‘Stranger Things 2’ Episode 1 Recap: “Madmax”

By the end of “MADMAX,” the first episode of Stranger Things 2, the Netflix sci-fi saga has held nothing back. Saved “zombie boy” Will Byers sees a new monster in the Upside-Down; the hubristic top-secret scientists are at it again; justice is coming at last for Barb; and we learn the true fate of Eleven, the put-upon telekinetic middle-schooler who seemed to disappear in the first season’s finale to put an end to the Demogorgon’s attacks on the town of Hawkins.

But before all that, Stranger Things 2 wants to show us something new. The episode opens in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as four robbers in masks race out of an apartment building and into their escape van, an alarm ringing behind them and police on their heels. It’s a chase scene, tense and earthbound, until the young woman in the passenger seat closes her open hand and says “Boom.”

An avalanche of rubble drops from a tunnel’s mouth. The chase is over. Until Officer Adams steps out of his car, bleary and dazed, realizing there’s no rubble at all. In the van, the passenger (Linnea Berthelsen) wipes her bleeding nose and reveals a tattoo on her wrist: 008.

We knew Eleven was not the first, but now we know: she wasn’t the last of the Hawkins National Laboratory’s experiments. With a cold open, Stranger Things 2 announces itself as a bigger, more unpredictable world than the high school hallways of Season 1. What else won’t we see coming?

With its buffet of influences, from sci-fi to horror, Stephen King to E.T., Stranger Things became a Netflix breakthrough in 2016—a work rich in 1980s genre nostalgia but also an evolution of it, a studious homage bursting with its own subversive new life. It felt more like an extended film (or a medium-size King book) than a TV show, and it’s fitting that the second season has dubbed itself with a movie sequel’s title.

Chase scene over, we��re back in Hawkins, to our three-tiered cast of characters: the nerd squad of Lucas, Dustin, Mike, and Will, the boy rescued almost a year prior from the fetid dark dimension of the Upside-Down and struggling still to feel normal; the Hughesian teen drama of Nancy and Steve—in love and making out in lockers—and third-wheel Jonathan, Will’s Vonnegut-reading outsider brother; and the adult concerns of protective mama bear Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) and the seeming slacker chief of police, Jim Hopper (Emmy nominee David Harbour).

Things have changed in Hawkins. There are new kids in town: an intriguing new student named Maxine—“It’s Max. Nobody calls me Maxine”—shows up in Mr. Clarke’s science class, but the boys know her reputation already: she must be the “Madmax” who beat their high score at the arcade. As Dustin says later: “Plus she skateboards, so she’s pretty awesome.” Dustin, by the way, has shiny new front teeth that he keeps showing off with a tiger’s purr. It’s almost the funniest thing in the episode, if not for the melodramatic shot of Max’s brother stepping out of his muscle car, all denim and cigarette smoke and “Rock You Like a Hurricane” guitars in his wake.

“Who is that?” three teens leer in a welcome moment of female gaze. “Would you check out that ass? Look at it go!”

It’s a moment so ‘80s, it almost tumbles into outright Wet Hot American Summer parody. That’s the tricky line of nostalgia, to pan through the past without its gold telegraphing as outdated caricature: luckily, Stranger Things’ strength has always been imbuing its period with dread. Like the opening act of any great horror movie, “Madmax” delivers scare after teasing scare: a crow screeching in a field of burnt-out pumpkins, a rattling garbage can, and the way a NASA-grade console goes into flashing overdrive in the re-opened underground of the Hawkins lab.

Those are just the fake-outs. As we saw in the Season 1 finale’s cliffhanger, the Upside-Down isn’t done with Will yet. As his friends argue at the arcade, he’s drawn out the door, back through the dimensions: the world is suddenly blue and dark, the air thick with spores, the building burnt out behind him and a storm cloud veined with red lightning in the distance. When it happens again, he sees a multi-limbed monster in the shadows, a towering beast that makes the Demogorgon look like a mouse. It’s hard not to think about Twin Peaks: The Return here, and its own visions of small-town post-apocalypse: it seems that evil is always coming across the barrier from a world it’s already destroyed.

Will, hungry to be normal again, hides his visions from his friends, but not his mom: Joyce and Hopper take him to the lab to see a new doctor, who explains the boy just has PTSD. It’s a relatively new concept in 1984. “We’re still learning,” Dr. Owens (Paul Reiser!) says, and waves away the memory of the extremely dead, child-stealing experimenters who came before him and trained Eleven at the facility before opening an inter-dimensional hell-mouth.

“Those people are gone,” he assures. “I’m on your side! I need you to trust me.”

Stories beneath them, men in suits watch Will’s examination on a surveillance camera. Dr. Owens soon joins them, and then a soldier steps into a protective suit and takes a flame thrower across sliding doors back into a familiar chamber: despite Eleven’s best efforts, the breach to the Upside-Down lives again! It’s growing like toxic ivy back into the lab: thus, the flame thrower. Sure, this is all under control, and not classic Jurassic Park sequel hubris.

Barb, Nancy’s best friend and Season 1’s meme-y tragic heroine, does not make the same kind of comeback. But she does get a tribute: a slow pan over her photographs on a mantle as Nancy and Steve arrive at Barb’s parents for a guilty, salty KFC dinner. Her mom breaks the news: they’ve hired a former journalist-turned-private investigator, Murray Bauman (Brett Gelman), and—a year later—truly believe “We’re going to find our Barb!” This won’t end well for the Holland family, and it hasn’t ended at all for Nancy. Barb’s death, despite fan anguish, was a smart twist on slasher tropes, the murder of a good girl rather than Nancy, the drinking, sex-having moral transgressor: she left Nancy as not just the Final Girl, but the one who doesn’t deserve to be. Nancy knows it, and the pain follows her to a bathroom cry.

In its first episode, Stranger Things 2 asks some deeper questions between its thrill-ride scares: can we ever let go? Do we deserve to? And when we try to, what forces are out there, still holding on from the other side? It’s a relief here to see some joy from Joyce, who’s found love with Bob, an electronics salesman who just gets excited to watch Mr. Mom over popcorn in the living room. When the phone rings—shot with a slasher film’s quick cuts and adrenaline implications—he tells her not to pick it up, to put her worries aside.

But she’s going to have to pick it up again. They all are. We may not know all of Stranger Things 2’s tricks just yet, but it’s a sequel for a reason: there’s always another monster in the dark.

But first, “Madmax” offers one more happy reveal. Bauman’s search for Barb takes him to the police station, where Hopper dresses him down over a Cold War theory of a “Russian child” in Hawkins with psionic powers. Behind orange-tinted glasses and a thinning grease-pile of hair, Bauman looks like Christian Bale in American Hustle on a budget: a little pathetic, and a lot paranoid. His story’s all true, of course, but Hopper can’t say so: he’s hiding Eleven out at his cabin in the woods, teaching her to eat frozen waffles after her vegetables. “Always,” he says. Good parenting, Hopper.

David Greenwald is a critic and cat owner in Portland who has written for The Oregonian, Billboard, and the Los Angeles Times. He has opinions on Twitter (@davidegreenwald).

Watch Stranger Things 2: "MADMAX" on Netflix