Stranger Things 3: a flawless finale – but what a slog to get there
The end of Stranger Things 3 is tremendous. It’s a blockbuster in every sense of the word; exciting, spectacular, funny and so unbelievably affecting that I cried for about 15 minutes after it ended. The final episode of Stranger Things 3 is a flawlessly executed, truly beautiful piece of television.But there’s a problem. To watch the final episode of Stranger Things 3, you first have to watch the preceding seven episodes of Stranger Things 3. And, oh boy, are those a slog.
I’m starting to get the feeling that nobody expected Stranger Things to last for three series. The first was a wonderfully judged confection about a missing boy and a monster. It had a charming young cast, it had emotional heft thanks to Winona Ryder’s non-stop weeping and it had the potential to be perfectly self-contained.
By the end, the boy was found and the monster defeated. Had Will not coughed up his little devil slug in the final scene – a scene whose inclusion felt more like the product of commercial bet-hedging than creative ambition – Stranger Things could easily have ended there. Or it could have come back as something else entirely; after all, it was originally pitched as an anthology series, which explains its weirdly bland title.
But then the cast became hot property, enthusiastically memeing themselves stupid at every possible opportunity, and the anthology was ditched in favour of a continuation. The resulting series was a dilution of Stranger Things – it was louder and brasher than its predecessor, with more monsters and a truly bewildering standalone episode – that could just as easily have left it there.
And yet here we are again. Stranger Things 3 has one episode fewer than its predecessor, but still feels four episodes too long. Once the series finally kicks into gear, it might very well count as the single best stretch of episodes that Stranger Things has ever produced. However, that doesn’t really happen until episode six.
Until that point we’re essentially just treated to Stranger Things: The Soap Opera, which is even less fun than it sounds. We watch Hopper and Joyce bicker and squabble like an old married couple. We watch Will tiptoe around the subject of his sexuality. Eleven goes on a shopping spree. Jonathan’s attempts to properly develop some photos are continually thwarted. I haven’t measured this, but it feels like we spend upwards of a full decade watching people serve ice-cream to each other in real time.
It’s slow to get going and it’s frustrating to watch. The inter-cast interplay that became the show’s hallmark is heavily reduced, because the gang is thrown to the winds, because the writers needed to fill some episodes. Jonathan and Nancy don’t hang out with anybody because they’re off investigating rats. Eleven doesn’t hang out with the boys because she split up with one of them. Dustin barely hangs out with the boys at all because otherwise Steve Harrington wouldn’t have anything to do. Joyce basically doesn’t see her children at all, because she’s too busy pulling funny faces on Hopper’s big adventure. It makes for a disparate and, dare I say it, boring viewing experience.
It’s a bizarre choice to drag things out this long, because we’re on the third series; there’s no mystery to it any more. A slow build – or at least a build as slow as this – is pointless. Just show us a bunch of kids being chased around by a giant tumour spider and we’ll be perfectly happy. The whole thing should have had the momentum of the final three episodes. The fact that it didn’t suggests that the Duffer Brothers ran out of ideas.
There will be more Stranger Things. Last anyone heard, how much was up for debate. “Four seems short, five seems long”, said Matt Duffer back in 2017 when he was trying to work out how many seasons the show should have.
But on the basis of Stranger Things 3, less is more. Much less. Going by this series, it would be sensible if they bit the bullet and ended Stranger Things with a film. If they gave themselves two hours to wrap up the story, condensing everything into a tight succession of the sort of blockbuster moments they have shown they are more than capable of delivering, Stranger Things could go out on an all-time high. But if they have got 16 more hours of ice-cream high jinx planned, not so much.