

The first season of Stranger Things seemingly materialized from nowhere: an unhyped show from a pair of obscure creators who nonetheless had the pretensions to bill themselves as “The Duffer Brothers,” starring a cast of unknown kids (plus Winona Ryder and Matthew Modine in supporting roles), paying tribute to the Duffers’ favorite sci-fi, horror, and fantasy stories of the ’80s, that somehow became one of the most beloved, talked-about shows of last year. The surprise of it was nearly as appealing as Stranger Things itself — which managed to be so much more than an exercise in nostalgia — because in today’s media landscape, how often does something appear out of the blue like this and turn out to be this good?

The last show to sneak up on the audience and entrance them to the degree Stranger Things did was True Detective, and we all unfortunately know how that show’s oversold, overstuffed second season turned out. Any sequel to a beloved property runs the risk of feeling too derivative and/or busy, and the danger seemed especially high in the case of Stranger Things, not only because the first season arrived with no expectations, but because that season told its story so effectively and simply that revisiting these kids and their small Indiana town seemed redundant. Better to use the Ryan Murphy anthology approach, perhaps, or else take another page from Stephen King and revisit Mike and his friends as adults

With the new season (it debuts Friday on Netflix; I’ve seen all nine episodes), the Duffers are leaning into all these expectations. They’ve dubbed the season Stranger Things 2, as if it were a movie rather than a TV show — a delusion that’s caused storytelling problems for a lot of Netflix dramas — they’ve larded the new episodes with as many echoes of season one as they can, and at one point they even have two returning characters describe last year’s plot to a newcomer, who takes it for a made-up story and says, “I really liked it. I just felt it was a little derivative in parts. I just wish you had a little more originality, that’s all.”

The whole thing could very easily fall prey to all the worst symptoms of sequelitis, but despite some bumps along the way — one bad storytelling choice in particular — Stranger Things 2 largely justifies its existence. The first season’s epilogue left me with no interest in returning to this world, yet I had an enormous smile on my face for a lot of the new episodes, and particularly the last two, which turn out to be a tighter and more exciting climax than we got last time around.

The action picks up about a year later. Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), and Will (Noah Schnapp) are all a bit more mature — and swear more than they did last time — but still obsessed with D&D and other bits of nerd culture. (On Halloween, they dress up as the Ghostbusters, which leads to a great bit of business where Mike and Lucas argue over who gets to be Venkman; “No one wants to be Winston,” complains Lucas.) The four of them, Will’s mom Joyce (Ryder) and brother Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), Mike’s sister Nancy (Natalia Dyer), Nancy’s boyfriend Steve (Joe Keery), and weary sheriff Jim Hopper (David Harbour) have all been sworn to secrecy about the other-dimensional incursion they fought off in season one, and everyone is doing their best to go back to normal… if only Will could stop experiencing flashes of what the kids dubbed “the Upside Down,” where he was imprisoned and nearly died. And none of the kids have seen Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) since she appeared to die while killing the demogorgon monster at their school.



The Duffer brothers and their collaborators(*) have constructed a lot of the season using the interlocking principles of “the same, but slightly different” and “the same, but more.” Again and again, there are echoes of things the audience responded to the first time around. Where once the walls of the Byers house were covered with Christmas lights that Joyce used to communicate with Will while he was missing, this season it’s a series of crayon drawings that take a while to decode. The big new catchphrase is “now-memories,” which — like the Upside Down — seems silly on paper but works in context. There’s another three-person hug, another strange visitor hidden and fed a particular junk food (Three Musketeers replacing Eggos, which were themselves an homage to the Reese’s Pieces from E.T.) With Eleven away from the group and Steve reformed from his bullying ways, their old roles are filled by a pair of step-siblings — respectively, skateboarding video gamer Max (Sadie Sink) and wispy-mulleted/mustachioed troublemaker Billy (Dacre Montgomery) — just as the government lab has been taken over by another actor with lots of ’80s credibility in Paul Reiser as Dr. Owens.

(*) Two episodes are directed by core Pixar helmer Andrew Stanton, taking another turn at live action after the overbashed John Carter.

Given how much the series was already riffing on the works of Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, John Carpenter, and more, paying homage to season one could very easily come off as a copy of a copy, containing the basic shape of the original, but not enough detail to be worth looking at. Fortunately, the Duffers have a collection of vividly drawn characters, and a terrific ensemble to play them, which gives weight to all the allusions to both ’80s pop culture (the Aliens homages go well beyond the casting of Reiser) and season one.

This is the advantage of not doing the anthology approach or even copying It and having a middle-aged Dustin swagger back into town. The kids and the adults are all well established at this point, and the creative team learned what their actors were capable of a year ago. So there’s a lot more of both Dustin and Lucas than we got the first time around, as the two of them vie for Max’s affections, while Steve becomes more complicated and entertaining as a reluctant hero than he was as the cruel jock with the impressive hair. (Steve and Dustin become the oddest of odd couple pairings for the season’s second half, and it’s wonderful.) We’re invested in this group of people, and after a bit of a slow burn start, season two pays huge dividends for nearly every character, both the ones returning and the newbies(*) who get nearly as much storytelling love and care as the originals did last time.