Definitely better than the second season, but at least that season was operating under the umbrella of Season 1's wild and unprecedented success; this one's just a second straight helping of "I mean, what's the actual point of this weird mishmash of '80s nostalgia and kid-friendly horror shit?" Don't get me wrong - this is still fun, plenty light-hearted, impossible to take seriously, really not unlike plenty of blockbuster film franchises in that regard. But in just eight episodes, all of the following shit happened, and plenty else:
- Four of the kids discovered and infiltrated a secret Soviet base beneath their town's brand new mall
- The local bad boy heartthrob lifeguard who all the town moms want to fuck got body-snatched and cloned by a monster and then did the same thing to his coworker and her family... and then died
- Winona Ryder was perplexed by like, magnets, and then she and her ex met and befriended a Russian scientist they called Smirnoff
- Said ex was not just a jealy ex but also a jealy father figures who caused a tween breakup
- The very small older sister and her photographer boyfriend worked at a newspaper and discovered some exploding rats and a crazy woman and then all of their bosses turned out to be, uh, I want to say zombie-like bad guys
- The nerdy kid who kept getting kidnapped by demons in the first two seasons was just sort of chilling in our dimension this time around getting sad that his friends had outgrown D&D
I think all of these elements work on their own, to various extents, but the amalgamation of everything just left me entirely confused and brainsore. These characters aren't people, they're just '80s tropes come to life! And these stories aren't stories, they're just a grab bag of '80s action and horror movie plots.
At least the very ill-advised Eleven-has-punky-goth-friends arc from Season 2 seems dead as hell.
Oh and Hopper is totally alive, right?
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