The second season of Netflix’s groundbreaking series explores the dire consequences of ignoring suffering.
This article contains spoilers for Stranger Things 2.
Leading up to its highly anticipated release last Friday, Stranger Things 2 faced a familiar challenge for surprise breakout hits: How would it recapture the magic of the original while offering something surprising and new the second time around?
The Netflix original show’s wildly popular first season managed to make Dungeons and Dragons and ’80s fashion endearing to all ages and generations—and its second season does not disappoint. It has all the warm nostalgia and nerdy kid innocence that made the first season so delightful. Instead of reinventing the wheel, though, Stranger Things 2 simply tells the next chapter of the story: a chapter that manages to balance being darker, deeper, and more hopeful than the first.
A year after the events covered by the first season, Hawkins, we discover, has experienced a superficial return to normal. The majority of the town has been shielded from knowledge about the gate that was opened into the “Upside Down,” and our beloved gang of geeks are more concerned with their scores at the arcade and their Ghostbusters Halloween costumes than fighting monsters from another dimension.
Except—maybe they’re not. Will may have returned to this dimension, but he experiences frequent “episodes” in which it seems like he’s back in the Upside Down, facing a new and bigger threat. Mike is still mourning the loss of Eleven (“El”), counting the days that he calls out to her on his radio and hears nothing but silence. Nancy’s guilt about Barb’s death and the lies she has to tell Barb’s parents is slowly eating away at her. And perhaps most hauntingly, Eleven struggles …
Source: Christianity Today Most Read