At last, we’ve arrived at the final post for the 3rd season of Stranger Things!

One of the most interesting sub-plots this season revolved around Murray (the Conspiracy Theorist) and Alexei “Smirnoff” (the Russian Scientist.) I could not get over how much I loved these two side-characters, and I believe the Duffer Brothers did a fantastic job of bringing them to life for the audience.

Murray started off in Season 2 with significant distrust of Russians in general. So when Hopper and Joyce drag one to his door (not just an average citizen, mind you, but a foreign gov’t recruited scientist) Murray is heated to say the least. He’s worked hard to stay off the grid, and he’s double-pissed when Hopper calls the local gov’t for back-up, after bringing “an enemy of the state” into his home, and compromising his position.

During this process, Murray is the only one of the crew that is fluent in Russian, and is able to act as a translator. He quickly realizes through the use of Loony Tunes and cherry slurpies (which results in a hysterical stand-off between Hopper and Alexei) that they are not dealing with a malicious enemy, but rather a scientific genius with the whimsical perspective of a child. Murray takes it down a notch from being hostile, to being cooperative, and eventually even genial. One of their best moments is in the car after Murray shreds Joyce and Hopper for arguing constantly, and urges them to release their obvious pent up sexual frustration with each other. Alexei questions Murray, wondering what the shouting was about, and after Murray explains, they burst out laughing, much to the chagrin of Joyce and Hopper.

Next thing you know, they’re at the carnival and Murray is encouraging Alexei to have fun with “rigged games” while he goes to get them some corn-dogs. Alexei is killing it at the Darts station, and manages to win a big Loony Tunes prize, which he totes back to his friend in sheer joy. Murray cheers him on, doing a quick jig with the corn-dogs before they can close the distance between each other. What comes next… is one of the saddest moments in the entire series. Russian Arnold Schwarzenegger cuts across their path and fires a bullet right into Alexei’s chest, dismissing him as a traitor. Alexei stares at the blood in confusion, while Murray screams his name, running to support him. Murray does his best to staunch the wound with his shirt, and searches frantically for Hopper, demanding that they get medical assistance immediately. But it’s too late… Within moments, Alexei is faded and gone… Murray grieves the loss of his friend, furious with himself for stepping away just for a moment to get them food. Of course, he couldn’t have known this would happen, but it shows how full-circle he’s come – from viewing Alexei as an enemy, to mourning his death, all in the space of a few days time.

Nancy is the other main character that had significant screen time this season. To be honest, I’m not really sure of what to make of her arc. She starts off in a workplace nightmare with Jonathan, and they are both interns for the local news. She is routinely mocked and ridiculed to such an exacerbating degree that she is fuming beneath the surface – I can practically see steam radiating off her skin. Granted, I did not grow up in the 80’s, but when viewing the way her boss and coworkers treated her… I couldn’t help but laugh. The level of obnoxious behavior was so over the top that it seemed more of a caricature instead of a reflection of reality. I mean, the only way these guys could have gotten any more brazen is if they all collectively whipped out their dicks and had a windmill party!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not justifying their mockery of her. I’m simply saying that viewing these scenes seemed so inauthentic that it jerked me out of the moment, and I realized that I was sitting in my bedroom watching a TV show. When scripting entertainment, this is the last thing that you want to happen to your audience – it is imperative that they are fully engaged and unaware of anything else until the credits roll. That’s how you know that you’ve done a great job. And sometimes this means knowing when to dial things back to make the scene more sympathetic and relatable, instead of bombastic and hysterical. (The exception to the rule is when you’re scripting for comedy – which often uses the very tactic that Stranger Things just displayed in the office with Nancy and her coworkers, albeit unintentionally.)

Nancy decides that in order to prove herself, she needs to chase a story on her own. She pretends to be sick, with relation to her female anatomy, in order to get the day off – and takes Jonathan along with her. Together, they discover rabid rats eating fertilizer in this old woman’s basement. After further digging, they find more rat issues and missing chemicals around town. Nancy is definitely on to something weird happening in Hawkins, but her boss and coworkers humiliate her once again, and tell her to leave real news to the big boys.

Incensed even further by their treatment of her, including a rat prank in the office kitchen, Nancy has finally had enough. She goes out to pursue her lead once more, finding the old woman in her basement, eating fertilizer in a maniacal frenzy. She and Jonathan immediately call emergency care and have her transferred to the hospital. Upon doing so, she gets the attention of her now MindFlayer-infected boss, who decides to fire the couple together.

While Nancy didn’t necessarily need the job, Jonathan did – for the sake of his family, and helping to pay the mortgage. She and Jonathan get into an argument, where he points out that all they had to do was lay low. Eventually they would have moved up and gotten respect in the company anyway. Nancy protests that with the way they were treating her, they never would have respected her or given her the opportunity to advance anyway. I think both Jonathan and Nancy handled the situation incorrectly, since Nancy was pretty self-absorbed, and not giving consideration to Jonathan’s plight. And while Jonathan was trying to encourage her on their rides to-and-from work, he never went out of his way to stand up for her amidst the ongoing ridicule. Though, to be honest, that may have lost them the job as well. In all reality, they probably should have just started looking for a different place to work a long time ago. That office can’t have been the only local news station around. But where would be the entertainment in THAT?!

After Nancy gets fired and has the argument with Jonathan, she returns home extremely discouraged. She talks to her mom, wondering if she really is just a kid who has no idea what she’s doing. Her mother encourages her, telling her not to give up, and take her story to the mainstream media big-leagues. By doing so, she’ll prove that she is a great journalist and will put the local news station in it’s place. With a renewed spirit, Nancy makes her way to the hospital to see if her lead has recovered enough to relay any more information of recent events. What she finds is a MindFlayer possessed woman displaying supernatural strength in an attempt to break out of her bonds.

Nancy runs outside in a panic to contact Jonathan, knowing that his brother Will had similar symptoms while being possessed, and asks for help. They agree to meet at the cabin, and shortly after proceed back to the hospital… only to find that Mrs. Driscoll is missing. To make matters worse, Nancy’s boss and obnoxiously sexist coworker have come back for her… not to mock, but to kill, under the direct control of the MindFlayer. The boss takes on Jonathan in one room. Nancy flees the bloodlust of the other, who is pursuing her in the flickering darkness of an abandoned hallway.

Nancy and Jonathan manage to tag-team the crisis, despite their physical separation. Here we come to our first glaring major plot hole. When the boss is about to murder Jonathan, Nancy slams the coworker in the face with a fire extinguisher. Somehow the boss feels the effect of this extinguisher, even though it happened to the coworker in a completely separate location. This blunt shock briefly gives Jonathan the advantage, and he’s able to jam some scissors into the boss’s throat… which in turn displays a puncture wound and blood around the neck of the coworker in Nancy’s room (after she finished knocking him out.)

The reason this is a major plot hole is because of what we know about the MindFlayer from last season, and also from evidence that is displayed in this 3rd season. Imagine with me for a moment that the MindFlayer is a tree, with many separate branches. The branches are under its control. Therefore, the tree is able to feel the pain of each individual branch (this is a rough metaphor, but bear with me.) Just because one target branch gets cut off does not mean that the other branches are automatically chopped off as well. If that were the case, then Billy, his lifeguard friend, and Mrs. Driscoll would have all died in the exact same moment… and we find out later that it just didn’t happen. Nor did they share any similar type of wounds from the boss or coworker. Now, all the branches will feel the pain of the main tree, which is where they are all connected to gain their collective source of energy. This is shown from Billy suffering when the MindFlayer is getting firework bombs rained down on it – as well as Will screaming in Season 2 when they burned a piece of the MindFlayer’s body from the underground tunnels. But I digress. The main point is that in this scene alone, the rules for the MindFlayer’s nature have been broken, and therefore the consistency of the story has been compromised.

Back to the hospital fight scene: the bodies of the two coworkers start melting and combine together in the hallway to form a smaller version of the MindFlayer (which is still lurking in the depths beneath Hawkins.) This disgusting mass of flesh charges after Nancy, and even after slamming the door in its face, it melts down once again to slip beneath the doorway’s crack. Jonathan comes rushing to save her with a metal pole to bludgeon the monster, but must resort to fighting against a locked door instead. Knowing that death is closing in on her, Nancy withdraws alone into the corner. She’s whimpering (I would have been too!) as the monster re-amasses its ghastly form to hover over her. She’s rescued at the last moment by Elle, who throws the creature out the window with her telekinetic powers.

At the end of the season, it’s implied that Nancy does get her big break. The mainstream media are publishing the breaking news of recent events in Hawkins, including the destruction at Starcourt Mall, government corruption, and the “chemical leak” which she exposed in Season 2. There’s an additional headline for the mysterious deaths of Bob, Hopper, and her best friend Barb from Season 1.

It seems her arc had more to do with proving competence to herself as opposed to the local office since… well she and Jonathan killed the people harassing her, lol. I suppose that takes the sentiment of murdering one’s boss to a whole new level. (Ladies and Gentlemen, please don’t kill your bosses or coworkers – unless they’ve been mind-flayed by a creature from another dimension, and are actively trying to murder you. I mean this literally, not metaphorically! If that’s the case, then by all means, have at it!)

*Ahem* Anyway, since Jonathan is moving out of town with his family, their closing scene is bittersweet. Nancy suggests that he could stay, if she didn’t let him go, if she hid him in her family’s basement, and put him in a tent like they did with Elle. He smiles, and tells her not to worry – they still have “shared trauma” after all, so what’s a little more? (I guess that’s supposed to be romantic?) But it’s in this reassurance that they (and we) know that their story isn’t over. Far from it.

Now, some of you may have been wondering more about the nature of the MindFlayer, like I have. How the hell did it survive when the Gate shut in Season 2, but dropped dead like a puppet when the Gate closed in Season 3? That’s an excellent question, because the MindFlayer is a creature of two parts: one part being the Shadow-Monster, and the second part a conglomerate of corpse-meat. If this ethereal being could just vaporize back into the Shadow-Monster after being expelled from a possessed body, (like it did with Will in Season 2) then why couldn’t it escape to fight another day?

The answer lies at the end of Season 2. Right as Elle is using the full extent of her power to seal up the passageway to the Upside Down realm, you can see that the Shadow-Monster (MindFlayer) has retreated beyond the veil just in time to initiate this final battle with her (in that season.) It is plausible that in its shadow form, it can travel much faster than any physical being, especially with no material barriers to slow it down. So even after they expelled it from Will and immediately gave the order to shut the Gate, it hypothetically could have retreated into the other realm just in time. This would explain why all the physical forms of the DemiDogs died, while the MindFlayer remained alive in Season 2. However, in Season 3, it was still possessing the physical fleshy monster body while engaging in battle at the Starcourt Mall. When Joyce shut the Gate this time, it didn’t have any notice to revert back to its shadow form and escape in time. So there you have it, plot-hole resolved!

We have a nice tidbit to look forward to in the future, courtesy of a line exchange between Mike and Elle. They spoke about seeing each other again at Thanksgiving, so I believe that’s a reasonable time to look forward to the Season 4 launch (a year and a few months from now, most likely). As Erica would say “Until next time, nerds!”

Let me know what you think in the comments section, I’d love to hear your thoughts on anything and everything about Stranger Things!

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