Listen, I hate ambush spoilers as much as the next deranged fanboy online, so I am giving you fair warning that the following rant contains SPOILERS. I care about you so much that I’m not even gonna tell you which show I’m spoiling. I even asked the art folks to NOT use a still from the show in question so that the headline above doesn’t serve as its own vague spoiler. But my editor had to politely rebuff that request, which means you will be mad that I even went spoiler-adjacent, because you now know someone dies on this particular show, and then you’ll have to worry about who gets killed and when it will happen. Suffice it to say that if there is something out there right now that you do NOT want spoiled, turn back now. If you’ve already read this paragraph, I already got your precious click anyway. I don’t need you anymore. Save yourself.

[waits for you to leave]

Okay, we good? We’re good.

I watched Stranger Things season three, and while I enjoyed myself, I’m like everyone else in that I had some bitchy nitpicks about it. Mike’s shorts were consistently hideous… true to the era but goddamn, man. Will fucking sucks and is only interesting as a signifier of incoming distress. The Mindflayer is all-powerful and the size of a mountain but sometimes takes nine hours to walk places. Mrs. Wheeler should’ve boned Billy (and the guy who plays Billy, Dacre Montgomery, is perhaps the only man in history who looks BETTER with a mullet than without one). The gang should’ve created a batch of POSITIVE demon goo and used it to bring the Statue of Liberty to life with it. They should’ve made the whole show out of Erica. And why could only Erica fit in the NORAD-style underground ventilation system at first but then everyone else could later? Eleven is a living meme at this point, always holding her hand out and letting out bloodcurdling cries while a single drop of ketchup hangs from her nose. It was nice seeing Cary Elwes on screen again but god, the mayor was a piece of shit.

And then, there's the Hopper issue.

I dunno why they made Hopper a pissy crank for the bulk of this season, given that David Harbour’s hangdog joviality was that character’s chief selling point the two previous seasons. Do I really wanna root for a cop taking liberties with his authority, man? But, of course, Hopper was redeemed when he found himself trapped on the wrong side of a protective shield wall in the season finale and courageously gave Joyce Byers permission to close the gate to the Upside Down and blow him up in the process. Then we got Hopper’s tasteful letter to Eleven read aloud at the end and Harbour’s time on the Stranger Things came to a bittersweet close…

OR DID IT?

Because every movie and TV must now have a Marvel-esque teaser button, there’s a “surprise” scene in the middle of the finale's end credits, where we find out those naughty Russians are still keeping a Demigorgon as a pet back in the Motherland, and they are also keeping “the American” imprisoned there as a possible snack for it. Those Russians referred to Hopper as “the American” previously, and so now we know: They have Hopper in there. Hopper is alive. Hooray!

Except no. Not hooray. Motherfucker should have stayed dead.

When they hint that Hopper miraculously comes back to life at the very very end, it undercuts the entire narrative arc that led to his supposed death to begin with. This happens all the time in movies and on TV, especially on TV because characters on these shows have to stick around, both to keep an actor employed and to keep the audience interested. "Stranger Things" itself already pulled this bait-and-switch with Eleven after Season 1, but at least they saved the ZOMG reveal for after the hiatus. I understand why showrunners continue to do this, but they’ve run the trope into the fucking ground, miles beneath the secret Russian mall ops base. Even Game of Thrones, an otherwise notable exception to the rule, dragged a key character back into the fold after seemingly killing him off for good earlier. I watched the season finale of House in 2012 and House faked his own death in that episode, too. It’s to the point where I never believe a dead TV character is dead anymore. It’s like watching NFL football now. I’m always waiting for the replay official to tell me that what I saw wasn’t what I saw.