Stranger Things Season 3 Review: 6 Ups & 6 Downs

4. The Wildly Uneven Pacing

The pacing of this season is totally all over the place, and while the eight episode length ensures it never reaches The Defenders level of exhausting, those first few episodes do take their sweet time to actually do much of consequence.

The first half as a whole feels sluggish, honestly, while the back-four episodes then feel overly rushed, resulting in a hurried sprint all the way to the finish line.

There's much to be said for a show that knows when to pump the brakes and when to ramp things up, but this season seems to have it all wrong: it stands still when you want it to move, and it hits warp speed when you want it to breathe a little.