So Stranger Things: Season 2....
Missus RC and I woke up yesterday feeling the onset of a spring sinus funk and decided to can our cleaning plans for a lie-in day. On a lark, I started the first episode of season 2. I guess it says *something* about quality that we marathonned all nine episodes in one day, only stopping to feed our animals and ourselves.
I should also say that my expectations were lowered by Nacho's inability to make it past two episodes and other "uh-oh" rumblings I'd heard from other sources. The only thing I truly feared was a Utopia situation where the second season totally demystified and ruined everything that had come before. Well, not totally ruined. The first season of Utopia, like the first Highlander and the first Matrix is still perfect in a vacuum. It's just a bit tarnished by the cash grab follow-ups that are unnecessary.
I was about to ask a rhetorical "Is Season 2 of Stranger Things unnecessary?" But it's a redundant and borderline idiotic question. Of fucking course it's unnecessary. However, in 2018 it was also inevitable. Things don't just exist on their own merit anymore. They have to be serialized and rebooted until it's driven smooth and unrecognizable into the flat ground of the vast barren entertainment tundra. I went in pretty sure that it wasn't going to be as good as what came before. Success only meant that it wasn’t offensive and didn’t *completely* throw-up on itself.
With the exception of one episode, it mostly succeeds by playing it safe and attempting to hit all the same beats. Stranger Things 2 knows it can’t be as scary as the first season, so it doesn’t really try. (Missus RC, a scaredy cat of the highest order, hardly jumped.) What is does instead is tries to be funnier, more clever, and bigger. It also plays up the romantic life of thirteen year-olds which I found more creepy than cute, but whatever. It’s basically a mishmash of Aliens, The Exorcist, Gremlins, Aliens, The Dead Zone, Aliens, and er, The Legend of Billie Jean.
Hey, did I mention Aliens, because for around an episode and a half in the middle of season 2, it turns into a nearly beat-by-beat remake that makes Neil Marshall’s Doomsday look like a one-of-a-kind original.
I don’t really want to spoil it because while the reveals are such you can see them coming a mile away, it’s all still pretty cool in the way everything unfolds. Season two ties everything “new” to the first season. For a rehash, the continuity is surprisingly good.
It's all serviceable. Some of it's even pretty good... except for Episode 2.07, which goes from a wild cliffhanger at the end of 2.06 to “a very special episode of Stranger Things.” Everything about 2.07 feels wrong, but particularly in the structure which breaks away from everything the series has done before. The episode really adds nothing to the overall story or the decision-making process of the character it deals with. That character could have come to the same conclusion in a thousand other ways. (And in some ways had really come to it in the previous episode anyway.) It was tonally wrong, narratively self-indulgent, and borderline out of character.
Then they come back to the two episode finale which hits all the same notes as the season one finale except with different characters in peril and everything just a little bit bigger. The denouement is Return of the King long. Overall, it was fine. Wholly entertaining, even a bit thrilling, but nothing more.
I’ll watch Season 3 with far less concern about it being ruined because I don’t think shows and movies can be ruined for me the way they used to be. I’ve been through this ride too many times.
