Stranger Things 2

Creators: The Duffer Brothers
Starring: Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Finn Wolfhard, Millie Bobby Brown, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Noah Schnapp, Sadie Sink, Joe Keery, Dacre Montgomery, Sean Astin, Paul Reiser
Original Airdate: 2017

★★★ ½ (out of ★★★★)

The verdict is in: The Duffer Brothers clearly know what they're doing and there are strong indications they have a long-term plan in place that doesn't involve making things up as they go along. While this seems to be pointing out the obvious, it was far from a guarantee they'd be capable of delivering a sophomore season as strong as the first. In fact, it was extremely doubtful.  But wherever you land on Stranger Things 2, everyone could agree that the only major factor missing this time around is the shock and awe accompanying a new series without expectations. The thrill of discovery surrounding a project that was shopped around to every studio before Netflix took a calculated risk that paid off hugely. These guys had years to hone that first season so it was just right, and couldn't have anticipated they'd be writing any beyond that. Now, the game's changed. It became a worldwide sensation and the kids are superstars. The real challenge begins.

Stranger Things 2 Title Card

The test is to now somehow write and shoot a worthy follow-up within a year's time or face the wrath of extremely fickle binge-watchers more than happy to move on to the next big thing. And with the expectation there will be a few more seasons, they can't burn through the story too fast, as the child actors are aging and maturing on screen at an increasingly rapid rate. But don't go too slowly either and risk falling into the trap of The X-Files or Lost because we want answers, dammit. The great thing about this series is that it actually gives us those, and quickly, sometimes within the confines of a single episode before moving on to what's next. That's the benefit of a single digit episode order. It moves quickly enough to never be bored and isn't around long enough to overstay its welcome.

So, yes, second seasons can be really tough. And it's important to point out just how creatively trying they can be in order to truly appreciate what's done here. Yes, they've essentially replicated the same formula, but isn't that what we wanted?  By expanding the scope of the universe we were blown away by last year, they raise the stakes, further developing characters we grew attached to while even incorporating purposeful, intriguing new ones into the fold.

In its own way, this follow-up is as much of success as could be hoped for, and a good cause for relief and excitement that this wasn't the one-trick pony some skeptics had assumed. That for all its 80's influences and Spielbergian touches, it isn't just some trip down nostalgia lane. While opinions will vary as to how well it stacks up against its preceding chapters as it heads toward the finish line, it's still as tight and meticulously plotted as anything else out there. Logically continuing what preceded it while whetting your appetite for more, it's a real stretch to find any source of disappointment in the thrilling nine episodes of a series that quite literally turned the sci-fi genre upside down last year.

A traumatized Will returns to school

It's almost one year after Will Byer's (Noah Schnapp) disappearance into the Upside Down, and despite returning home to his mother Joyce (Winona Wyder) and older brother Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), he's still having problems coping, plagued with continuous nightmares and visions of his traumatic experience. It's also been that long since Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) have seen Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) whose whereabouts are still unknown after using her psychokinetic powers to defeat the Demogorgon.

As the lovesick Mike mourns El's absence, the boys have turned their attention to the new girl in town, a red-haired, skateboarding, arcade champ named Max (Sadie Sink), who's moved to Indiana from California with her sociopathic step-brother Billy (Dacre Montgomery).  He also steps on the turf of Hawkins High School's reigning alpha male and returning hero, Steve Harrington (Joe Keery), whose relationship with Mike's sister Nancy (Natalia Dyer) is again on shaky ground as she becomes obsessed with exposing Hawkins Laboratories' role in Barb's death, enlisting Jonathan's help.

Gruff, grumpy Hawkins Police Chief Jim Hopper (David Harbour) is also attempting to move on, investigating a mysterious rash of contaminated pumpkin patches that may or may not be connected to the new tenant at Hawkins Labs, Dr. Sam Owens (Paul Reiser) a Department of Energy executive who's also taken an interest in Will's condition. But Hopper's continued concern for Joyce and Will is somewhat infringed upon by Joyce's new boyfriend, the dorky Bob Newby (Sean Astin), a former classmate who now runs the local RadioShack.

Dusty, Joyce and Max express concern for Will

All these characters will be jolted out of their relative complacency when a dreaded threat returns to Hawkins, more dangerous than ever. The question is whether they'll be able to fight it this time without El's help. Or if she'll even be able to return to reunite with her friends, and possibly get a chance at trying to live a somewhat normal childhood, free from government experimentation and interference.

This season is all about tandems, with our already well-established favorites and some newcomers pulled in different directions, often opposite characters you wouldn't expect. El and Hopper. Steve and Dustin. Joyce and Bob. Nancy and Jonathan. Max and Lucas. Max and Dustin. Max and Lucas and Dustin. Dustin and a slimy pet Pollywog. Once again, after being absent for most of the first season due to his abduction into the Upside Down, Will is the odd-man out, as his friends have attempted to resume their lives while realizing something is still very, very wrong with him. Whether this is entirely psychological (in the form of some kind of PTSD) or physical or something else, it forms much of the groundwork for these nine chapters.

We do find out what Eleven has been up to since she single-handedly saved Hawkins and Hopper was leaving Eggos in the woods. While she spends nearly the entirety of this season cut off from the whole crew, it isn't without a purpose, as the El/Hopper story is the most successful of many overlapping plots. The thrilling results come every time David Harbour and Millie Bobby Brown share the screen together in a makeshift father/daughter relationship that complicatedly manages to be both adversarial and loving at the same time.

Eleven "channels" Poltergeist in Hopper's cabin

While Hopper's holding El in seclusion for her own safety and and can't comprehend how she could even consider risking her life to break his "three rule" code of the cabin, his hubris allows him to forget who he's dealing with here: A human lab experiment who's been poked, prodded and held captive for much of her life until she finally found real friends and a chance at a normal existence. So while the temporary living arrangement is for her own safety, it can't help but feel to her like another round of mandatory detainment. Hopper's no Dr. Brenner and has her best interests in mind, but to El he may as well be in so far as his standing in the way of her freedom.

What's even more impressive and expressive about Brown's performance this time around is how she starts to become this angry adolescent, and El isn't exactly someone you want to make angry, regardless of her age or size. One of the season's best scenes involve her and Hopper arguing and the viewer genuinely fearing for this tough, no-nonsense sheriff's life as she dangerously hurls objects at him with her mind, as the show completely reimagines the stakes of a father disciplining a child. The subtext here, of course, is that she's filling void left by the passing of Hopper's own daughter, infusing the encounter with twice the emotion.  El discovering how and when to use these "gifts" is at the crux of her journey toward understanding her true self: Jane Ives.

Locating her comatose birth mother and unraveling the mystery of her time spent at the lab leads to the polarizing self-contained episode, "The Lost Sister," where Eleven tracks down childhood labmate, Eight, A.K.A. Kali (Linnea Berthelsen) and discovers she's been using her powers more nefariously, leading a NYC street gang in crime sprees. While the episode's objective is pretty clear in guiding El to discover her true purpose and return to help her friends, it's a narrative and stylistic detour for a show that hasn't taken one up to this point. Sure, it was a risk, but not as enormous of one as some have been claiming and occasionally even bemoaning. While you could question whether this deserved a bottle chapter and contend it vaguely resembled a lost Heroes episode, it hardly curbed any of the momentum of the main storyline back in Hawkins.

"Chapter Seven: The Lost Sister"

If anything, it's a testament to how good the other episodes are that viewers' tolerance for anything else was so low. And it's not like this is just "anything else" either. El's arguably the series' most valuable character so donating a full episode to her personal arc and leaving Hawkins behind for 40 minutes is hardly a capital offense.
The episode works largely because of the turns from Brown and Berthelsen, whose Eight will almost surely return down the road. This effectively plants the seeds for that eventual story but you have to wonder that if the reaction to this one episode was so inexplicably harsh, how game the Duffers are going to be to take what will need to be even bigger risks if the show continues for multiple seasons. Or more importantly, whether this affected how much rope Netflix will give them to do it.

Of that action back in Hawkins, there's so little to complain about that we're basically just checking off boxes in terms of the varying degrees to which everything clicked. But what impressed most was how creatively the four new characters were weaved into the series. Seamlessly, purposefully, and without distraction, they each added important components in driving the story forward, but special mention should be made of new girl Max and the incomparable Bob Newby, as both Sadie Sink and Sean Astin respectively knock their roles out the park.

As the closed-off tomboy crush of both Lucas and Dusty, Max essentially becomes El's stand-in for the season, much to Mike's disdain. It's a role that could have easily been thankless, with attempts at adding her to the group possibly drawing as much scorn and skepticism from viewers as it does Mike. But Sink's a natural, masking "MadMax'"s recent history of verbal and possibly physical abuse at the hands of stepbrother Billy with a tough, seemingly impenetrable exterior the boys need to break down. Once they do, it's fun to watch Lucas and Dusty battle for the attention of the latest female recruit to the gang without a number to her name.

Sean Astin as Bob Newby

We're not sure what to make of Joyce's new boyfriend Bob, who seems to be trying so ridiculously hard to win the affections of Will and Jonathan that we're sure he has to be up to something. No one could possibly be this transparent, and if the rumors are true that the Duffers did initially conceive him to be manipulating them before Sean Astin's performance convinced them to change course, I'd believe it.  As Bob, Astin gives this perfectly calibrated, open-hearted turn as a type of honest, normal character we don't see enough of on screen anymore. He's a literal "Mr. Nice Guy" who does what he says and says what he does, frequently going out on a limb to help others without expecting anything in return.

The enthusiasm and sincerity Astin brings to the role and how it so thoroughly subverts our expectations of what we assume the character will do is possibly the season's greatest accomplishment. Whether dispensing incorrect but well-intentioned advice to Will or selflessly making a fool of himself to make others smile, the RadioShack manager is this year's Barb, but even better, as Astin seems to accomplish all of it by seemingly just being himself.

While casting nostalgic stars like Ryder, Modine, Reiser and Goonies alum Astin in an 80's set sci-fi series could have reeked of the worst kind of satiric self-awareness, his work here proves why it doesn't. The writing and performances deliver the goods, with the actors' histories serving as merely the cherry on top, adding a clever meta-subtext to what they do. And it's the only middle-aged Winona Ryder role that's come close to recapturing her trademark weirdness and unpredictability she displayed early on in in films like Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands. If we know one thing about her, it's that the odder the material gets, the better she is.

Steve and Dusty team up

By reaching for accuracy and believability in depictions of these characters and the period, we buy into the more fantastical, unbelievable stuff without hesitation. That's particularly true when it comes to the kids, who curse and antagonize each other in a manner very unlike what we see in much of today's overly sanitized, too sweetly positive portrayals of kids in film and television. If it's true the latter approach merely a reflection of a modern era where participation trophies are mandatory, then it's only fair the Duffers get credit for completely ignoring it, writing entirely through the prism and time period in which their story takes place, as well as the pop culture surrounding it.

The kids' sharp-witted, hilarious argument concerning who should be Winston when they dress up as Ghostbusters for Halloween represents the series at its best in nailing those small details. Or even just the character of Billy, who comes across more as a full-blown psychopath than your typical schoolyard bully, until the realization dawns on us that this is exactly what constituted a bully back then. His inexplicable hatred toward Lucas has us wondering whether he's also a racist, but by letting that possibility sit there as his actions speak for itself is more frightening than any outright acknowledgment would be. In a way, we don't want to know.

Whatever the root of Billy's anger (and we're given many indications), a lot of it is misdirected at Steve, whose redemption arc at the end of last season was one of the series' more surprising rewards. This season finds him thrown into kind of a big brother role that not only suits the character well, but gives us some priceless scenes of him mentoring Dustin as only Steve can. It's small treasures like that and even Nancy and Jonathan's trip to see wacky conspiracy theorist Murray Bauman (Brett Gelman), who offers up some shockingly sound and smart advice on how to properly expose the danger in Hawkins.

Eleven and Mike reunite at the Snow Ball

In the season finale, the Duffers do something I'm not sure many other showrunners would even bother delegating the time for. After the action's essentially been resolved and the kids can go back to life as usual (or as "usual" as it gets in Hawkins) much of that episode is spent with these characters processing the aftermath and their connections with one another. There's no doubt many of them have evolved a great deal and we're given these little moments toward the end that remind us for all the Spielberg and Stephen King comparisons the series justifiably receives, it just as heavily influenced by John Hughes movies, if not more so.

Getting these nuances right wouldn't mean as much if the big stuff didn't also work just as well the second time around, like new shades of Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein's 80's electronic score and the use of practical effects in conjunction with CGI in an effort to stay true to the period. Whatever they've done, it's worked again, as everything looks and sounds great. They basically took what they did in the first season and amped it up, in some ways making it bigger and better visually without losing so much of the character development that initially hooked viewers onto the show. And too think at one point we doubted they could even have a second season, much less one that nearly equals its first.

Now, the new problem will be producing more at a rate of quality that can sustain three or four additional seasons of story. What will this even look like when the kids get older?  Could we get a time jump where we see them as adults? Is the series' style and story so entrenched in the 1980's that it couldn't possibly leave that time period and survive? Every season can't end with El defeating the Demogorgon, can it? These are questions that will likely necessitate a lot of pondering in Netflix offices, and I'm not sure those even scratch the surface in terms of mapping out a future for this show. The good news is that these nine episodes bring with it considerably more hope that they can.