Stranger Things S03E01-02 Review: Gibbering Mouthers & Doppelgangers

Stranger Things, Season 3, Episode 1: Suzie Do You Copy?; Episode 2: The Mall Rats

Aaaand we're back! The third season of Stranger Things, everyone's favourite supernatural horror sci-fi soup of everything geeky is back in the small screen! Huzzah! And while the very first scene is a huge, bombastic scene of underground Russian labs and a ridiculously large metal machine contraption that zaps a wall and seemingly attempts to create a portal to the world beyond (because that's what shady government operations do) and a Darth Vader-esque "you have failed me, you died" disposal of a scientist, the majority of the first two episodes are... relatively mundane, dealing mostly with picking up with the characters and how much they've settled into their lives. And honestly, it could've been something that could easily turn me off and made me write the entire two episode off as 'setup', but, as with previous seasons of Stranger Things, the cast and the writing are so charismatic and likable that you end up being pretty enthralled even if there are a couple of sub-plots that honestly don't seem like they're particularly interesting -- like the mystery if Dustin actually has a girlfriend, or the whole reporter room sublpot, or the bizarre MILF bit between Lifeguard Man Billy and Ms. Wheeler.

And for the most part... that's all I can say about the happy civilian stuff. They're amazingly charismatic and well-acted. The crux of the show and the one that the first two episodes spend the most time with is still Mike and Eleven's relationship. They've grown to kissing and whatnot since they're teenagers now, and as with all teenagers, the bane of a relationship is an overprotective dad. And Hopper, bless his soul and his new dad-bod, acts as the overprotective dad hilariously. While this isn't all that there is to their scenes and Stranger Things still enjoys throwing their characters at each other to have them interact with the many people in the small town, that's essentially the main point of the two episodes. It's neat, even if, again, I don't particularly care all that much.

We get to see other parts of the small town as we slowly check in with the rest of the cast, too, which, again, while not the most interesting out there, is elevated by the pretty great scripting and the pretty spot-on acting. Lucas and Max are sort of still dating and are just kinda there. Will is even more kinda there, flashbacks to the Mind Flayer from season two notwithstanding. Joyce is running a store and is trying to help Hopper out with parenting, if unsuccessfully, and there's this awkward romance between them as well that ends up with Joyce being far more engrossed with the mystery of magnets not working moreso than going on a date with Hopper. Jonathan and Nancy are reporters, with Nancy bearing the brunt of 80's sexism and a 'make my coffee' attitude. Steve got a job selling ice cream at a mall. Hell, even the most direct conflict to our characters seem to be the slimeball mayor ignoring the protesters of the random people in the city who want the mall to be closed down... but no one we care about is really protesting about that since the kids actually enjoy the mall a fair bit.

But all of these mundane storylines end up leading to somewhere interesting, and it's primarily due to the fact that, well, we actually care about these characters to sit through seeing them enjoying their natural lives before the inevitability of the setting throws them into more chaos. Throughout the first episode we get glimpses of things that are just kind of wrong, slightly out of our main characters' sight. There's a giant dust cloud in some abandoned building. There are swarms of rats charging around and exploding into gibbets of meaty gloop. There's Will's little brief vision and flashback to the second season's events.

And, of course, slowly by surely, our characters start seeing hints that things are... not quite right, even if those are things that they want to handwave as just oddities. The initial city-wide blackout is strange, but still under the realm of possibility. Joyce sees that strangely, fridge magnets are not working -- once at her house, and a second time at work. Nancy and Jonathan ends up investigating reports of rabid rats attacking a poor old woman's fertilizer stock throughout the second episode, and ends up barely missing said rat exploding into a glob of moving, sentient goo. Dustin's attempt to set up an impractically large homemade antenna to talk to his girlfriend ends up intercepting a Russian transmission, which he decodes with the help of Steve and his co-worker Robin.

In fact, throughout the first two episodes, the only real member of the cast who ends up really coming into direct encounter with something strange is Billy, easily the character that's most detached from the clump of family and friends  that the rest of the main cast are part of. Hell, I still kinda view him more as an antagonist more than anything. While on an attempt to go onto a tryst with MILF Ms. Wheeler (something that's unbearably creepy and thank god Ms. Wheeler ended up getting second chances), he ends up being dragged by shadowy tentacles and finds himself stumbling into the Upside-Down, meeting... humans! What? Including a doppelganger of himself! And, throughout the second episode, Billy has lost all his swagger, lashing out, being irritable, getting vampire-esque sunburns... culminating in a hallucination of his co-worker going all "take me to him", causing Billy to do... exactly that. In a scene that honestly ends up being framed pretty similarly to a rape scene... turns out that Billy is feeding her into a ginormous mound of ooze seemingly made out of rat corpses.

Shit, in D&D terms, Billy's now a cultist serving an elder being or some shit!

While Billy is busy being a cultist to an extradimensional being, the rest of the cast go about their relatively mundane lives. Sure, Eleven blows up the soda cups of some mean girls, but it's pretty neat to see that after the wedge that Hopper shoved between Eleven and Mike, the two of them ends up recruiting their respective buddies. Eleven and Max go out for a girl's night out, which is adorable as all hell, while Mike, Lucas and Will (mostly Lucas) just scramble and try and find out a way to get Mike to apologize to Eleven. Lies are serious business among these kids, so Eleven ends up dumping Mike... although with a girl friend to high-five and share ice creams with, it's way more lighthearted than an emo betrayal or something like that. Again... all very mundane and teenager-like.

The main kids are dealing with teenage-politics stuff, and Hopper's balancing real politics as well as being stood up by Joyce at a dinner... while the rest of the cast stumble into different, weird things. Nancy and Jonathan, as mentioned before, investigate the rats. Dustin, Steve and Robin translate the still-coded Russian message, but figure out that it came from America thanks to some similar music. Joyce and good old Mister Clarke ends up discussing the ramifications of magnets and electromagnetic fields. Throw in the flesh abomination Billy is serving, and it's getting increasingly curious which parts of the events are caused by the Russian experimentation (the magnets for sure, right?), and which parts are due to extra-planar beings.

It's a pretty slow start, but it's one that's definitely sucks me in pretty quickly back into this show!

Random Notes:

• In episode 1, among Dustin's robots is a G1 Transformer, Ultra Magnus! Which... shouldn't be motorized, but we'll chalk that up to Eleven's powers. Also, Ultra Magnus should've been released in 1986 instead of 1985, but... eh, close enough, I guess? I'm just happy to see an old-school Transformer. 
• Other than his brief wincing due to his connection to the Upside Down, the only real thing Will does this episode is "can we play D&D now?" Relatable.
• Both the Swarm of Rats and the ooze monsters are very D&D. I approve. 
• There's a little pinup of Bob Newby, superhero, on Joyce's wall. Aww. 
• It's a very short scene and quickly noted to not be the case, but the look on Dustin's face early in the first episode when her mother tells him that "maybe they just... forgot?" is perfectly portrayed. 
• Hopper's mustache is ridiculous and I love it.