So I am starting Season 3, Episode 1 fresh, mostly looking for gay characters and beefcake, but also trying, once again, to figure out the painfully interrelated characters and endless back stories in this monsterized Peyton Place.
Prelude: A top-secret underground lab in the old Soviet Union, where scientists are trying to break on through to the other side. When they finally manage to blast a crack in the wall, something slithery and horrible comes out and kills them, then goes back in. The experiment was a failure. "You have one year!" Colonel Klink growls.
1. In stereotypic small-town Indiana, Sheriff Hopper (David Harbour, top photo) is annoyed about his daughter and another girl kissing.
A lesbian couple! Score! When they pull back, I find that they're not lesbians after all, but it's still cool that they're so gender-atypical. The more masculine one is the girl, El (Millie Bobby Brown), and the more feminine one is:
Great name, although he looks less like a Wolf Hard than anyone I can imagine.
Sheriff Harper doesn't want his masculine daughter having sex with a feminine boy, or anyone, for that matter, so he asks advice of Joyce (Wynona Ryder), his old girlfriend, who runs a local drug store that has fallen on bad times since the opening of the mall.
Joyce suggests a heart-to-heart talk; but when the Sheriff tries the talk, the teens laugh at him, so he drags Mike out to his truck and threatens to kill him.
They are sneaked into the movie Day of the Dead by:
Afterwards Steve tries to pick up every female customer in sight, but usually fails. His coworker Robin is keeping a tally (spoiler alert: Robin turns out to be a lesbian.)
By the way, Nancy (Steve's ex, Mike's older sister) is now dating:
Both Jonathan and Will, by the way, are sons of Joyce, the ex-girlfriend of Sheriff Hopper who works at the drugstore downtown.
Jonathan sneaks Nancy (Mike's older sister) out of the bedroom, and she goes to work at a horrible job bringing hamburgers to the local newspaper staff and having them make fun of her ideas.
Turns out that Mom Joyce is aware of Jonathan's sexploits, and fully approves. His heterosexuality established, she turns her attention to:
"I'm not gonna fall in love!" he exclaims. So he's either asexual/ aromantic, or he means "with a girl," and he's gay.
Spoiler alert: later on, during a fight, Mike exclaims that Will doesn't like girls, and he gets all upset. But he doesn't express any interest in boys or girls this season. Maybe the writers are ok with lesbians but skittish about gay men.
After Joyce's "what girl do you like?" interrogation, Will meets up with his friends (El, Mike, Max, and Lucas), where they use El's magical powers to arrange a welcome-home surprise party for:
7. Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), who has been away at summer camp. He got a girlfriend there, so instead of doing something fun, he insists that they all trek to a mountaintop to install a makeshift radio tower, so he can call her via short wave (what, no telephones in Utah?)There's no answer. They hang out all afternoon, abandoning him one by one, until he's all alone. Then finally he gets a message -- but it's in Russian!
Call back to the first scene. He's getting transmissions from the Soviet lab where they had "one year" to break through to wherever the slithery thing is from.
He tries to pick up Karen Wheeler, the mother of Nancy and Mike. Initially she resists, probably due to his horrible 1980s double-entendre talk: "I could give you a...private lesson...I know some...moves...the breast stroke...." But then she agrees. That night she gets dolled up, and leaves her husband and youngest child asleep on the couch to head out for her hookup.
On the way to the hookup, Billy hits something slithery that drags him into an old abandoned iron mill. Call back to the Russian blasting experiment?
That's all for this episode, but see how nicely everyone is interconnected?
I don't think I'll be watching.
My grade: B for the gender-atypical and queer characters, D for the plot.
