Stranger Things season two is bigger, but is it any better?
We were lucky enough to head down to the premiere at the Sydney Opera House today (check our Instagram stories at @pedestrian for all the action), and got a sneaky look at the first episode before it drops on Netflix tonight.
It opens a year after the events of season one (and not only is this review spoiler-free, it’s will also only cover episode one, making it about as useful as Steve in a chemistry test). Catching up with characters you know so well but haven’t seen for months is always disconcerting. Like, what’s new? What have you been doing with your life? You good?
Narrator: things were not good.
Will is back, and hanging out with Mike, Dustin and Lucas, only instead of playing Dungeons and Dragons in Mike’s basement, they’re scraping quarters to go hang out at the arcade. It’s peak 80s, right down to the insult of “wastoid”. But like we saw at the end of season one, Will is flashing into the Upside Down, and this time, he sees a storm brewing, and that monster spider thing we got a glimpse of in the trailer.
OH GOOD THAT’S NICE AND NORMAL.
Meanwhile, Nancy and Steve are totally in love, Joyce is happy with her beau (a rather tubby Sean Astin), and Hopper is back to coffee and contemplation… when he’s not throwing a pesky private investigator off the scent of last season’s events, that it.
The newcomers this season are the aforementioned Austin (as Bob Newby), Sadie Sink as Max, and Aussie bloke Dacre Montgomery as Billy, this season’s new antagonist. We don’t see much of him except this episode except to learn that he’s got a really loud car, but Netflix is promising he’s worse than those bullies we’ve seen before. Good-o.
Max is Billy’s younger sister, and Dustin and Lucas are infatuated with her. She skateboards, beats their high scores, and mostly wants them to stop following her around like love-sick puppies. She’s described as “a tough and confident girl whose appearance, behaviour and pursuits seem more typical of boys than of girls in this era” with “a complicated history and is generally suspicious of those around her,” so she sounds like just a badass who’ll run rings around them. No wonder she beat Dustin’s high score by 20,000 points.
Then you’ve got Bob. Look… I was so incredibly excited for Sean Austin to be in Stranger Things (I mean, he’s SAMWISE GAMGEE), but I just don’t know if his character is up to any good, you guys. There’s nothing he did or said. Just that he seems a bit… off. The show takes great pains to paint him as a normie in a world of off-beat cool kids. We’re supposed to not quite like him, when all I want to really do is love him, and hug him, and tell him that it was he, not Frodo, who really saved Middle Earth.
Elsewhere: the Hawkins National Lab is back (albeit with a makeover) and poking around in places they don’t belong, Mike is heartbreaking in his attempt to find Eleven, and Barb‘s parents are damn sure trying to get their justice. They’re selling their house to afford a private investigator, and Nancy is struggling to tell them if, y’know, the corpse of their daughter is rotting in another dimension.
Maybe it was the Concert Hall at the Opera House (and the dope lighting effects whenever the episode went into the Upside Down), but the entire episode felt bigger. There’s more characters, more locations, more separate storylines as each character attempts to process what has happened to them, rather than taking separate journeys to the same, ultimate conclusion. By all accounts, this season is a bit of a slow burn.
Stranger Things‘s first season was such a pinnacle of television, and coming in after that was always going to be a challenge. The 80s nostalgia is more in-your-face than last time (the Reagan posters! The Ghostbusters costumes!), but it’s not over-the-top… yet.
And even without the central plot of a missing child and massive conspiracy, there’s enough mystery to keep things going. Who wrecked that dude’s pumpkins? Who the hell is 008 and how did she escape Hawkins Lab? And, most importantly, WHEN WILL ELEVEN AND MIKE REUNITE? They need to go to the school dance together and subsequently burst my ovaries into teeny, tiny pieces. A necessary piece of collateral damage, you understand.
The entire season drops on Netflix at 6pm AEST, so I hope your weekend plans consist of nothing but the binge.
https://youtu.be/vgS2L7WPIO4
P.S. – Hello, it’s me, the author. I’m concerned that some of you think that ‘justice for Barb’ in the headline is a spoiler. May I please assure you that, while I understand the fear of spoilers, this is no such spoiler. #JusticeForBarb became a thing when it appeared that a teenage girl disappeared and no one gave two shits (versus, y’know, Will, who had the entire town searching for him). All I mean is that in season two, people do give two shits about what happened to Barb. They give several shits, in fact. She has not been forgotten to the Upside Down, blithely believed to be a runaway teenager. That is all.
