Stranger Things season 2: news and episode reviews

Stranger Things 2, released on October 27, hasn’t inspired quite the same level of conversation that the first season’s surprising success did. But it has nonetheless been well-received, and there’s still plenty to talk about, especially vis-à-vis how the show responded to criticism and made adjustments along the way. So critic at large Todd VanDerWerff and staff writers Caroline Framke, Constance Grady, and Aja Romano got together to talk about how Stranger Things 2 compared to Stranger Things, and where the show could — and should — go from here.

Caroline Framke: We’re a couple of weeks out from the release of Stranger Things 2, and the general consensus seems to be that it pretty much did what the first installment did, only bigger. Will (Noah Schnapp) was once again incapacitated by the Upside Down; Joyce (Winona Ryder) once again trashed her own home in the name of bringing him back from the brink; the “Demogorgon” became countless demogorgons and a mammoth shadow monster. But there was at least one area in which Stranger Things 2 made a concerted effort to differentiate itself from Stranger Things: Original Flavor: It tried to treat its female characters like, y’know, people.

In the first season of Stranger Things, no character was more extra than Steve Harrington — Nancy Wheeler’s frequently possessive, largely confused, often douchey boyfriend. Though he eventually got with the program and helped fight some monsters, he wasn’t exactly what you’d call the pick of the litter.

So when the actor who plays Steve, Joe Keery, was promoted to series regular status for Stranger Things 2, fans were left to wonder why that might be. With Nancy’s eyes clearly wandering toward her stalkery BFF Jonathan Byers, what could Steve possibly be getting up to?

At once better and worse than its first season, Stranger Things 2 is good enough to suggest the breakout Netflix series isn’t a one-trick pony, while still falling into many of the pitfalls that made season one diminish a bit in the memory the further one got from it. It takes a long time to get where it’s going, it makes some bafflingly strange choices on the way there, and it still feels like a show that’s set in “the ’80s!” instead of the 1980s.

But when it works, it works. I’m powerless to resist it. You probably are too.

Stranger Things 2, the second season of 2016’s surprise hit Netflix series, is upon us. Though it’s only been out in the world since October 27, plenty of fans have already binged all nine episodes and started looking ahead toward season three.

By and large, season two has fully delivered on the expectations and high hopes that fans had after season one, which instantly lured in viewers with its ’80s homages and throwback atmosphere. Stranger Things is still full of nostalgia for an analog world, still full of kids on bikes battling monsters by using moves they learned from Dungeons & Dragons, and still packed to the brim with ’80s references. But season two finds the show’s ensemble cast embarking on a thrilling new adventure, as the bizarre hellmouth known as the Upside Down unleashes a whole new threat on the small town of Hawkins, Indiana.

The most consistent criticism levied against Stranger Things when it debuted in 2016 was that it didn’t really do anything new. The Duffer brothers’ Netflix series has been called a retread of film tropes, a series of homages, and a throwback that’s fun but not exactly satisfying beyond its immediate consumption.

And for the most part, Stranger Things 2 doesn’t do a whole lot to challenge those claims. Most of it revolves around the same elements as season one — the Upside Down, the Dungeons and Dragons parallels, the mysterious girl with extraordinary powers — except this time, everything is bigger.

Stranger Things 2 is finally out on Netflix, and a year of frenzied speculation and buildup can finally be put to rest in favor of discussing the newest freaky occurrences in the town of Hawkins, Indiana.

Season two is rife with more of what fans loved in season one: more cheeky and charming preteens, more frantic Winona Ryder, more strange supernatural happenings, and more ’80s references. Overall, it’s a solid showing from a series with astronomically high expectations riding on its second season.

Back for a highly anticipated second season, Netflix’s Stranger Things does an impressive job remixing and referencing a whole lot of ’80s classics. But the show’s tone owes a lot to the striking credits sequence that follows every episode’s cold open.

To give the show its retro opening look, production studio Imaginary Forces actually went back to an old-fashioned credits-making process. The team printed out the main logo on a type of film called Kodalith and set up camera tests to see what it looked like when light passed through the film sheet. Using those shots as references, they then animated the sequence digitally.

We’ve long been promised that Stranger Things season two will boast more of everything we loved about season one — more charming kids, more ’80s throwback goodness, more weirdness with Will Byers and Eleven and that freaky science lab, and more Lovecraftian monsters from the Upside Down.

But not until the latest trailer from Netflix have we been able to see all of that in one place. While the season’s first two trailers focused on teasing Stranger Things’ ’80s roots, the third and final trailer is all about playing up the show’s ensemble cast and at last offering a real, if still limited, taste of the plot.