Stranger Things 2 Review (SPOILERS)

I never reviewed the first season of "Stranger Things" on this blog. Part of that is that I've not been as big on reviewing all the TV shows I watch. I've decided that reviewing things episode by episode is the way to go instead binge reviewing a whole season at the same time. But reviewing every episode of every TV show I watch is simply too time consuming. So I just enjoy my TV on my own and focus this blog on movies, while occasionally throwing out my thoughts on something major like "The Defenders" or "13 Reasons Why." The other reason why I never reviewed the first season of "Stranger Things" is that I was really late to the party. I actually didn't have a Netflix account when it came out. In fact, this is the show that caused me to cave and sign up for Netflix. Yes, I had a Netflix account quite some time ago, but I cancelled it because I just didn't use it much. But now that we live in a day with so many major Netflix original series and movies, it suddenly became a necessary thing to have. So I figured what the heck. I'll give my $10 a month to Netflix so I can be on top of things when something major comes around. Like "Stranger Things 2." Now that the second season has been binged, it's time to finally deliver you my thoughts on this show.

First off, I think it's important to note that when I finally got around to binging the first season of "Stranger Things," I completely ate it up. The mystery and the suspense hooked me from the very first episode and I found that my agency had been completely taken away, causing me to watch the entire season in one sitting. It was quite the marvelous experience. Do I think it was the absolute best show ever given to mankind, causing me to worship the ground the Duffer Brothers walked on? Definitely not. If you hate me for saying that, well then so be it. Be a grinch towards me if you want, but I think that'll be unfair on your part because I really enjoyed my experience. It was a great trip down memory lane that brought to the modern day everything good about Steven Spielberg and Stephen King, mashed into one show. You have the camaraderie of a group of kids bonding together and being kids, like "The Goonies," while something crazy and mysterious happens, like in "IT." In fact, the latter I think is actually the best comparison to "Stranger Things," although we side more on mysteries and thrills rather than outright horror. If you hate horror, you still might like "Stranger Things" because it's really not as scary as something like "IT." For the most part, anyways.

Speaking of which, if you haven't seen "Stranger Things" or "Stranger Things 2," this is about as far as you should go in this review. If you didn't notice by my spoiler tag in the title, I will be discussing spoilers. I'm not going to cover everything in the season, but I'm going to write as if everyone reading has already watched both seasons. You've been warned. When push comes to shove, I think the best way to describe "Stranger Things" is that it's 80's nostalgia vomit at its greatest. I feel it's created by two brothers and their team of writers, directors and producers that absolutely love the 80's and wanted to bring the best of the 80's back to the modern day, which is actually a very popular trend right now that I mostly enjoy. I was born in the final year of the 80's, which means I'm mainly a 90's kid, but as a 90's kid, I couldn't help myself with all the 80's stuff as well as there's a lot of great movies, music and TV shows from the 80's that are absolutely fantastic. Thus seeing that come back in my adult years makes me smile like a giddy, little school kid. Unlike movies such as "Super 8" and the "Ghostbusters" remake, "Stranger Things" is 80's nostalgia vomit that is done to perfection. Not that those two movies are awful. But they don't quite capture the magic.

Now that I've properly buttered you up as to why I think this is a great show that is definitely worth watching if you're a fan of everything 80's, it's time to bring a little bit of honesty to the table because while I love the show as a whole and I was madly in love with the first season, the second season falls a bit short of the first season. While I love getting myself caught up in nostalgia, I don't let myself get completely caught up in the nostalgia as I refuse to claim something is the greatest thing of all time when it quite frankly isn't. The camaraderie of the kids simply isn't as strong. The suspense and the mystery isn't there. The season doesn't grab you and hook you in like I wanted it to. In fact, after watching the first two episodes on the day it was released, instead of having my agency taken away by being forced to watch the whole season in one sitting, I was totally fine with stopping after two episodes to focus on finishing my Halloween movie reviews and Halloween festivities with friends. I went a whole five days without any "Stranger Things" and never once during that period did I have the burning sensation of needed to know what happens next. It wasn't until I got bored following the ending of Halloween that I went back and finished the season.

Jumping into specifics, let's first talk about this camaraderie of this group of kids. Mike is a completely unlikable prick in season 2. I mean, boo hoo, your girlfriend is gone. I'm so sad. Now why don't you stop taking it out on your friends. And why act like a dictator in this group of friends that has all the say in everything? I especially hated his complete stubbornness in not letting Max into their group when she obviously had a whole lot to offer them and proved her worth time and time again. If I were Dustin and Lucas, I would've said, "Screw you Mike. We're going to hang out with Max until you get your head out of the sand." But I did appreciate their loyalty to the group, although both of them could've stood their ground a bit earlier on. Speaking of Dustin, I thought it was really dumb of him to hide the baby Hell Hound (Demidog) from his friends or to keep it as a pet. I mean, did he forget everything about the Upside Down and the Demigorgon from a year ago? Doesn't he know it's a bad idea in this world of theirs to keep mysterious-looking creatures as pets? And after they go on their hunt to find it when it escapes, why in the world does he think it's a great idea to hide the thing from his friends and take it back to his home?

Of the bunch, Lucas is the one that gets his time to shine this season and I loved the addition of Max as the obligatory red-headed girl in their group (another comparison to "IT"). I just could've used a little more effort on Lucas' part to be more headstrong instead of allowing himself to be pushed around by Mike so much. But I do realize that it added a bit to his character arc, though, as he learned how to stand up for himself or be confident around Max. So I can let that slide. And I do realize that these are Middle School aged kids. Doing dumb things and acting like pricks is very normal. I just think the writing of their characters was a bit underwhelming as they did things that didn't seem to make sense for their characters. But the kid actors certainly were fantastic. Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo and Caleb McLaughlin certainly have bright futures ahead of them. Speaking of writing, though, I think it was another mistake to keep El, or Eleven, or Jane, whatever name we're giving Millie Bobby Brown's character, hidden away in a cabin for most of the season. I'll get to that in a second, though. Finishing off my discussion of the main group of kids, the huge standout was Noah Schnapp as Will. The poor kid can't catch a break on this show, yet the acting there was superb.

The other major complaint I have is the suspense. One of the greatest things about the first season is that it hooked me right from the start with the disappearance of Will into the Upside Down. But since we didn't know the lore yet, the suspense was super high in my mind as I was dying to know what the heck was going on. When we revealed everything about the Demigorgon and the Upside Down, that was a satisfying conclusion to all of it, especially the more we saw from El throughout the season. This season we had El locked in a cabin for most of the season, Will is having flashes to the Upside Down that everyone is confident is PTSD and Dustin finds a baby Hell Hound that he decides to keep as a pet. That didn't hook me. It wasn't bad. I just wanted to be hooked and I wasn't. I did think it was a great moment when Will took the advice from Sean Astin to face his fears head on, because that turned out to be very bad advice, causing Will to get possessed by the Smoke Monster. But that all meant that we were going to be facing the Smoke Monster from "LOST" and the Hell Hounds from "Supernatural" in a finale that I hoped was good? Meanwhile we have El and her X-Men powers to help them if Hopper would let her free.

The fact that all I had was hope that this would turn out well frustrated me a bit because the first season just took off running while the second season had a poor set up that decided to be content with waiting four to six episodes before finally DOING something. It's as if they didn't know they were going to get a second season, so this season they had to start over and set up something completely new instead of continuing where they left off. Luckily for me, that hope paid off because the final three episodes were phenomenal. What really hooked me was that X-Men episode... that apparently everyone hates. I mean, after watching the show, I looked at the episode grades on IMDb and saw a 6.4/10 for episode 7 with a ton of bitter, hate-filled reviews? Say what? That floored me. I think that this was the most important episode of the whole season as El finally decides to stand up to Hopper, who obviously wasn't going to do jack squat outside locking her up in the cabin for the rest of eternity. So she gets out to see the world and teams up with a fun group of outcasts who actually respect and appreciate her. Then we have her Indian sister who is there to teach El how to use her powers. I had been waiting two seasons for that moment and I'm glad it happened.

I also really liked the character arc that El went on during this episode. This group was trying to teach El that she belongs with them because the outside world rejected them. And she fit in so well with them. Quite frankly the little heists they went on during that episode were fun to watch as El and her sister combined their powers together to create quite the team. I was kinda hoping for a few more of these people so that we can have a full-out X-Men team to fight all the monsters from the Upside Down. And maybe we're going that direction in the future. Because Shadow Monster certainly didn't get stopped and it's possible that the Hell Hounds could be back. All we did in this season was close the gate to the Upside Down again, which we learned from the last season doesn't really work. But I'm getting ahead of myself. El could've gone with this team of outcasts, but she makes a great decision that her friends back home needed her. She has the psychic premonitions that they are all in trouble, so she has to make the decision to part ways with her sister, the one person she has come to know as family, to go help her friends back home. Because they need her and might all die without her. It was a powerful moment, yet a sad one as the sisters parted ways.

This leads us to our finale. Which, holy cow! This was super intense. The Hell Hounds have banded together and they are out for blood. When I said earlier that this show is not really horror, but is more mystery and tension, this is where I have to go back on that a bit because the attack of the Hell Hounds definitely does make this pure horror on the level of "IT." Those things are scary and their flower heads with their dog bodies make the creature design look freaking awesome. I roll my eyes a bit that the big reveal with this show is that it's just monsters attacking the city from a different realm and nothing more, but these are well-designed monsters that are legitimately terrifying, so it works. And the sequences in the lab with the Hell Hounds were probably the most terrifying sequences in this show thus far. The fact that this show has the guts to brutally kill off one of the main characters in Sean Astin made it even more intense because that means anything can happen. Thus when they're hiding in the house with absolutely no plan as to what to do, with the Hell Hounds closing in on them, I was practically cowering in my chair or my bed -- wherever I was. Even though I complained a lot about the set up of this season, the finale was fantastic.

The final episode itself, though, was not quite as impressive as the previous two episodes before it. I think we get bogged down a bit by the Billy story arc. They moment where Billy goes to Nancy's house and has a moment with Nancy's mother is perhaps the worst moment in the entire show thus far. It was just so stupid and unnecessary. I suppose having Billy around helped make Max's character more interesting, but Billy is definitely the worst part of this season. I could've done without. Thanks mostly to El, we did a good job of wrapping this season up by defeating the Hell Hounds and closing the gate. But part of me actually wanted more of a cliffhanger ending. I know that would've killed me, but that could've made it so season 3 starts off running, because now I fear that we are instead going to spend half of season 3 setting up something new  instead of continuing one story arc that could've made season 3 intense and mysterious right from the get go. But we'll see what they do. The dance was a nice way to end things. That gave me the feel-goods. Although I could've done without both kisses. Middle School romance is dumb to me. Too young. Spending a nice moment dancing would've been sufficient for 13-year-old kids. But whatever.

As far as a grade for the season, after each episode ended, I got out a notepad and gave a grade to that episode. So here's how those episode-by-episode grades turned out:

- Chapter One: "MADMAX" -- 8/10
- Chapter Two: "Trick or Treat, Freak" -- 8/10
- Chapter Three: "The Pollywog" -- 9/10
- Chapter Four: "Will the Wise" -- 8/10
- Chapter Five: "Dig Dug" -- 9/10
- Chapter Six: "The Spy" -- 9/10
- Chapter Seven: "The Lost Sister" -- 10/10
- Chapter Eight: "The Mind Flayer" -- 10/10
- Chapter Nine: "The Gate" -- 9/10

That leaves us with a per-episode average of 8.89/10 for the season as a whole, which I personally think is fair. If you wanted me to drool all over myself by giving each episode a 10/10 and proclaim that this was the greatest season of television ever bestowed on mankind from the heavens above, I'm sorry. That's not how I felt. By my 8.89 average is actually higher than the 8.80/10 average from IMDb, mostly because of that 6.4/10 for the seventh episode. But still. I'm higher than the average IMDb user for the season as a whole. That should mean something. And maybe I was a bit too harsh on the setup for this season in this review, because as you see, I gave every episode either an 8 or a 9. This was good enough and I still give this season a strong recommendation. I don't know what my per episode ranking of season 1 would be, but I imagine it would be higher because I was more invested throughout during season 1 while season 2 it was just for two episodes that I was blown away while being decently entertained for the rest. And I'm slightly nervous for season 3 because we didn't get a proper cliffhanger after this season, thus I fear more time will be spent setting up again. I'm guessing next Halloween is when it will come, so let's hope it's good!