‘Time to get excited!’ Why Stranger Things could be back to its best for its final episodes ever

The Netflix show’s last season just dropped a trailer full of heavy metal, demons, tornados and flamethrowers. And even better – it might have rediscovered its devastatingly emotional coreObjectively, you should not be excited about the return of Stranger Things. Over the years, the Netflix smash has in many ways come to represent everything bad about television’s streaming era.It began as a fun piece of fluff, a one-and-done collection of overt 1980s film references, designed as the first part of an unconnected anthology. But then it exceeded expectations, so the Duffer brothers found themselves having to pull an entire mythology out of thin air. And a bloated one at that, full of (at best) bottle episodes about punky young superheroes and (at worst) self-indulgent episodes that grind on for hours and hours. Continue reading...

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