One of last year’s most surprising shows was “Stranger Things.” The weird, under-marketed, pseudo-horror mystery set in the 1980s took the world by storm with a cast of lovable and relatable characters while also delivering a fairly amazing story that felt both new and refreshingly familiar.
The second season of that show has now released and the question has to be asked: Could “Stranger Things” season two live up to the standards set by the first?
The short answer is yes. The second season was just as much of a joy to watch as the first but for pretty different reasons. The second season focuses on the fallout from the first. The fictional community of Hawkins, Ind., is reacting to the return of Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) in a peculiar way.
The Hawkins National Laboratory and the U.S. government have put everyone with connections to the first season under a strict gag order, and the rest of the community believes Will was simply lost in the woods and the “child” found at the quarry was another child that was mistaken for Will Byers.
Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), who disappeared after defeating the “Demogorgon,” has been deceitfully classified as an agent of the Russian government by the Hawkins Lab and federal government in order to cover her up and to cover up their connection to her. They are still actively searching for her, and the community has been drafted in the effort to be on the lookout for the mini Russian spy.
The real storyline of the second season rests upon the shoulders of Will Byers. This season is a direct reaction to his time spent in the “upside down.” From visions of the parallel reality to directly communicating with it, Will has many side effects from his time spent in the foreign dimension.
What I want to address immediately is how well the cast works together in this season. In the first season, I was amazed at how well the child actors worked together on screen, but that chemistry and bonding spreads fully to nearly the entire cast this season. Even with the addition of new characters Max and Billy Hargrove (Sadie Sink and Dacre Montgomery respectively), every character feels natural when linked in a scene with other characters.
The core group of Will, Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) improves upon the chemistry forged within the first season. It very much feels like these characters have grown together over the course of a year. That reflects very well on the young actors installed into these roles.
In spite of this, slightly less attention is pushed onto that core group in favor of some of the adults. More specifically, Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) and Police Chief Jim Hopper (David Harbour) get slightly more screen time and narrative involvement than they did in the first season. This works really well for those characters because they were standouts in the first season.
What I found interesting through the progression of this season was, when combined with the outcomes in the first season, every time Joyce Byers draws a conclusion or makes a decision based upon her intuition, she is always right. Other characters will shove her off as a crazy, overprotective mother, but rarely if ever is she actually wrong.
That kind of development for her character is great because it is juxtaposed against a community that consistently treats her as if she is wrong, misguided or out of her mind. What makes it all the better storytelling is that when she is finally proven right, the community never learns that she was. This creates this perpetuating cycle where people continually believe she’s wrong even though she has always been proven right through the course of the narrative. This makes her very sympathetic and my favorite character from the series.
One of the biggest and best characters from the first season was Eleven and with her fate at the end of the first season, I was afraid they would integrate her back into the group way too soon, as many shows tend to do with popular characters who find themselves separated from the group. I was pleasantly surprised that the showrunners didn’t do that. They did bring Eleven back to the screen very early in the season, but she goes on her own journey, divorced from her fellow child characters.
This solo adventure was great as it allowed us to get a more introspective look into Eleven’s mind. Her character arc is very much the quest for freedom, and the show makes you wait a long time for that arc to come close to conclusion. Eleven’s lengthy separation from the group also makes their reunion much more emotional.
If they had reunited the group after two or three episodes, it would have been nice to have the band back together, but waiting to do so makes the story so much more compelling and the reunion so much more special. It gave the group the opportunity to continue the main plot of the story while also allowing Eleven to have a more personal arc where she wasn’t the center of attention. It gave the character space and let the audience really get to know her in a way we weren’t allowed in the first season.
The story of the second season is also really good. The mystery isn’t as great as the first season, but the story overall, and the integration of ’80s popular culture references into the plot, is even stronger than the first season. Everything from the Dungeons and Dragons player’s handbook to the 1984 election play a fairly substantive role in shaping the direction of the story.
One thing I want to address regarding the story is in reference to something I said in my review of season one. I stated in that review that I didn’t think a second season was necessary and that it should stay an eight-episode mini-series. I don’t regret saying that, but I feel the creative team did a fantastic job proving that they had more stories to tell and a bigger world to build.
This second season was risky because they could have ruined something truly great, but they took the risk and made something that now has me fairly excited for future seasons.
As for negatives, I would say the biggest one is the VFX. They range from average to flatout bad. For a show as popular as “Stranger Things,” I would expect more money would have been spent on VFX, especially considering how prevalent VFX monsters are in the second season. The first season hid a lot of the VFX in dark or shadowy scenes, which actually helped accentuate the feeling of horror and thrill.
In this second season, a lot of the VFX scenes take place in the daylight, and this does absolutely no favors for maintaining suspension of disbelief. It’s such a shame, considering just how great everything else was in this show. It’s not that big of a deal since VFX isn’t as prevalent in this show as in most any big budget movie, but I have seen far better VFX from shows like CW’s “The Flash” and “Supergirl.” I would imagine that those shows have similar or even smaller budgets, and they have much longer seasons and tighter production schedules. My hope is that for the future seasons of “Stranger Things,” they spend some more time polishing the look of their monsters.
Other negatives would be that a couple of scenes/plot points in the second season were eerily similar to the first, and when it was revealed that the community believed the story that the “child’ found in the quarry was a different dead child, no one in the community seemed too concerned to find out who the child was. I guess that’s par for the course in Hawkins, Ind., though, seeing that no one cared Barb Holland was missing or dead in the first season either.
At nine episodes long, “Stranger Things” season two ranks among one of the best seasons of television this year. Some average to poor VFX is vastly outweighed by great characters, storytelling and world building. If you liked the first season, you should love the second season of “Stranger Things.”
I give “Stranger Things” Season Two 9 / 10.
