Eight Titles and a Summer I Could Almost See

By December 2018, it felt like I’d been waiting for new Stranger Things for years. Season 2 had come and gone, and I’d filled the gap badly—including giving Game of Thrones another chance in its final stretch, which I regretted immediately. You know the season. After that, the Duffer Brothers’ small Indiana city started to feel like the last show that still knew what television was supposed to be doing.

The new trailer showed a mall. Starcourt Mall, summer 1985, all neon and synthetic fabric and that specific American light that makes the eighties look like a fever dream even in retrospect. The kids had gotten older in the way that happens between seasons of shows you love—still recognizably themselves, but something had shifted, some innocence quietly converted into something more complicated. Eleven still at the center of it.

At the Game Awards in Los Angeles, Matt and Ross Duffer joked that the delay was their fault—they’d been too deep in Red Dead Redemption 2 to finish the scripts. I chose to believe this was a joke. It had the texture of a joke.

The episode titles leaked alongside the trailer like a partial map: "Suzie, Do You Copy?", "The Mall Rats", "The Case of the Missing Lifeguard", "The Sauna Test", "The Source", "The Birthday", "The Bite", "The Battle of Starcourt." Eight titles, eight blank spaces. The arc they described, read across like that, had the shape of a summer going wrong—which is the shape all the best Stranger Things seasons have. Something ordinary collapsing into something terrible.

I sat with those titles for a while. "The Battle of Starcourt" is a finale title. Someone gets bitten. There’s a birthday that’s probably not just a birthday. You fill in the rest yourself, and that’s partly the point—the gap between a trailer and a season is its own strange experience, the anticipation a small ambient pleasure you’re not quite ready to give up. The season came eventually. It was July before any of us got to find out what those titles meant.