Stranger Things Season 2 Discussion

I liked it alot. Maybe not as much as season 1, but alot. The kids were all great including mad max. Eleven was abit disappointing. It wasn't as freaky as season 1. But man oh man was Steve great. That fight scene toward the end of the show bad me audibly yelling get him Steve!

I felt it was pretty bad on the whole. They expanded the universe in all of the wrong ways and failed to properly set up or payoff anything interesting. The weird punk band episode was such a weird genre-shift and it rushed through an entire season's worth of character development in two shitty action scenes. The Dart/Dustin plot was ridiculous and absolutely unjustifiable, given what the boys had experienced prior (and also where did Dart even come from???), and retconning Nancy and Johnathan to be together was weird and lazy as well.

The plot is chock-full of weird contrivances and happenstance that occur because the writers couldn't figure out a more natural way to resolve their arcs. The abusive step brother character is an all-around terrible person who is awkward as hell to watch, and his backstory is similarly rushed and meaningless.

The only good things to come out of this season were Hopper, who continues to be a relateable-yet-unlikable person and a great actor, and seeing Samwise pop up again. It's pretty clear that the Duffer Brothers, or whoever else was involved here, had absolutely no plan about the future of this show and clearly didn't understand what people liked about it before setting out to make the second season.

The pollywog that was in Will, I would assume.

Also, about Nancy and Jonathan, it wasn't that weird, they were clearly headed in that direction in season one, and putting those two together benefits a probable arc for Steve as he's now the odd man out in a similar position that Jonathan once was which may leave him susceptible to a Lost Boys influenced Mind Flayer group in season three. He's certainly got the hair for it.

I really enjoyed the whole thing. I binged it over the course of 3 days; got my dad to watch it too. He's a huge fan now.

@shiftygism: So it took that thing a year to grow to cat size, but a handful of days to become an entire army? And if that thing needed a human host to get to our world, where did the others come from? If they didn't need a host, why was it in Will in the first place? Did Dart make them? Why didn't the Demogorgon multiply that way?

And now that I'm thinking of it, why didn't Max believe their story after seeing Dart, which is clearly not an earthbound creature? And why was Steve initially so reluctant to help Dustin, despite personally batting the Demogorgon in the previous season?

The thing with Nancy and Johnathan wouldn't have been so weird if they didn't go out of their way to portray them as being so happy at the end of Season 1. Johnathan made peace with their situation, Steve bought him a new camera, and all was well and good. Backpedaling on that felt like a betrayal of that whole arc, and the scene that it was brought up in (the beds in the hotel) was so abrupt and unnatural that it's hard for me to view it as legitimate.

The more I sit here and think about the events of the season, the less and less sense it makes. The individual character moments are good and most the entire cast put forth great performances, but the things tying the events together are sloppy. It's just a series of poorly-paced coincidences that suddenly ends.

I assumed Will's pollywog multiplied and they were busy with the tunnels for the last year. He obviously picked it up when he was cocooned in the Upside Down, and the Demogorgon was more human-like than dog so I dunno....it doesn't really matter much, we don't need to get all Prometheus about the life cycle.

Regarding Steve, he probably didn't have much interaction with Nancy's brother and his friends, and given he and Nancy were on the outs, he probably thought he was in for a prank.

Jonathan didn't speak up being the shy dude he was and played the nice guy when Steve turned out not to be a jerk, plus he was pretty focused on Will after finally getting him back. Also didn't Nancy give a "did I make the right choice" look when she joined Steve on couch after giving him the present?

i'm a tremendous fan of season 1. i think they NAILED what they set out for.

now i've just finished season 2- and i need to watch both season 1 and 2 again to crystallize my thoughts. but i think...

...is exactly right. this thing operates at its absolute best when you get those charming, small scale character interactions against a backdrop of creepy mystery. season 2 (generally speaking) had a few too many action sequences and ran at a really brisk pace...and i really don't think it did the show any favours. not enough unknowable menace, not enough character explorations (no vignettes from the past like those heartbreaking hopper/daughter bits in the s1 finale), and not enough ensemble scenes.

that said, holy fucking shit that SNOW BALL. kinda made the whole season worth it. nancy asking dustin to dance REKT me.