‘Stranger Things’ Mall Promo Could Foreshadow Season 3’s X-Men Connection

Like Legion or The Gifted, Stranger Things is a TV show based on Marvel’s incredibly popular/influential line of X-Men comics. Unlike those other two Fox-produced shows, however, Stranger Things is a way more subtle about its X-Men connection. The hit Netflix series is not in any way officially based on Marvel’s mutants; instead, the show pulls from 1980s X-lore as readily as it does all pop culture from the Reagan years. Stranger Things is also inspired by the novels of Stephen King and the films of John Carpenter, along with ’80s movies like Gremlins and The Goonies and Poltergeist.

Still, I wanna circle back to that X-Men connection, because it’s probably the most surprising influence on Stranger Things considering that plenty of people don’t really associate the X-Men with the ’80s as much as they do the ’90s or ’00s. Plus, the references the show makes to X-Men comics aren’t really the most well-known ones. I mean, they aren’t talking about Wolverine all the time. So when our first look at Stranger Things’ upcoming Season 3 was a gloriously retro promo for Hawkins’ new mall (see above), it set off alarms in my X-brain. Stranger Things loves to make deep cut X-references, and X-Men fans know just how important malls are. Seriously. I’m not joking. Knowing that a mall will be a setting in Season 3 means we can finally start to speculate about what will happen in the new episodes–but first, let’s go through Stranger Things’ X-connection, and the X-Men’s history with malls.

The X-Men are first referenced in the very first episode of Stranger Things when X-Men #134 is mentioned. That issue is super significant because the battle between Jean Grey and Mastermind, the battle that pushes her into deadly Dark Phoenix territory, is directly homaged in the Season 1 finale when Eleven battles the demogorgon. In fact, critics have pointed out how all of Eleven’s arc in Season 1 is really Dark Phoenix-y. But less has been said, at least that I’ve seen, about how Season 2 advances the X-Men references and works in all sorts of nods to the X-Men comics that came out a few years later. Specifically, Season 2 (set in 1984) is fuuuuull of parallels to the X-Men comics that came out in 1983, issues #168-176. Here’s a Twitter thread from me back when all this clicked into place:

Wild, right? I’m not just seeing things? I’m not! Look at all the parallels!

So on the subject of malls (a.k.a. a term paper I should have written in college), the X-Men have a long history with them. It more or less started with Uncanny X-Men #244, published in Spring 1989. In the issue (titled “Ladies’ Night”), the X-Women teleport to the Hollywood Mall where they stopped a group of mutant hunters called M-Squad from busting a wisecracking urchin nicknamed Jubilee. A few years later in 1992, Jubilee’s origin was loosely adapted into the opening scenes of the very first episode of Fox’s X-Men series.

This scene has everything: Jubilee throwing shade at an arcade manager, Gambit flirting with a cashier, Storm and Rogue carrying a comical amount of gift boxes and shopping bags. This is how millions of kids (myself included) were first introduced to the X-Men, by them fighting a giant Sentinel robot in front of some escalators.

Further cementing the X-Men’s mall connection is 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse, a movie set in 1983 that features a very, very brief mall adventure for the new X-teens. The full scene was actually cut from the film (absolutely the most frustrating thing about X-Men: Apocalypse, even more than tiny Oscar Isaac playing the imposing Apocalypse), but it’s made its way online. The montage is absolutely glorious, filled with the same kind of feel-good nostalgia you get from the just released Stranger Things mall ad.

So if Stranger Things is full of X-Men references and the X-Men are all about the mall, and the first promo for Season 3 is set at a mall, then what can we infer about the new Stranger Things season? If Stranger Things keeps their X-homaging up, it’s possible that we could see a lot of influence from the mid-to-late ’80s era of Uncanny X-Men, informally referred to as the Outback Era. Not because the team ate a lot of Bloomin’ Onions, but because this stretch (roughly from Uncanny #225 to #253) is when the X-Men were stationed in a remote area of Australia. That’s why they had to teleport to the mall in Hollywood.

There’s a lot that Stranger Things could pull from this era to inform Season 3, although not much of it is pleasant. For one thing, the X-Men were believed to be dead by their friends, families, and the entire world during this time. Could that happen to Eleven, Hopper, or both of them at some point in this season? Uncanny X-Men #232 saw the arrival of the xenomorph-esque, body-snatching Brood aliens on Earth, and demons invaded our reality during the “Inferno” storyline (#239-243). The final shot of Season 3 is of a massive threat from the Upside Down looming over the school. Is Hawkins about to face it’s own “Inferno”-style demon infestation?

The Genosha storyline (#235-238) dealt with an oppressive government regime. Will the government agency that created Eleven (and all those kids in Chicago!) make a deadly move to contain their creations? Speaking of the mall, we could get a big chase in Hawkins’ new shopping center, like the one seen in Uncanny #244. Then there’s how the Outback Era ends for the X-Men in issue #251: every member of the team steps through a mystical portal (given to them by the daughter of literal Merlin… that’s comics!) and is spat out the other end in a new location with amnesia. Could Season 3 end with everyone separated, with possibly no memory of each other?

Fingers crossed things don’t go that badly for the Stranger Things kids. I wouldn’t wish what happened to Wolverine or Storm or Psylocke at the end of that storyline on any ST character, even the unquestionably awful Billy. But if Stranger Things is going to the mall, it’s entirely possible they’re taking Eleven and friends down the same dark path the X-Men went down. Or, I dunno, maybe Eleven will move on from waffles to a Bloomin’ Onion. It’d still be a X-Men homage!

Where to stream Stranger Things

Where to watch X-Men

Where to watch X-Men: Apocalypse