‘Stranger Things’ Season 3 is here: A guide to bring you up to speed

Things are about to get even “Stranger” than before. That is, if you can remember exactly how strange they were the first two times around.

It’s been a long 21 months since we’ve seen new episodes of Netflix’s sci-fi nostalgia wonder “Stranger Things,” and in a show with Demogorgons, demodogs, Upside Downs and a lot of Farrah Fawcett hairspray, you’d be forgiven for forgetting exactly where things left off when Season 2 wrapped up in October 2017.

So before you binge-watch the third season when it debuts on July 4, we’ve rounded up the most important details. Now you can return to Hawkins, Indiana, with a clear head, ready for monsters and teenage hormones aplenty.

In Season 1, Will was stuck in the Upside Down, but in Season 2 it was stuck in him

Season 1 of “Stranger” revolved around the disappearance of Will Byers (Noah Schnapp), whom we eventually discover was trapped in an alternate dimension known as the Upside Down. In Season 2, although he’s seemingly safe and sound with his mother Joyce (Winona Ryder) and brother Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), he’s experiencing “now memories,” visions of the Upside Down in which he seems to go there, psychically. During one episode, he’s possessed by the Mind Flayer, a new monster from the dimension, who makes him sick and controls his actions.

Under the Mind Flayer’s influence, Will leads agents from Hawkins Lab – who are trying to contain the threat of the Upside Down – into a trap. Joyce’s dorky boyfriend Bob Newby (Sean Astin) dies trying to save Joyce, Will, Chief Hopper (David Harbour) and Mike (Finn Wolfhard) from the “demodogs,” young, four-legged versions of Season 1’s Demogorgon monster.

Max and Steve join the party

Middle-school emotions are thrown into high gear when Max (Sadie Sink) moves to Hawkins and becomes the object of affection of both Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin). Her sadistic brother Billy (Dacre Montgomery) also shows up and vies for the top spot on the high school food chain. Mike, moody and depressed since Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) vanished at the end of Season 1, lashes out at Max and anyone else he comes into contact with.

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Dustin also finds a slug-like creature in the trash that Will thinks is from the Upside Down. Dustin tries to keep little “Dart” as a pet before realizing he’s a demodog (Dart ate his family’s cat), and Dustin turns to Steve (Joe Keery) for help. Recently dumped by Nancy (Natalia Dyer), the former bully proves he’s a sweet, sensitive guy. Steve forms an adorable friendship with Dustin and wields his trademark nail-studded bat to battle with the demodogs.

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Eleven does her own thing for awhile, but she returns to save the day

At the start of Season 2, Eleven is in hiding at Hopper’s old cabin, where he’s keeping her cooped up and away from prying government eyes. But after the surrogate father and daughter have a big blowup (and Hopper becomes temporarily trapped in the Upside Down), Eleven leaves the cabin and goes looking for her birth mother, who eventually points the way to another victim of Hawkins Lab experiments, Eight (Linnea Berthelsen). Eleven’s “sister” tries to pull her into a life of vengeance and murder, but El resists and goes home to save the friends she can (psychically) see are in trouble.

Eleven saves the gang from a pack of demodogs, and reunites with Mike before heading to the lab to shut the gate to the Upside Down for good. Joyce, Jonathan and Nancy burn the Mind Flayer out of Will while Steve, Mike, Dustin, Lucas and Max lure the demodogs away from the gate to clear Eleven’s path. The crisis is seemingly averted.

Nancy and Jonathan get the truth out (sort of)

After breaking things off with Steve, Nancy hits the road with Jonathan, seeking out the local conspiracy theorist (Brett Gelman) to help expose the lab for the experiments that took Eleven away from her mother and resulted in Barb’s (Shannon Purser) death in Season 1. Before reuniting with the whole gang for the season’s climax, they record incriminating audio inside Hawkins Lab and help leak it to the press (although most of the world thinks the problem was a chemical leak, not monsters and alternate dimensions).

The government closes Hawkins Lab after the incident, and Eleven even gets to hang out in the real world, now with a birth certificate that says Hopper is her father.

Everybody gets a perfect school dance at the end, but...

The final scenes of Season 2 take place at the Hawkins Middle School Snow Ball, where Lucas and Max share a kiss, Mike and Eleven finally get to dance, Will gets asked to dance by a girl and Nancy bucks up Dustin after his classmates reject him. It’s all very sweet and set to Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time, but then the camera turns, well, upside down, and we see that the Mind Flayer is still very much alive, and looming over the Upside Down version of the school.

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