‘Time to get excited!' Why Stranger Things could be back to its best for its final episodes ever

The Guardian

6 days ago

Objectively, you should not be excited about the return of Stranger Things. Over the years, the Netflix smash has in many ways come to represent everything bad about television's streaming era.
It began as a fun piece of fluff, a one-and-done collection of overt 1980s film references, designed as the first part of an unconnected anthology. But then it exceeded expectations, so the Duffer brothers found themselves having to pull an entire mythology out of thin air. And a bloated one at that, full of (at best) bottle episodes about punky young superheroes and (at worst) self-indulgent episodes that grind on for hours and hours.
And because the episodes were so gargantuan, they took years to make. This is why you shouldn't be excited about the return of Stranger Things. Whatever happened in the last batch of episodes has long since receded from memory and they were so long that you cannot possibly build up the enthusiasm to watch them all again. It is less a series and more a Man v Food challenge, served up long after you've forgotten what your last meal tasted of.
And yet the first trailer for the final batch of Stranger Things episodes has dropped and goddamn it if I'm not suddenly really excited about it.
What happens in the trailer? It's hard to say. Joe Keery turns a wheel in a van. A bunch of lights flicker. There are flamethrowers. Someone jumps between trees during a lightning storm, pursued by a demon. A bunch of four-legged monsters prowl around a kitchen like raptors in Jurassic Park. There are machine guns and fast cars, and crying and flying and Vecna throwing a sort of burning tornado at the sky, all accompanied by Deep Purple's Child in Time.
Does it make sense? Not really. Is it so overloaded with mythology and superfluous characters that you felt you needed a diagram to remind you who everyone was? Almost certainly. But could I feel my heart start to race as it went on? Yes. The Stranger Things trailer isn't the best trailer I've ever seen, but it might qualify as the most trailer I've ever seen, and sometimes that does the trick.
More than anything, it reinforces the direction that Stranger Things has been heading for the past nine years. There will be not a single atom of subtlety in these episodes. Any nuance will be forced out by a powerhouse of spectacle. Things will explode. There will be CGI by the gallon. Characters will operate exclusively in emotional red zones. For better or worse, you will end this series exhausted.
However, there is one small hint that – despite the heavy metal frenzy that whirls around it – Stranger Things knows how it will stick the landing. It comes in the form of a snatch of dialogue between Hopper and Eleven. It isn't much ('Let's end this, kid') but it's a sign the key relationship of the entire series is back on track.
Despite all the excess – the monsters, the nostalgia – Stranger Things was always a show about parenthood. It's the story of a man who finds a weird little girl with nowhere to go, who helps him rebuild himself after experiencing the most devastating bereavement. Any time it has leant into the found-family dynamic between Hopper and Eleven, Stranger Things has found an emotional wallop that cannot be overwhelmed by the whiz-bang chicanery of the rest of the show. This is where Stranger Things began and I pray this is where it will end.
That's the pull of this trailer. The final season of Stranger Things will surely be too long. There will be too many storylines. There will be children riding bicycles even though they are visibly so old they should really have been driving their own children to school for the past decade. But if it remembers to focus on its heart – on the dynamic between a man and a girl who saved each other – then it might be worth getting excited about Stranger Things after all.