrington’s cervix, the Vecna stuff would finally start being established, “Running Up That Hill” would finally happen. People who were not as favorable to season 3 agreed that this was something of a return to form. Let’s fucking see about that.

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