Man, I haven't been keeping up on these trailers and I'm really at the point of really having zero excitement or interest in this series anymore.
It's a combination of outgrowing it due to some personal changes in the past five years, and the series just really shit the bed so damn hard in 3.
It went from a fairly serious and dark sci-fi horror series that used its 1980s setting well in the first season to channel the right mix of Stephen King and Spielberg/Lucas to ground things in a time, place and vibe, to season 2 starting to more uncritically indulge in the kids' pop culture fixations for a bigger, messier story that nonetheless still felt like it had something, to season 3 just... feeling like pure indulgence and stupid bullshit.
You go from children playing with and referencing real world pop culture products because that's just sort of how you evoke childhood from that era... to the utterly ludicrous and cringeworthy scenes with the mall in 3. Plus, the completely insane Soviet subplot that now looks like it's going to cannibalize the entire goddamn series. I mean, you had Soviets building a full underground super-base in the middle of Indiana on a site that already has the US government crawling around it. That's the kind of thing that contemporary Reaganite anticommunist cranks would put in contemporary propaganda to encourage witch hunts for fifth columns and spending another trillion dollars on tanks, in something that's supposed to just be using the 1980s as a backdrop it just completely shreds any suspension of disbelief. And then there's the fucking trailers that seem to show Hopper in a Stalin-era Gulag in the middle of Perestroika.
It feels like Stranger Things went, in the span of just one season, from a decent series that worked a delicate balance of nostalgia and doing its own thing to a story that overindulgently glorifies 1980s consumerism while also feeling like a schlocky product of it.
