Hawkins Has a Mall Now
At some point I quietly stopped caring about Game of Thrones—you know which season, everyone knows which season—and Stranger Things absorbed that space in my schedule without much resistance. It doesn’t have dragons or the specific pleasure of watching characters you spent years investing in get murdered, but it has something those later Game of Thrones seasons lost completely: the sense that the people making it still know what the show is supposed to feel like.
The new Season 3 trailer is out, and the setting teased a few months back—a gleaming 1980s shopping mall at the center of Hawkins—is front and center. There’s something exactly right about that location for this show. The Starcourt Mall is the kind of place that exists in a specific American memory as a site of both adolescent freedom and low-grade dread: fluorescent lighting, food court smell, the ambient sense that something is wrong in a way you can’t name. Which turns out to be accurate, because something is always wrong in Hawkins.
Season 2 ended with the shadow monster still alive—contained, not destroyed—watching from whatever corner of the Upside Down it retreated to after the gate was closed. The last scene at the Snow Ball made clear that nobody believed it was over. The trailer confirms what that scene implied: closing the gate didn’t end anything, it just reset the board. Whatever’s building in Season 3 has found the mall, which means either a possession storyline or a very bad food court experience. Probably both.
The release date is July 4th, which is either a clever piece of American-nostalgia casting or the Duffer Brothers pointing directly at the show’s own irony—a series about the specific terror hiding inside American suburban innocence, premiering on the day that innocence celebrates itself loudest. Matt and Ross Duffer joked at the Game Awards last year that they’d delayed production because they were too busy playing Red Dead Redemption 2. I choose to believe that was a joke. Either way, it’s almost summer. Hawkins is ready.