Stranger Things season 3: news and reviews

Every week, we pick a new episode of the week. It could be good. It could be bad. It will always be interesting. You can read the archives here. The episode of the week for June 30 through July 6 is “The Battle of Starcourt,” the season three finale of Netflix’s Stranger Things.

Stranger Things is arguably the most successful young adult series of the last half-decade. Like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games before it, the TV show is charting the maturation of a bunch of kids who start out knowing very little about the world and grow into adulthood as uneasily as the rest of us.

Stranger Things has 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.

If, for whatever reason, you wanted everything you wore, touched, and ate to bear some relation to Stranger Things, this would not be impossible for you.

In advance of the show’s third season, Levi’s announced a capsule collection designed in collaboration with the series’ costume designers, with a lookbook shot on set. H&M partnered with Netflix to create a line of t-shirts, shorts, and swimwear inspired by the fictional Hawkins Community Pool (some of which will be worn by characters on-screen in season three). Nike made Hawkins High School limited editions of three of its most popular sneakers.

Stranger Things 3 sees all the characters from Hawkins, Indiana, growing and evolving. And yes, I’m including a few monsters in that mix.

The second season of Stranger Things came in for its fair share of criticism, including from Vox, for a meandering and sometimes disjointed plot, and writing that clearly undervalued and underused the show’s female characters. And yet, as my colleague Emily VanDerWerff noted in her season two review, “when it works, it works. I’m powerless to resist it. You probably are too.”

Stranger Things has been known to keep its plot details under wraps, but Netflix has just released the latest (and most likely final) trailer for Stranger Things 3 — interestingly at 7:11 Pacific time — and it’s full of intriguing plot details concerning the latest threat looming over Hawkins, Indiana.

The new trailer features our loyal band of heroes, both teens and adults, valiantly facing off against a terrifying threat — and not a new threat, it seems, but one they thought they’d previously defeated. Namely: The Mind Flayer, the terrible tentacled entity last seen hovering over Hawkins Middle School in the Upside Down, is apparently alive and well and prepared to lay waste to the whole town, and perhaps more.

By now, Stranger Things is well known for keeping plot details largely under wraps until the debut of each new season. And the first full trailer for season three has stayed true to form, as it’s low on story and high on Stranger Things’ sumptuous ’80s aesthetic — the new season is set in the summer of 1985 — and kids being kids together.

Or are they? “We’re not kids anymore,” Mike (Finn Wolfhard) is heard telling his fellow members of Hawkins, Indiana’s local monster-fighting gang. But the rest of the clip is full of the kinds of nostalgic moments and imagery that have long been associated with both Stranger Things and ’80s pop culture at large: kids on bikes, kids on slides, carousels, toy robots, and invisible lightsaber fights.

Netflix rang in the new year with a special announcement: Stranger Things season three finally has a premiere date. In a new teaser trailer released at 12:01 am Eastern on New Year’s Day, the streaming network revealed that the 1980s-set series will officially return on July 4, 2019.

The teaser is appropriately New Year’s-themed, featuring archival footage of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve from 1984: As the ball drops in Times Square and 1985 dawns, things take a turn toward the Upside-Down just as the clock is about to strike midnight. While the clip doesn’t seem to contain any new footage from season three, it does build on a previously released teaser, with Hawkins, Indiana’s Channel 5 news station noting that the Times Square broadcast is “Brought to you by: Starcourt Mall.”

With Stranger Things season three now in production — and the first teaser trailer officially available for fans of the hit Netflix series to pick apart — it’s time to take stock of where we left off, and what’s to come. There haven’t been many clues as of yet, in terms of where the story will go next or what tone it’ll take, but the puzzle pieces we do have promise the same kind of nostalgia-tinged thrill ride we’ve come to expect from the show.

Here’s what we know so far.