Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Like its predecessor, Stranger Things Season 2 imagines itself as more movie than TV serial, an ambition given away by its story beats: two-thirds of the way in, we’ve reached the point in Save the Cat screenplay parlance where “fun and games” descends into “the bad guys close in.” And close in they do, with one brilliant twist and another that feels like the opposite of a deus ex machina—a Dart ex machina.
After Chapter Five’s grisly hospital scenes, “The Spy” takes us there again, this time in the chaos of Will and his internal wounded Shadow Monster rushing somewhere in the Hawkins lab. Will feels like he’s burning, the transferred pain from the Shadow Monster’s torched tunnels.
In the same building where Eleven’s mother couldn’t save her child, Joyce is determined not to lose Will. She sits at the head of the table with Dr. Owens and his fellow white-coat scientists, their illusions of control over the Upside Down’s dimensional rupture and the forces within it evaporating. But their villainous need to hide their handiwork and avoid responsibility remains, even as Joyce refuses to be gaslit: “Can a single person in this room tell me what is wrong with my boy?” Hell hath no fury like Winona scorned.
On another adventure, Steve’s quest to muster up his courage and a rose bouquet to apologize to Nancy has been sidetracked by Dustin, who needs his other skills. Steve might have lost his basketball mojo, but he’s presumably still good at smashing monsters, and the pair pick up his spiked baseball bat and visit the cellar where Dustin trapped Dart.
A stairway, a dark cellar, a growing monster-dog: what could go wrong? But the expected horror-jolt twists toward something more escalatory: Dart’s shed its skin again and burrowed its way far, far out of the cellar. The shot follows the tunnel and rises out to a twilight blue forest, the color of the Upside Down. The color grading of Stranger Things continues to be evocative and gorgeous, the perfect balance between an ’80s analog aesthetic and vivid modern possibilities. It’s a relief to watch something digital that treats green and orange as tones that don’t need to filter the entire frame, and leaves more room for colors to help with storytelling—like a dark dimension’s expansion into Hawkins.
As Dustin and Steve make an unlikely pairing, Nancy and Jonathan begin to realize how right they are for each other. They join Bauman to record tape after tape of Owens’ Barb-killing admission, packaging them up to mail out to newspapers and reveal the lab’s ugly results. With success inevitable, they celebrate with vodka cups and Bauman turns his private-eye skills toward the platonic couple’s relationship.
“You’ve got chemistry, history, plus the real shit—shared trauma,” he says, stunned they’re not together and amused at how easily his armchair psychology tags their hang-ups—Jonathan’s trust issues, Nancy’s need to conform. “My goodness, you two are adorable, aren’t you?”
What they are is squirrelly, and up all night as his analysis ricochets back and forth in their separate rooms. They meet in the hallway and play their feelings off, a scene right out of Nick and Jess’ New Girl awkwardness. Of course they hook up, and the scene cuts to Lucas’ sister Erica, making his He-Man action figure kiss her doll: Stranger Things 2 only does comedy for a minute or two per episode, but it has a master’s touch. It helps to have actors like Priah Ferguson, 11 (!), whose relentless sisterly clowning of Caleb McLaughlin’s Lucas is one of the season’s guaranteed delights.
One of Stranger Things 2’s savvy touches is its world’s technological limits: beyond nostalgia, using a 1980s setting means getting to trade in smartphones for walkie-talkies and missed connections. There’s a reason the ‘80s were probably horror’s peak decade: the genre requires isolation and confusion, the kind Jonathan and Nancy feel when they arrive back at his abandoned home, Will’s blunt tunnel drawings lining the walls. They know nothing of the events of the last two days, and have no way to find out—only a piece of Polaroid camera gear that tells Sherlock Jonathan someone else has been here.
His walkie-talkie back on, Lucas catches up with Dustin: things have gone south with Dart, and it’s time to rally the party. Steve and Dustin take a walk on the train tracks, leaving a trail of meat for Dart and bonding like the siblings Dustin doesn’t have. Steve shares the routine to his incredible hair (“four puffs of the Farrah Fawcett spray,” see, Steve also has secrets) and gives his younger friend romantic advice about Max. The cinematic influences Stranger Things draws on so often kept their heroes to age-group chemistry: seeing relationships extend and intersect from childhood fantasy to teen drama to adult gravity with equal attention is one of the show’s richest strengths.
But we’re running toward the third act now, and banter time is over: at the lab, Owens admits things have gotten out of hand. He takes Hopper down an elevator into the origin of the tunnels: it didn’t occur to the eggheads until now that the dimensional rift in their wall might have cracked through the floor.
“It’s been spreading, growing beneath us like some cancer,” Owens says. The revelations continue with Joyce and Bob, who takes in the truth of Will’s Season 1 disappearance with befuddled solidarity. Joyce looks at him with affection, and maybe sympathy. Bob is simple and kind, a partner who should be easy to love, but Ryder plays Joyce’s feelings toward him with their full complications: the obligations of her single parenthood, the angst left from her ex, plus the unending supernatural drama that’s sucked them all in.
Domesticity takes another hit from Will, whose psychic scorching has left him with incinerated memories. He doesn’t know Bob, or Owens, and barely recognizes Mike. But he has a message from the Shadow Monster. “They shouldn’t have done that,” he says of the flame-throwing. “It upset him.”
Owens tells Joyce that Will has a virus, one taking over its host and tied to “some sort of hive intelligence.” As his brain scans show, the inversion of Season 1’s central plot continues: Will is disappearing even as he’s still here.
Hopper tries to signal Eleven, not knowing that she’s gone off to find her real parent.
“I don’t want to lose you,” he says—not like he lost Sara. It’s a heartbreaking scene, a reminder that Joyce isn’t the only struggling parent. Inside the lab, the other scientists dispense with emotion: they’re ready for another burn, even if it kills Will. Owens, an inkling of genuine good in him, goes to think and grip his stress ball. Will has a flash of insight from his monster now-memories and buys himself a few more hours of usefulness: “I think I know how to stop him,” he says, and points the soldiers to a vulnerable location.
The motley party—Lucas, Dustin, Max, and Steve—wait in Season 1’s abandoned car field to ambush Dart, and Lucas and Max have a moment. She and Billy are step-siblings, she reveals, their move to Hawkins a product of her mom and step-dad’s “fresh start.” Turns out the ominous score around Billy and his anti-Lucas warnings hasn’t been a suggestion of conspiracy: “He’s just angry, all the time.” And maybe kind of racist! But the bonding stops when they all hear a roar, and ready themselves for Dart. And his friend. And his other friends.
The monster pack descends on the group, and Max definitely believes in Demogorgons now. But before any violence, they turn back, called off to somewhere else—the tunnel graveyard that almost killed Hopper.
Will was right in Chapter Five about the Shadow Monster spying back: the soldiers are following his map to a trap.
“I’m sorry,” Will trembles. “He made me do it.”
That’s the brilliant twist. The Dart pack is the less brilliant one: they arrive at the graveyard, and the soldiers vanish in the fog in a mess of noise and roars. The lab elevator is next.
At this point, Stranger Things 2 has taken on a lot: its stormy, Godzilla-sized Shadow Monster; a new round of baby Demogorgons, apparently breeding in Hawkins for months; and notions of an assimilationist flora/fauna hive-mind mixed with metaphors of infection and cancer. Exhilarating as it is scene-by-scene, it’s also a sequel cliche: too many ideas. The Shadow Monster, it seems, is not some hulking physical beast but a central intelligence: having it trample Hawkins is probably out of Netflix’s budget, but trading in such an overwhelming enemy for an Upside Down raptor pack is disappointing.
But the movie’s not over yet. Fingers crossed for trampling.
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).
