The nostalgic growing pains of Stranger Things are as sweet as ever
for the first minute of season three’s
Stranger Things, you may be forgiven for assuming you’re watching the wrong show. Grizzled men wearing pristine lab coats press analogue buttons in a test laboratory. Everyone is talking Russian. Shifty looking sparks fly from heavy machinery. Has the normally ruddy-cheeked, nostalgic 1980s sci-fi phenom turned into… Chernobyl? Fear not. The charm offensive of this remarkable screen oddity, a defining show of the 2010s, swiftly returns.
Stranger Things’ second season came in for the routine drubbing that is now customary for anything turning a proper televisual page on arrival. The shock of the new was over. Winona Ryder in a quality TV show and that cop who carries his extra couple of stone over his pistol-belt with unreasonable sex appeal were no longer fresh Netflix stars. Like The Handmaid’s Tale and Killing Eve, ST had a slight case of second season blues, where the confidence and bravado of its debut was handed over to an audience suffering collective ADHD.
The thing with Stranger Things is that it was never really about a girl with a skinhead, its panoply of film nerd references or The Upside Down, the odd graphic netherworld where children disappear and come back to life. It wasn’t even about the emerging red-carpet fashion profile of millie bobby brown. All of the extraneous details layered intrigue on a central concept which followed dutifully from the ET model: telling a brilliant, convoluted, fanciful story of family good and evil from the point of view of a bunch of adolescents, when morality crunches at its most untainted. It’s a love letter to the naivety of that moment when you turn yourself out of childhood, surrounded by a maelstrom of confusingly huge new emotional codes.
The big news for season three is – initially, at least – that Dustin has a girlfriend, the sweetest touch in an opening episode which wills you from every angle into adoring it. This year’s Hollywood offspring, Uma Thurman’s daughter maya Hawke, is strong-armed in. The local swimming pool is awash with hormonal mums in thrall to a hunky new attendant. The soundtrack is that American soft rock which disappeared in 1989. Oh, and the hot cop is still hot. Begins Thursday, Netflix