Stranger Things season 3 binge recap: Episodes 1 – 4

Chapter One: Suzie, Do You Copy?

The long wait is over, Stranger Things fans! We’re back in Hawkins, the weirdest fictional town in Indiana outside of Pawnee.

But first, a short prologue in Russia, where some scientists fail spectacularly at breaching the dimensions. Remember their faces because you better believe we will be seeing them again. After that curious opening, we move to the Summer of 1985 where Hawkins seems surprisingly normal from the lack of mortal peril.

Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) behaves as close to a regular teenager as she can, using her powers to pull pranks and slam doors instead of saving the world. The snazzy Starcourt Mall has opened and while Steve (Joe Keery, hilarious as always) now works there, and the kids are crazy for it, it’s crippled downtown. Nancy notices the effect at her new job at The Hawkins Post, but her sexist editors treat her like a maid while giving Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) more respect as the paper’s photographer. The biggest change, though, is that teenage hormones are now raging, with most of the main couples from last season still going strong.

One couple is going a little too strong for Chief Jim Hopper (David Harbour, turning the surly dial to, um, you get the joke) who’s now obsessed with both Magnum P.I. and the amount of time his adoptive daughter spends sucking face with Mike (Finn Wolfhard).

Hopper seeks parenting advice from Joyce (Winona Ryder), who counsels him to act reasonably with Eleven and Mike while dodging his longing looks and invitations to dinner. To the consternation of Jopper fans everywhere, Joyce still mourns Bob (Sean Astin) and doesn’t seem quite ready to date yet. Hopper understands but takes his frustrations out on Mike later on, preferring threats to calm discussion.

The swirl of hormones also leaves Will and Dustin a little out of sorts. One suspects Will will never be interested in girls, but Dustin, not wanting to be left out, swears he met a great girl named Suzie at science camp. Though the gang doubts her existence, he builds a radio tower to communicate with her and by accident, picks up a mysterious Russian message. In the midst of Reagan’s Cold War America, Dustin goes on high alert.

Of course, this being Hawkins, that’s not the only disturbing thing bubbling under the surface. The town suffers a massive unexplained power outage, Joyce’s magnets have stopped sticking to the fridge, and the town rats scurry toward a mysterious force at the abandoned Brimborn Steelworks. The rats start exploding in a truly disgusting scene.

Will (Noah Schnapp) senses the mysterious force as goosebumps form on his neck on a hot summer day. He doesn’t want to admit it, but he knows the Mind Flayer stirs. And it’s found its new target in Billy (Dacre Montgomery), who has spent the summer trying to seduce Mrs. Wheeler during his lifeguard stint at the community pool. On the way to meeting her for rendezvous at the Motel 6 (sexy!), he crashes near the steelworks and gets sucked screaming inside. The Mind Flayer has found a new host and now nothing in Hawkins is safe from its clutches, including our intrepid heroes.

Other Observations:

Maya Hawke (daughter of ‘90s icons Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman) is a delight in her debut as Steve’s new Scoops Ahoy co-worker, Robin. It’s almost uncanny how much she sounds like her mother and definitely wins the award for best new character.
Though it probably won’t last long, it’s nice to see Eleven being happy after all her past trauma. Her bedroom even received an upgrade from its barebones state last season.
Did I rewind the Jopper hand grab and his longing look more than once? Why, yes I did. Did I do it five or six times? Maybe. Only my Netflix account knows.
As usual, the show is filled with homages to various ’80s movies and TV shows, but I enjoyed Jonathan falling over as he put on his pants like Michael J. . did in Back to the Future.

Chapter Two: The Mall Rats

Billy survives the Mind Flayer’s attack, but just like Will in season 2, he’s not the same. Reality becomes distorted as he suffers from violent and disturbing visions. At his lifeguard job, his skin scalds in the sun showing the creature within him still hates the heat.

He isn’t the only one under the Mind Flayer’s control. Bored by the menial work she’s been doing, Nancy takes Jonathan to investigate a tip from Mrs. Driscoll, who has caught a crazy, diseased rat. They see the rat for themselves but leave before it explodes and slithers from its cage.

In other upsetting news, Eleven and Mike hit a rocky patch as Hopper’s threats take effect (just what did he say to the poor kid?) and Mike stands Eleven up. Confused by Mike’s squirrely behavior, Eleven seeks out romantic counsel from Max (Sadie Sink), who takes her to Starcourt for a shopping montage right out of an ’80s movie. The scene seems designed to show off the set more than anything else (and it does match my memory of an ’80s mall), but Max has a point in showing the sheltered girl how to discover herself away from her boyfriend.

A confused Mike also winds up at Starcourt along with Will and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) as they try to find Eleven a gift she’ll like (and he can afford). He runs into Eleven and, fed up with his inability to explain himself, Eleven takes Max’s advice and dumps him. She and Max laugh about it as they escape on the bus, but poor Mike looks like he just got hit by one.

Such news would normally thrill Hopper, but he suffers a romantic setback of his own. After finally convincing Joyce to go to dinner just as friends (though he’s definitely got romance on the brain), she stands him up. Hopper stumbles drunk and little heartbroken past the restaurant bar, bumping into the Terminator lookalike (Andrey Ivchenko) from the season’s Russian prologue.

And what did Joyce stand our loyal police chief up for? The damn magnets! She’s noticed that they’ve stopped being, well, magnetic and abandons both work and her dinner plans for an impromptu lesson in magnetic theory from Mr. Clarke. Though Joyce is often right in her suspicions, the magnet plot seems really kooky even for her. How quickly did she get all those library books before abandoning work entirely? An hour? Maybe two?

While the romance in the episode suffers, the bromance is as strong as ever as Steve and Dustin reunite and attempt to decode the Russian message Dustin heard. Steve’s co-worker Robin has a better ear and deciphers it herself, though Steve later realizes that the message didn’t come from Russia but Starcourt itself.

The episode ends on a disturbing note as Billy kidnaps a fellow lifeguard named Heather and delivers her to the Mind Flayer. Whatever has happened to Billy, he’s in deep and only getting more dangerous.

Other Observations

Cary Elwes makes his first appearance as Mayor Larry Kline in a role that honestly seems better suited to another blonde ’80s icon, John Schneider. The town folk aren’t too happy with Mayor Kline because Starcourt’s opening has really killed businesses downtown.
After her somewhat adversarial treatment of Max last season, it’s nice to see Eleven become friends with her, though it’s curious she’s still not supposed to be out in crowds. Is she even enrolled in school?
Which was funnier? David Harbour’s pronunciation of Chianti or Natasha Lyonne’s pronunciation of cockroach on Russian Doll?
Will repeatedly asking if they could play D&D now was both hilarious and familiar to anyone who’s been stuck in a mall far longer than they’d like.
Robin asking Steve, “How many children are you friends with?” was my favorite line of the episode.

Chapter Three: The Case of the Missing Lifeguard

After breaking up with Mike, Eleven regrets her rashness until she spies on Mike using her powers and discovers him acting like your basic teenage boy. But a sleepover game leads her and Max to choose Billy as another spying target. This time the results are terrifying as Eleven sees Billy kidnap Heather and hears her blood-curdling screams. Back at Max’s house, they discover a tub filled with melted ice bags and a bloody lifeguard’s whistle.

As the sky opens for a massive, episode-long downpour, the other investigations around town continue to pick up steam. At Starcourt, Steve, Dustin, and Robin notice the coded words in the Russian message stand for various places in the mall and that the loading dock is unusually well-armed for a suburban mall. Nancy seems to be onto something as well, but Tom (Michael Park), the editor-in-chief, just dismisses her findings. Jonathan would rather not get fired over it but still follows her as she pushes on and discovers Mrs. Driscoll eating fertilizer like a crazed rat.

Meanwhile, Joyce finally shows up at Hopper’s cabin, and while he’s furious at her, he gets drawn into her magnetic (pun intended) web. He breaks into the boarded up Hawkins Lab to prove to her that the people who endangered Will are truly gone. After their earlier bickering, they have a heart-to-heart where he reveals he knows Joyce is planning to move out of town. He confesses that he’s been doing everything he can to make her feel safe and wants her to know that there are people in Hawkins, namely him, who really care about her. This lovely conversation gets interrupted when they realize they aren’t alone and Hopper gets ambushed by Grigori, the mysterious Russian Arnold Schwarzenegger lookalike from the restaurant.

After fighting with Mike and Lucas over their girl obsession, Will bikes home in the rain and in a heart-breaking moment destroys Castle Byers. As he does, he gets another sensation from the Mind Flayer and when Mike and Lucas come to apologize, he tells them it’s returned.

Eleven and Max continue their sleuthing only to discover Heather hasn’t turned up for work at the pool. When they track her down at her house, they find Billy and Heather at dinner with her parents, one of whom is Nancy’s boss, Tom. Billy gets the suspicious girls to leave by acting as normal as he can. As soon as he does, the terror starts for Heather’s parents, who become the Mind Flayer’s next victims.

Other Observations

What I wouldn’t have done for a cameo by Matthew Rhys or Keri Russell from The Americans somewhere in the Russian plot.
It’s been a subtext that Will might be gay, but when Mike pointed out he didn’t like girls during their fight, we got further suggestion that he really could be. And though Noah Schnapp hasn’t quite had the showcase role he did last season, he was absolutely heartrending as Will struggles with his growing pains.
There has been a lot of bickering between Joyce and Hopper, but when they quiet down and just talk, it’s obvious why people have shipped them for years.
Even though Billy and Max feature prominently in this season’s plot, the show really hasn’t found a way to make their relationship with each other compelling. It would be nice to understand why Max cares at all about her bully of a stepbrother.

Chapter Four: The Sauna Test

Though Billy has thrown Max and the still suspicious Eleven off his trail, the gruesome flaying of Heather’s parents show he’s as dangerous as ever. Before the girls can alert anyone to their fears about Billy, the boys call a code red based on what Will has sensed. Though there is a lot of awkwardness between Mike and Eleven as Will describes what being a host to the Mind Flayer feels like, the gang realizes that Billy still poses a serious threat to them all.

Despite being under the Mind Flayer’s control as well, a visibly injured Tom fires Nancy and Jonathan, who’ve been unknowingly pursuing the Mind Flayer through their investigation of the also flayed Mrs. Driscoll. Their firing opens a rift between them as Nancy realizes Jonathan doesn’t face the same sexism she does and he realizes she doesn’t know how hard opportunities are to get when you don’t come from a cushy middle-class background. After some well-timed actual parenting by Mrs. Wheeler, Nancy decides to forge ahead on her own.

Meanwhile, Joyce somehow gets Hopper back to his cabin where he wakes up completely naked and visibly bruised. Just who took off his clothes remains a mystery but one Hawaiian shirt, some detective work, and a few well-placed punches to the former Dread Pirate Roberts’s face reveals that his attacker works for Starcourt and there are more nefarious plans for the town in store.

Back at Starcourt itself, Robin acquires the mall’s blueprints and the group recruits Lucas’s sister Erica (Priah Ferguson) to climb through the ductwork to the loading dock. Erica remains a walking quote machine but her inclusion seems more like fan service than logical plotting considering her young age. Nevertheless, Erica succeeds and they discover vials of glowing green goo before plummeting to the mall’s depths as the room they are in turns out to be an elevator.

Steve and company are not the only ones in peril. After stalking Billy at the community pool, the gang traps him in the sauna once the pool closes. Knowing the Mind Flayer hates heat, they turn up the temperature, but things go haywire when Billy escapes. Knowing she’s the one thing standing between the Mind Flayer and total domination, Billy starts choking Eleven. Mike comes to her rescue and she uses the last of her strength to throw Billy through a brick wall.

That doesn’t stop him as he escapes and rejoins Heather back at the steelworks where their true handiwork reveals itself. For while the gang has been trying to defeat Billy, he’s been assembling an army of the Flayed. And it’s gotten very large.

Other observations:

Cara Buono’s role as Mrs. Wheeler has been rather thankless but the conversation with Nancy was a nice showcase for the former Mad Men actress.
Eleven’s “I make my own rules” battles Erica’s “You can’t spell America without Erica” for the episode’s best line, though Steve confusing Gumbo for Gumby may be a runner up.
While Max rectified Eleven’s missing Wonder Woman knowledge, someone really needs to take the poor girl on a roller coaster.
Okay, so just who took off Hopper’s clothes and what exactly did Joyce see when it happened? Season 3 really is the season of shirtless Hopper in all his dadbod glory.

Check back in for episodes 5 -8 later today!

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