Stranger Things Season 3 Review

Good: 

1. The Plot.  Escalated without being too redundant. 

2. FX. They're good.  You know... Like pretty much everything these days. 

3. Teen Drama Garbage. Hear me out. In most media representation of teenage drama the TONE is such that the feelings they have are as important as the characters experience those feelings to be.  I guess this is "good" in the sense that it could theoretically put you in the headspace of the characters.  The problem for me is that teenagers are very stupid and very arrogant and very inexperienced.  I hate being in that headspace and recoil from depictions of it. What Stranger Things 3 did -which is something I haven't seen often- is present the teen drama with a TONE that views it for the silliness that it is. I think it was handled expertly because doing that could easily lead to being alienated from the characters and not caring about their experiences.  Instead I felt like "aww... I remember those kinds of feelings.  Poor kids."

4. Monster speed. This is a pet peeve of mine.  Since CG came along, virtually all monsters move too fast for their size. These ST monsters are still too fast.  But compared to what else is out there, they did good.

5. Conspiracy-guy and Russian-scientist becoming best buds.  I want them to have a spin-off show. 

6. El and Max's friendship. I've never been a teenage girl but their friendship felt authentic. 

7. Sad feels seeing the nerd being left behind as his friends are becoming more interested in girls than DnD.

Bad: 

1. Hopper and Joyce. I'm guessing they were trying to do a Moonlighting thing where the leads are snarking at each other due to sexual tension. In fact, they explicitly call out the purported tension.  But no.  This did not work for me.  It COULD have worked if they played with the trope in a less-heightened (ham-fisted) way.  What made seasons 1 and 2 work so wonderfully for me was the way most of the characters, most of the time, acted like real people trapped in a plot full of 80s tropes, but did not BECOME 80s tropes.  But in S3 the apparent desire to make them SO snarky overrode the desire to have them act like real people in those situations. SO much yelling in inappropriate places.  Infiltrating a base full of badguys with machine guns?  Let's yell at each other.  Hiding from a giant body horror creature?  Let's yell at each other.  Nope.  Ya broke it.

2. Hopper.  Used to like that guy.  By the end I felt nothing at his 'death'. It was practically a relief. That guy had enough abusive personality red flags to choke a camel. The redemption letter at the end was nice, but too little too late. 

3. Erica. She was a fun spice sprinkled around Season 2. She could have been a fine addition to the main cast in S3 if they didn't write her as cliche'd-line/attitude-spouting machine. It just reminds me of when a kid does something cute and all the adults laugh... and then for the next nine hours the kid does the same thing over and over and over. It's embarrassing.  They can do better.  The writers... not the kid. 

4. They took the wrong lesson from The Thing.  The Thing (80s version obs, duh) worked by doing a slow build of dread.  The way that was accomplished was by hinting at the edges and silhouettes of a slowly emerging horror.  When there were full glory shots of the monsters they were brief and the lighting was always very carefully placed.  (This was due to technical limitations, but accidentally worked very well.) The first ep or 2 of ST3 did this, but before the halfway point (I think) they had fully-lit full-body shots of monsters running around. Clearly a case of being so preoccupied with whether they COULD that they didn't stop to think if they SHOULD.

5. "This is cute, ISN'T IT CUTE?!?!" music.  Another pet peeve of mine.  I don't know why I'm fine with music "telling me" that a scene is supposed to be epic, tense, romantic or sad, but DON'T EVER TELL ME I'M SUPPOSED TO FIND SOMETHING FUNNY!.  Either they didn't use those music cues in the first two seasons, or I didn't notice because I was actually FEELING the intended feeling.  

Odd and Annoying, But Not Enough to Qualify as Bad:
1. El's nosebleed. Just stick a tissue up there before you do your thing.

2. Reloading your guns ads tension you guys.  Please just do it!
3. The Portal Opening Machine didn't look 80s at all. It looked like a prop from an Avengers movie.

4. Lounging and flopping all over movie theater toilets. Just ew. Could not hear what they were saying over the internal screaming in my head.