Network: Netflix
Showrunners: Matt Duffer & Ross Duffer
Main Cast: Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Finn Wolfhard, Millie Bobby Brown, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Cara Buono, Noah Schnapp, Sadie Sink, Joe Keery, Dacre Montgomery, Sean Astin, Paul Reiser
***This is a season review. There’s just no getting around the spoilers. You’re warned.
Netflix’s Stranger Things initially took the pop culture world by storm. It paid homage to 80’s pop culture, but the Duffer Brothers didn’t feel like a cover band playing through the hits. With the Demogorgon, the Upside-Down, and Steve Harrington’s hair, we got fresh, new takes on the genre. It achieved the feel without feeling too derivative. It seems daunting to create a season 2 with the same characters, and it seemed almost certain to miss. While some things work better than others in the new season, Stranger Things 2 is a sequel season that, for the most part, re-captures the magic of season 1.
Set almost a year after Will (Schnapp) first vanished into the Upside-Down, Season 2 immediately catches us up with all the folks from season 1. Mike (Wolfhard) is still pining daily for the missing Eleven (Brown), who, as hinted at the end of season 1, is now living with her protective guardian, Sheriff Jim Hopper (Harbour). Joyce (Ryder) and her boys, Will and Jonathan (Heaton), have moved on, and Joyce even has a boyfriend, the too-cutely named Bob Newby (Astin). Nancy (Dyer) is going steady with Steve (Keery), and Jonathan is still obviously in love with her. The AV Club’s Mike, Will, Dustin (Matarazzo), and Lucas (McLaughlin) are a grade older, and a little more foul-mouthed than before. There are new stepsiblings in town, the AV Club-aged Max (Sink) and the Nancy/Steve-aged Billy (Montgomery). Hawkins Lab is now being run by Sam Owens (Reiser), a kinder, gentler replacement for season 1’s Matthew Modine. It’s a big cast with moving parts, and it only got bigger in season 2. The Duffers decide to mix things up, explore different pairings and different relationships, and that winds up being the way Season 2 is most notably different from Season 1.
Let’s start with the good. The pairing of Sheriff Hopper and Eleven is brilliant. Harbour and Brown are two of the strongest performers on the show, and they have remarkable chemistry as, respectively, a man acting as father figure out of responsibility instead of desire, and an emotionally stunted child trying to learn the basics of the world while feeling a desire to rebel. After months of keeping El away from the world, they both love each other and also find the other impossibly difficult. You empathize with both. El, raised as a prisoner of Hawkins Labs, is now a prisoner again. But considering what she’s capable of, what else can Hopper really do? Their scenes together, whether getting overwhelmed with frustration or working to understand the other, are the season’s very best. It’s an emotional punch that season 1 didn’t really have.
It’s nice to see Joyce enjoying life a bit, and Sean Astin’s dorky Bob “The Brain” Newby is a perfect match for her. I wasn’t a fan of Ryder’s frantic Joyce in season 1, but I think she’s far better here. Joyce has a little more understanding of their weird corner of the universe, and it makes her a more compelling character. There’s more suffering for Will in season 2 – that kid should really ask his parents to move – but Joyce handles it more interestingly. When Will frantically starts drawing his visions, Joyce doesn’t simply freak out and call for doctors; she lets others help decipher them. Instead of impeding the solving of the mystery, she proactively helps – it makes for a great scene. It’s not that Season 1 Joyce was an idiot, because there’s really no choice when it comes to how to portray a mom whose son is missing. The key with Season 2 Joyce is that she doesn’t react the same way. And why would she, after experiencing the events of season 1? It’s a marked improvement for the show, and I enjoyed Joyce’s arc in round 2.
On top of that, Will is so much more interesting in season 2. He’s still under duress for most of the season, but at least he’s something other than just scared and lost. He tries to fight back as best he can, and even if he loses most of these battles, he’s willing to fight. It’s a nice look, and he’s an improved character for it.
Max is a welcome addition to the kids of Hawkins. She’s instantly a perceived threat to the AV Clubbers, whether as an unwanted stand-in for El (as Mike sees her), or as an object of romantic desire for both Dustin and Lucas. She seems poised to tear the group apart, and while the Duffers never seem to know exactly what to do with her, she still makes for entertaining screen time, particularly as Dustin and Lucas* try, in their own awkward ways, to woo her.
*There’s no better place to put this, but if I could get an entire spin-off devoted to Lucas’ smartass little sister, I’d be pretty pleased. You greenlit War Machine, Netflix, you can greenlight this. Priah Ferguson is hilarious in the role.
Finally, I should mention the most unexpected pairing of the season, but one that winds up stealing every scene, is that of Steve and Dustin. The two wind up looking for Dustin’s pet demogorgon. Dustin’s “demo-dog”, Dart, doesn’t make for a particularly interesting sideplot, but because it got these two on screen together for lengthy amounts of time, I forgave it. In a season that became largely about relationships between people of a different age (Will & Bob, El & Jim), Steve acting as a pseudo-big brother to Dustin was excellent. I don’t think I’ve enjoyed an odd couple journey this much since Jamie and Brienne trekked to King’s Landing. There’s even a great payoff at the season’s conclusion. I love everything about Steve & Dustin, and it’s one of the best ideas the showrunners have had.
To pull off these improvements, though, the show suffers a tad in other areas. First and foremost, season 1’s heart and soul, Mike Wheeler, spends entirely too much of season 2 moping. He’s still devastated about Eleven, and he’s far too antagonistic when it comes to Max. There is something deeply romantic about his devotion to El, especially when you consider kids of that age have an attention span of a fruit fly. He sends out messages for her on his radio for 353 straight days. The only real problem with it is that Sad Mike is around just a little too long. Mike’s reunion with El is obviously a major moment in the series, so I can understand why the Duffers wanted to save it for a later episode, but the price is Mike being grouchy for 2/3 of the season.
While new kid Max is a fine addition, her step-bro Billy isn’t. Honestly, I’m not sure why Billy exists. He’s the bad-boy asshole archetype, a psycho who exists to torment Max for unknown reasons. There’s some prior abuse that’s supposed to be an underlying cause, perhaps, but the show does a poor job of really getting any depth from the character. Montgomery’s performance is enigmatic, and there are glimmers of Billy being interesting (his scene with Buono’s Mrs. Wheeler is uncomfortably great), but it just never comes to fruition. He’s a distraction, and there’s no interesting payoff for it. Steve Harrington, in season 1, had an interesting arc, starting unlikable but winding up a hero of sorts. Billy has no such arc. Or even a coherent story, as he mostly just shows up in the middle of scenes and loses his shit. It’s unfortunate.
Nancy’s season 2 arc is a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, I think Natalia Dyer is fantastic in the new season. Nancy’s a smart, capable girl, and I love watching Dyer in the role. I think it’s one of the more vital casting choices the Duffers made, because Dyer brings that mix of soft and tough that’s needed. She wears Nancy’s determination so well on her face. That said, Nancy’s season 2 story is mostly just one of being around. She and Jonathan (who is pretty much a carbon copy of S1 Jonathan) go on a side quest to help prove Hawkins Lab’s complicity in Barb’s death, and along the way it does make for a great dinner table scene with Barb’s family’s lawyer, Murray Bauman, played by the excellent Brett Gelman. But aside from that, you’re kind of bored when the Nancy-Steve-Jonathan triangle plays out predictably. They’re all likable folks this time, so it’s not the “dump the jerk” trope that season 1 relied on, but the Nancy-Jonathan coupling isn’t the cathartic payoff they probably intended.
After a mid-season blow-up with Hopper, Eleven goes on a personal quest, delving into her beginnings. While any TV focused on Eleven is good TV, it felt more like a special episode, something that stands on its own instead of in the context of a season. Her origin is a story that she needs to know, but devoting an entire episode to it feels a tad disjointed. Sure, it makes her reunion with everyone a tad more meaningful, but it’s still out of place within the season.
Finally, the one bug I just kept coming back to is that in order to shuffle things and create new pairings, both interesting and uninteresting, the show had to punt, for much of the season, on the biggest thing that made season 1 so great: the AV Club. Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and Will needed more time together than they got in Season 2, and they all needed more time with Eleven. Once she’s back, the season dials things up to (it pains me to continue this metaphor) 11, and it’s arguably the strongest few hours of the entire series to this point. But with Mike moping, Dustin and Lucas focusing more on Max than solving the central mystery of the season, and Will often isolated again, I just didn’t get the same sense of adolescent brotherhood. As we learned with 2017’s Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2, the Guardians are more fun when they’re together and working together. The same goes for the Hawkins Middle AV Club.
Still, it’s an excellent season, and in some ways it’s better than its predecessor. The season’s Big Bad, in this case a large, spooky smoke monster eventually named the Mind Flayer (Stranger Things absolutely knows how to name its villains, by the way), is a nice follow-up to the Demogorgon. But even better than that is its ultimate showdown with the cast of characters. Once Eleven is back and everyone is focused on defeating the Mind Flayer, the show is fantastic. The climactic showdown with evil is even better this time around. The stakes are much higher, and the fight is more spread-out. Our heroes have to not just band together but be willing to break off into smaller groups to get things done. It winds up being the most thrilling must-see sequences of the season.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t also point out the season’s epilogue. It’s just… perfect. It’s such a cliche, but a cliche done right. Season 1 ended on something of a downer, what with Will puking up slugs and still finding himself in the upside-down from time to time. The happiest part of its conclusion was seeing Hopper put Eggos into the storage bin in the woods, letting us know that El survived. That scene seems like a crumb of happiness compared to the cookie Season 2’s epilogue delivers. It might be too saccharine for some, but these characters have earned some happiness by this point. They deserve it.
I think, for some, Stranger Things 2 won’t quite measure up to season 1, and in ways, it doesn’t. But in others, it surpasses its predecessor. Season 1 had nothing quite like the heartbreaking meltdown between Hopper and El. Season 2 may have had lower lows than the tight storytelling of season 1, but I think it had higher highs. That’s a hell of an accomplishment, and Stranger Things 2 was a hell of a season.
Is it Watchlist-Worthy? Absolutely.