I watched the first three episodes so far, basically trying to line up with the release of this next batch of episodes.
Yeah, Maya Hawke’s character is sort of annoying and doesn’t serve much of a purpose. I think the show suffered from adding in too many characters. Maybe that’s not quite it. But rather promoting characters that would have been fine as secondary characters, who only show up once in a while, into core cast members. There are too many people, and not really enough for them to do. And the show has to juggle all of their screen time.
To me this issue seems the most obvious with the young boys. They’re basically the main characters of the show since the beginning, and I could barely tell you anything they actually did in the last two seasons.
For example, Dustin, gets beat up by bullies in the first episode, doesn’t show up for the crawl, and it literally made no difference to the mission. Maybe there is some payoff later, but essentially all it turned into is some tension with Steve
To be fair, that is also an issue generally with the genre, where young kids are the stars, and it’s fun when they go on an early adventure. But as the stakes rise, it sort of becomes ridiculous that a bunch of kids are still leading the way when it should be more capable adults.
That said, after watching episode 2 and 3, I’ve gradually gotten a little more absorbed into it.