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Things Get Stranger


Warning: This article contains minor spoilers for Stranger Things 2.

As the year’s holiday season rolled around, Netflix aficionados from across the globe craving a Halloween weekend binge were rewarded with the second season of the critically acclaimed, massively successful phenomenon that is Stranger Things 2. The show follows life in Hawkins a year after Will Byers’ mysterious resurrection, centered around a bigger, badder Shadow Monster that stalks and preys upon the citizens of the small town.   

Created and produced by the Duffer Brothers, and released on October 27th, 2017, the show’s sophomore season ups the tense, slow-building sense of dread, crafting a darker, more polished storyline that maintains the same nostalgic sense of the 80’s sweetness that made the first installment a fan favorite. Boasting a stellar soundtrack, retro-iconic cinematography, and Sean Astin, there are Spielbergian traces laced in every bike ride, arcade game, and alien apocalypse conjured up in the small town of Hawkins, Indiana. Needless to say, this is not perfect television; at times, it feels as though Stranger Things 2 either sticks too close to the first season’s source material, or strays as radically far from it as possible (an especially random, Eleven-centric episode comes to mind), thus having trouble finding a middle ground. Still, it is terribly hard not to warm up to the childlike, profoundly human, array of characters that we have all come to know and love.

Through it all, I am left assured that Stranger Things 2 lives up to all of its hype. Decidedly strange and yet somehow strikingly familiar, the second season to one of the best shows on television is, without a doubt, certified holiday binge material.