Episode 4 was really tense and scary in certain parts. And once again, I love how Stranger Things deals with these physical props. It’s just cause for so much excitement in the viewer. In Season 1 it was Joyce setting up those lights on the wall, and here in S2E4, it is Will drawing really fast using crayons. It turned out not to be as exciting as the lights though. That was definitely more exciting.
I guess this was part of my problem with the season. I’m not sure exactly what I wanted from Eleven in a season 2, but having her spend the whole time acting up and arguing with Hopper and some other randoms wasn’t really it.
The other thing that disappointed me, was I’m sure we were promised some more insight into the Upside Down but pretty much got nothing on the ecology of the place beyond the shadow monster itself, since nearly everything took place in our world.
Okay so there’s a couple more now I’m unloading - taking the baddy from last season and just multiplying by ten weaker variants was a bit lazy (Aliens homage be damned), as was making it a hive mind yet having one tamer one that could think for itself… :)
It annoyed me how a lot of the season still revolved around the drama created by secrets and lies, after the events of last season you think they’d know better.
AND we had to go through the whole Jonathon/Nancy thing again. Kind of tedious.
Okay it sounds like I hated it, but I really didn’t. Even though it was at times annoying I was still happy to watch it, but it was certainly missing the fresh magic of the first for me.
I canceled my Netflix, so I binged watched Season 2. I definitely enjoyed it more than the first season. The nerd in my loved all the D&D and 80s movies references.
I actually enjoyed the episodes were EL was out discovering the world outside of Hawkins.
Oh man, I just saw episode 6. The Spy. So good. The scene on the railway tracks, the preparation montage scene between the kids and the soldiers. Just brilliant. The best episode yet.
My enjoyment of this season was marred by the Prometheus Alien scientist syndrome of Hopper’s case of “go-it-alone-ism”. What the hell, man. You knew what to expect.
It’s still quite well made and entertaining in parts, but there’s only so much you can mine 80s movie tropes, and they’d already done that in the first season. IOW, we really didn’t need another “weird revelatory constructs made from everyday things filing up the living room” scene.
Also, it seems to want to turn into a Heroes/Sense8 type superhero show now.
I really enjoyed the first season but this wasn’t as good overall, and I’m not looking forward to the projected 5 or 6 seasons, I think they’re over-milking it.
I watched Episode 7 last night. So good. I loved the new character’s return from the first episode, and the retro 1980s Chicago. I think it’s the first time the show has done an episode where instead of switching from character to character, they just stick with the perspective of one character throughout the episode. As such, it felt like a really great change of pace.
And tonight I watched Episode 8. Wow. That was awesome.
Just finished season 2! I think I loved it more than 1, which I really just liked.
Give Will’s actor an Emmy please. He was fantastic in those middle episodes. And man he kind of haunted me when that thing happened to him.
I’m in the same camp in that season 2 was a more refined and even experience for me than the first one.
I was not completely over the moon as others about S1 as many others, but I liked it quite a bit, and it has the novelty of introducing us to the setting and the characters and letting us see how Eleven and the boys get to know each other. That said, I thought it would have been better to go with 6 episodes rather than 8. After 5-6 episodes everything had been established. The last act was a bit of a drag for me, although I’m certainly in the minority there.
In S2, I never reached that point. Sure, that one episode - it probably should have been done as B plot of a regular episode. But overall, S2 had enough material to last 9 episodes. I also think you can really see that all of the child actors, in one way or another, improved compared S1 and knock out all emotional scenes out of the park. (Mind you, they were already pretty good in S1.) The new additions to the cast were great, too. And really every character in this not-so-small ensemble gets to go through some phase of development during the course of the season. Snowball was a great emotional beat to wrap up everything. Props to the Duffer brothers.
I really enjoyed season 2 and felt it was a worthy successor to the first season. As far as the 80’s tropes, this series is set in the 80’s and they are going to be omnipresent. I guess if that’s not acceptable then this series is simply not for you because I doubt that they are going to lighten up on the scene settings and atmosphere going forward, its kind of part of its DNA. The kid actors they found for this show are simply fantastic. All of them did such a good job but I have to say, Millie Bobby Brown, especially, looks to have an amazing acting career ahead of her. I believe I read somewhere that the Duffer brothers have a 4 season arc already planned so there should be at least two more seasons of Stranger Things going forward.
I said “80s movie tropes.” The USP of the first season was that it had a Spielberg/Carpenter mixed with King/Lovecraft sort of vibe to it. That worked very well for one season, but already in this season we’re stretching to perms and music/early videogame references, and re-re-treading the “strange informative constructs made from everyday materials in the living room” thing. What are they going to dredge up next, padded shoulders and Rubik’s Cubes? And when is Wynona Ryder going to stop being a “hysterical mom”? We were promised that would happen in this season but it didn’t materialize.
That said, yes it’s well-acted and has enjoyable moments, but I fear the longer it goes on the thinner and more meandering it’s going to get. The essential theme of this kind of show is juxtaposing weird events with ordinary circumstances (in this case 80s ordinary circumstances), but it’s already drifting from that. Hawkins is turning from a sleepy nowheresville into a famous epicenter of weird - but then that loses the juxtaposition, the weirdness looks less out of place, and begins to be definitive of the town, turning the show into a genre weird show.
Well yeah, but that’s just part and parcel of taking a one season concept and trying to extend it indefinitely. If you want to be truthful to the story telling, you will inevitably lose the ordinariness of the town. But on the other hand, you get to tell more tales in the universe, so just because Season 1 had that juxtaposition doesn’t mean the other seasons need to have it. If they did, it would feel fake.
While I would have enjoyed it more if they had mercilessly edited it down to a 6-7 episode run, most of the new additions, like Sean Austin, were great, and overall I really enjoyed the second season.
That said, boy, people weren’t exaggerating about episode 7. What a left-field momentum killer. I think completely cutting it, even if that meant never explaining the series cold opener or a certain character’s badass makeover, would have been preferable.
The finale was very cute! It’s such an easy watch; one minute it’s like a live-action Resident Evil 6, the next it’s a sentimental John Hughes movie. Steve’s the secret best character!
I agree with a lot of this (and especially the unquoted part about the ending, which I loved), but I really enjoyed the line at the end of episode 7, where 08 says those people can’t save you and 11 answers that she can save them. Was it a fair trade (all of the momentum killing for a single good line)? Maybe.
It also helped, dramatically, to take powerful eleven character out of the equation while the town when to hell in a handbasket. Also, her meeting with momma was important and gut wrenching. I can’t remember the order of the episodes very well, but it would not have been a better series without eleven meeting her momma.
That line ends up playing a pretty big role in the finale, so completely losing it would require either some sketchy ADR or a hilarious editing solution, but I still think the whole Chicago trip was a wash. The new crew of outsiders felt absurdly two-dimensional and tropey even by Stranger Things standards.
I agree about keeping the scenes with 11’s mother. I might be mistaken, but I think they’re kinda broken up between episode 6, and a few minutes at the start of 7.
They could have written around the stuff that happened and still hit all the points they needed to fairly easily.
Overall the show was great, but the flow of the show hit a brick wall with that ep.
Watched the last three episodes today. I think I liked this season even more than the first. I can’t think of a single thing I didn’t like about season 2, really. The cast just impressed me even more—every one of those kids, and all the new additions too.
Episode seven was also great and important, fight me.
Yeah, I don’t get it either. I knew that behind spoiler tags, there was a bunch of people here who didn’t like one of the episodes. After I finished the series I came back and clicked on all the spoiler tags to find out which episode they didn’t like, and I was really surprised to see that it was Episode 7. Honestly, if I had to lay bets, that would have been my last choice, since it’s the most unique and best episode of the new season.
But then, I was watching one episode a day, and everyone else seems to have been watching multiple episodes, and from that perspective maybe it was different, since Episode 7 was different from all the others. That was a virtue for me, but if I’d been watching the episodes in a row, maybe that wouldn’t have been a virtue.
I didnt find the episode to be horrible. I think it played an important part in Eleven’s development and Hopper’s as well but it did seem out of sync, tonally, with the rest of the series.
Without going back and counting, am I right in thinking that their D&D “party” at the end was 11 people, then one character dies and 11 returns as the 11th party member?