Stranger Things is a series that lots of people love, and some other people sneer at, because it so consciously knows how to evoke pleasure, and it does so by poking at the simplest and most easily satisfiable desires. It’s a referential patchwork constructed from pieces of other, beloved pop-cultural works, but it cuts its cozy analgesic with doses of caustic suspicion. In one scene in Stranger Things 3, Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) hides from some assailants in a screening of Back to the Future with his friend Lucas’s little sister, Erica (Priah Ferguson). Dustin tells her they’re lying low, “like Oswald.” Lee Harvey Oswald, Erica reminds him, was caught in a movie theater. Only because it was a setup, Dustin counters. Oswald was just a patsy. While Marty McFly innocently time-travels on the big screen in front of them, the kids debate a conspiracy theory pegged to one of the darkest events in American history. When it comes to paranoia, no space is truly safe.

Conspiracy theories, in fact, are in the show’s DNA, a counterforce to all the cuddly Spielberg evocation and the tween-age bonding. Before Stranger Things bore its current title, its creators—the Duffer Brothers—reportedly named it Montauk, in reference to long-standing rumors about government-run psychological experiments on human test subjects conducted on military bases on Long Island, New York. The show’s story is built on the premise that various strains of delusional thinking are actually true. The government has conducted highly unethical drug tests on human subjects. Terrifying alien monsters are real. People can become possessed by dark external forces that absorb them into one diseased hive mind. On the rare occasions when these events are exposed, the military does cover things up.

Stranger Things 3 is more deeply informed by American paranoia than ever before, as the show starts to mine classic, Cold War–inspired works of the mid-1980s. Red Dawn is an obvious overarching influence, that gung-ho story of a handful of teenagers fleeing Soviet invasion. So is Day of the Dead, George A. Romero’s zombie horror about militarism and power. The Terminator, James Cameron’s dystopian hit about an unconquerable cyborg killing machine, gets the show’s most palpable allusion yet: an unbeatable enforcer with a motorbike and a single, ligneous facial expression.

The Duffer Brothers’ pivot toward Russia is signaled in the first scene, a stylish, near-silent sequence set in 1984 that depicts a team of Soviet scientists using what appears to be a giant energy beam to break down the fabric between this world and the Upside Down. It’s a comically horrible idea: The Upside Down, as seen in previous seasons, is a wasteland of an alternative realm inhabited by gruesome monsters that keep surfacing in Hawkins to abduct teenagers, possess children, and test the physical impact of tentacles on man-made structures. In Season 1, Brown’s Eleven accidentally opened a portal to the Upside Down in a fit of telekinetic rage, unleashing a monster that ran amok in Hawkins and transported Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) to its ashy dimension. In Season 2, Eleven closed that same portal, after a different monster from the Upside Down possessed Will and used him as its vessel.