The third season of “very strange things”: the fight against Soviet invaders and transitional age

Spoilers! Spoilers! Spoilers!

On Netflix on July 4, a new season of “Very strange things” was published. Now young heroes save the city from the mysterious Soviet conspiracy and new otherworldly enemies. At the same time, each of them lives their own exciting story about growing up. The film critic Yegor Moskvitin tells how the third season has regained all the best features of the first.

What happened

Caution, there are a lot of spoilers. If you do not want to recognize them, it is better to look at the lamb Sean, which flies into space.

The first words in the third season of “very strange deeds” sound in Russian - and these are the words “comrade general”. The opening scene is as if cut out of Chernobyl: the USSR, the eighties, a secret laboratory with a huge reactor and an evil warrior who makes a frightened scientist open a portal to another world - he responds with an Odessa accent.

Events are immediately transferred to the summer of 1985, to the city of Hawkins, Indiana. Heroes that were loved a couple of years ago, whom I wanted to see in the new season, matured. Mike and the eleventh kiss in the forest hut for days - which is why they bring a fury of the stepfather of the heroine, Sheriff Jim Hopper. Bright boy Lucas and a red -haired girl Max - also a couple do not spill water. And even the burnt Dustin, who was not in the city for a month, allegedly met a Susie Momonk girl on the journey-but for some reason she is in no hurry to answer the signals that he sends her with his amateur radio station. But friends manage to intercept the secret conversations of evil Russians, from which it follows that Soviet invaders are about to arrange a disaster in Indiana.

Supernatural creatures will help them in this, the presence of which is felt only by little Will. But the company no longer notice him: he still wants to play board games, and the elders on his mind now only girls. Once Mike will even exclaim: "I am sorry that you do not like the girls!" -And on the Internet they will immediately begin to discuss the orientation of the hero (this topic excites fans from the first season-in 2017, the 13-year-old performer of the role of Noah Shnapp even commented on this, emphasizing that this is not so important).

In general, love languor has become the main theme of the third season. Nancy and Jonathan are finally together, but in the editorial office where they begin the careers of a journalist and photojournalist, caricature sexists are refueling everyone. Sheriff Hopper calls on dates the mother of Will and Jonathan, but she misses her boyfriend torn to pieces from last season. In the past, the most popular guy at school Steve now works as a seller of ice cream in a shopping center - and the new colleague, an ironic and mysterious beauty Robin, is lifted most about this, who is associated with one of the most spectacular plot turns of the season. Mama Mike and Nancy are considering changing the snoring spouse with his brother Max - athlete and hooligan Billy. But much more predatory creatures are already looking at him.

Why everything turned out

For which the viewer loved the previous issues of “very strange things” remains in place. This is still an exciting quest in the labyrinths of pop culture of the 1980s. And the only series that can unite geeks and millennials is especially after the end of the Big Bang Theory. At the same time, the riddles of “very strange things” become easier every season - but it is all the more pleasant to solve them.

The depressive Joy Division is replaced by the popular “American Pie” Don Maklin, the Sheriff Hopper falls asleep in front of the TV under the first series “Private Magnum Detective” , and all the most important events rhyme with the film screen of the film “Back to the Future”. The heroes compare the Russian invasion with the film “Red Dawn” , although in fact it will occur according to the scheme described in the picture “Alien among us” , published in 1988. But, judging by the ratings, “very strange things” will get to this time. In the first season, the series built with the viewer before the trusting relationship that the prime minister of the second was waiting with the same trepidation and fear with which classmates are waiting for the meeting after the holidays. And even stupidly jealous of old friends to the new ones - for example, to the red -haired girl Max, guilty of the audience only in the fact that she is too cool.

The series could never decide which of the heroes is the main one. The only victim of the monster from the first season, the quiet girl barb, the audience mourned so much that the creators of the show, just in case, decided to continue to love all the characters the same way. And if in the second season this slowed the plot, then in the third the problem was solved simply: the heroes were united into groups.

Steve, Dustin, Robin and the hilarious younger sister of Lucas Eric are conducting their own investigation, almost without leaving the walls of the grand mall, which seems to be the personification of Netflix itself. Max finally ceased to be a secondary heroine-now she has to raise a gentleman from the selfish Lucas and teach the eleventh first to throw the boys. Lucas himself, Mike, Will, the scriptwriters left alone with their puberty. Nancy and Jonathan turned into a touching couple of detectives and wrestlers for their rights in the world of adults. Sheriff Hopper and Joyce are also struggling with evil together - and remain the only reminder to the viewer that you can’t solve all the problems with childhood nostalgia.

These “very strange things” come out at the right moment. The release of the first season was scheduled for the summer of 2016 not from a good life. The concept of the “terrible story for adults with children in the main roles” was doubted by the producers, the project was rejected by a dozen channels, and only Netflix decided to show it - and even then in the least competitive season. The second season was presented to the viewer as a gift for Halloween - it became less terrible in it, but the masquerade was more. The third appeared on Independence Day. Some of the Americans are leaving for a long weekend. The cinemas have another historical decline in ticket sales, and the audience with special impatience is waiting for the series - an eight -hour summer blockbuster.

“Very strange things” are in a sense of “Dandelion Wine” by Ray Bradbury: the viewer plunges in the era of innocence in the same way as the reader-in the world of childhood. The daily heat and evening breeze of these stories are felt by the skin - their storytellers are so talented. By the way, it was the authors of “very strange things” that used the seeds of dandelions for special effects in the first season.

Every time this series returns, the viewer is afraid that the wine was exhausted or, conversely, transferred and the touching story turned into a manipulating attraction. Someday it will probably happen. But not this time.

Egor Moskvitin