Stranger Things Season 3 Review: 6 Ups & 6 Downs

The third time isn't quite the charm.

By Jack Pooley /

Netflix

The day has finally arrived! Season 3 of Stranger Things is streaming now on Netflix - some 20 months after the slightly divisive second season dropped - amid hope from fans that it'll serve as a major return to form for the smash hit sci-fi series.

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Is that the case? Well, yes and no. Reviews have been pretty consistently positive out of the gate so far, and in several ways Stranger Things 3 builds on a rocky second season, best of all reducing the episode order to eight and forgetting that infamous Chicago detour ever happened.

But it's also fair to say that this is far from the triumphant return to the first season's prevailing quality fans may be hoping for.

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Scripting issues abound throughout season three, and overall there's an unshakeable feeling that the Duffer brothers have perhaps grown a tad complacent due to the show's success.

Everything feels so ordinary this time around, even in its better moments. As such, the inevitable fourth season should probably be the last, before the show risks comprising itself with a genuinely bad or undeniably perfunctory batch of episodes...

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