Stranger Things season 3 has good ideas but poor execution

Stranger Thingshas always worn its heart on its sleeve and flown its nerd flag high. Season three leans into both impulses to deliver a story that’s fun and familiar, one that may seem like a retread of previous seasons. But Stranger Things fans who just want to hang out with their favorite characters from Hawkins, Indiana, are likely to enjoy it nonetheless.

Season three sees the gang mostly split up into smaller subgroups, each doing their own things. But they’re still dealing with the Upside Down, and they each become entangled in different threads of a convoluted web of intrigue regarding yet another attempt by sinister forces to access it.

Naturally, there are more monsters too.

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Stranger Things season 3 is charming but frustrating. Here’s a spoiler-free review.

To talk about what season three really gets right and what it doesn’t, we have to spoil some of the plot for you. It’s a bit convoluted, but it’s also pretty fun. If you’d like to get an idea of what to expect without any spoilers at all, check out our spoiler-free review; if you’re comfortable knowing at least the basics, read on.

The plot of Stranger Things 3 is the show’s silliest and most convoluted yet

Stranger Things 3 takes place in the summer of 1985. It’s immediately clear that our adorable tweens have sprouted into full-on teens. And between the constant makeout sessions that Eleven (Millie Bobbie Brown) and Mike (Finn Wolfhard) are having and the disinterest that some members of the group are feeling toward Dungeons & Dragons, the gang is starting to grow apart.

But that’s not entirely a bad thing, and Stranger Things capitalizes on the opportunity to try out some new character pairings. Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), newly back from summer camp, winds up bonding even more with his old pal Steve (Joe Keery), whose season two role as an accidental babysitter made him a breakout meme star. Steve, in turn, is working at the new Starcourt Mall; he’s serving ice cream in the food court’s Scoops Ahoy, where he’s regularly mocked by his deadpan coworker Robin (Maya Hawke) and strategically undermined by mall patron and ice cream connoisseur Erica (Priah Ferguson). (You may remember Erica from season two; she’s Lucas’s little sister.)

Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) and his girlfriend Max (Sadie Sink) are mainly spending their time helping Mike and Eleven avoid breaking up due to pressure from Chief Hopper (David Harbour), who doesn’t seem to know how to handle his adopted daughter having a boyfriend. Hopper turns to Will’s mom Joyce (Winona Ryder) for help, but since he isn’t ready to listen to her, his efforts only serve to drive a wedge between El and Mike.

Much to the chagrin of Will (Noah Schnapp), his friends all seem way more interested in having girlfriends than in embarking on new D&D adventures, and as the group’s only late bloomer or asexual and/or queer kid, he’s feeling pretty left out. He’s also distracted by his constant sense that the Mind Flayer — the giant spider-like monster that came from the Upside Down to threaten Hawkins in season two — is still lurking around town, despite the closing of the gate between worlds in the season two finale.

Meanwhile, Mike’s older sister Nancy (Natalia Dyer) has started working as an intern at the local newspaper, alongside her boyfriend (and Will’s older brother) Jonathan (Charlie Heaton). But while Jonathan is seen as a star employee, Nancy is constantly belittled and mocked by the paper’s top editors, all of whom are men. She’s eager to find a story that will allow her to prove herself as a reporter, and the one she decides to pursue is grisly — it seems there’s an infestation of diseased rats who are eating fertilizer and other chemical substances all over town. Let’s be clear: Never in a zillion years would a teenage girl decide to start developing her journalistic beat around diseased rats, but sure, Stranger Things, you can have this one.

The rats, as it turns out, are indirectly connected to a major underworld conspiracy — literally. A group of evil Russians have built a covert underground lab beneath the Starcourt Mall food court (stay with me here), and they’re working to secure access to the Upside Down. Why they’re doing this is never explained. But after Dustin intercepts a strange coded message spoken in Russian and transmitted from the mall itself, he — along with Steve and Robin — can’t help but investigate, and the trio’s quest to infiltrate the lab keeps them busy for most of the season (not least because they end up trapped there for a while).

The Russians are presumably why Will keeps sensing that the Mind Flayer is back to wreak havoc on Hawkins; it seems they’ve already opened the gate just enough to let the monster through. Their experiments involve a huge electromagnetic “key” intended to open the gate at will — a detail we ultimately learn because Joyce becomes obsessed with why her refrigerator magnets aren’t working like they should. She ropes Hopper into investigating with her, and he plays along mainly because he wants to spend time with her, in hopes of finding romance. But her instincts that the fridge magnets are symptoms of a bigger problem are correct, and before long, she and Hopper are being pursued by an evil Arnold Schwarzenegger figure who’s attempting to keep them from learning more.

These disparate stories begin to converge as Eleven, Mike, Lucas, Max, and Will realize that something disturbing is happening with Max’s bully of an older brother, Billy (Dacre Montgomery). Billy has actually become possessed by the Mind Flayer, and it’s using him as a vehicle to possess more people all over town.

Like the rats Nancy is investigating, the Mind Flayer’s newly possessed victims are voraciously eating fertilizer and other chemical substances. Once they’ve consumed enough, they explode, and their bodies melt into bloody, gelatinous puddles that contain a piece of the Mind Flayer’s sentience. These puddles are capable of merging with each other to form a terrifying monster that resembles something like season one’s Demogorgon combined with the Mind Flayer: It’s got long, spider-like arms and the Demogorgon’s layered, petal-like mouth, as well as the convenient ability to collapse back into a puddle of unkillable goo.

Oh, and as more people become possessed by the Mind Flayer, the new monster simply gets bigger and bigger.

All of this is highly silly, especially given some of the odd writing choices in play. For example, Stranger Things is at pains to explain how electromagnetic fields work, but it makes no attempt to clarify how eating fertilizer transforms possessed humans into a sentient, scalable goo-monster. Nor does it give a reason for why evil Russians showed up in Indiana to try to reopen the gate to the Upside Down. I guess “because they’re evil Russians” and “because it’s the Upside Down” are expected to serve as satisfying answers, but make no mistake: Season three is more or less an eight-episode romp whose sense of urgency is often undermined by its patently ridiculous plot.

And for the most part, that’s perfectly fine. It stands to reason that fans who are showing up for Stranger Things 3 are doing so primarily for their favorite characters, for the charming dynamics between those characters, and for the ’80s nostalgia that Stranger Things delivers in spades. The season offers plenty of all those things, wrapped around a plot that never takes itself too seriously. Which makes sense, given that it’s set in (and underneath) a mall.