In second season, show even scarier but still ‘genius’
The much-anticipated second season of “Stranger Things” is even stranger than the first, at least in terms of plot twists and endearing references to fantasy films from the 1980s.
But the Netflix science-fiction/horror series itself is hardly a stranger. The show — including its characters, most of the cast and the imaginative concept at the inviting heart of the series — is now familiar to many TV fans.
With the nineepisode second season of the show available for streaming today, the ante will only rise for the creators of “Stranger Things” — brothers Matt and Ross Duffer.
The Duffers ended the first season with a perfect balance of resolved and unresolved elements of the multilayered story. The younger son of Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) survived a visit to another dimension known as the Upside Down, but Will (Noah Schnapp) isn’t the same. He brought back with him a friend, a tiny creature he coughs up.
Will’s survival offers at least a slim hope that Barb (Shannon Purser), who also disappeared during the first season, might still be alive in the Upside Down and could be rescued.
As the new season begins, it’s a new year — icon-loaded 1984 — and Ronald Reagan is running for re-election.
Halloween is nearing, but Will and his friends — Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) — have other matters on their minds. They don’t know the whereabouts of the strange girl they call Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and want to find her.
After spending the first season in total panic looking for Will, Joyce has a moment or two of calm with her new boyfriend, Bob (Sean Astin), who manages the local Radio Shack and is working (too) hard to try to win over Will and his older brother, Jonathan (Charlie Heaton).
Joyce’s moment of normalcy is quickly shattered — and the game is afoot again — when another key figure in the story goes missing.
Although the script sometimes edges toward over-plotting, viewers will be inclined to stick with the craziness, knowing that their questions will be answered soon enough — some of them, anyway.
It’s fun to spot the sly references to great 1980s fantasy films. The creators are trying to tap directly into the inner kid in all of us, not to mention creating something that actual 21st-century children with no 1980s frame of reference can enjoy.
The series’ primary focus on kids is an important element in making it work simply because innocence scares more effectively than sophistication.
Yet, at the same time, kids don’t have their lives all figured out yet; their minds are open and hungry, and their imaginations have yet to be dulled to cynicism by experience.
We identify with them, or, in the case of older viewers, our inner kids identify with them.
There really is a kind of sophisticated genius behind “Stranger Things.” Others might try to imitate what the Duffers are doing, but the brothers have moved the game forward in the second season by making the show scarier without losing the wise innocence of 1980s films as embodied by a bunch of kids riding around Hawkins, Indiana, on bikes in the middle of a real adventure.