How We’d Fix It: Stranger Things 2 Ended How It Should’ve Started
Some revelations from Stranger Things 2: a) Millie Bobby Brown is already one of the most magnetic TV actors of the Peak TV era. b) This show can’t resist its own meme-ification. c) Its best parts are when it realizes it’s an ensemble program instead of a hardcore sci-fi. Season two was fine; it was enjoyable and sometimes charming and sometimes moving, but its great moments were fleeting. Stranger Things 2 tried to blow out its world in the way all sequels do, and while it was the right idea, the way it ultimately set out its game pieces was misguided. There’s nothing here that feels as permanent or resonant as season one (except, of course, Steve’s hair).
Let’s start here: The way Stranger Things 2 approached its own sequel-ness was the right move. By all means, go bigger. We like this stuff, so give us more of it. Hawkins felt a little more lived-in and real this time (the first season never really made the town feel like an actual place; that’s remedied to a small extent here), and the characters all interacting with the history of the first season (or even earlier Stranger Things lore) bolstered the scale in a smart, foundational way. The board this season used, to continue our game metaphor, was more dynamic and interactive and interesting than before—huge plus.
The problems began with how Stranger Things 2 placed its characters. The show ran with the idea of putting everyone into these surprising little pairings: Dustin and Steve, Lucas and Max, Mike and Will, Hopper and Eleven. It made for some warm little scenes, no doubt, but the physical separation of all the characters critically held the show back from more ambitious interpersonal drama. There’s a love triangle between Nancy, Jonathan, and Steve, so why aren’t they together more? There’s conflict in letting season-two newcomer Max into the main “party,” so why aren’t there more arguments among the boys about that? The only divisions that were really explored were physical: Mike can’t reach Eleven, Eleven goes off on her own (the worst choice of the season, and it’s not close), and people literally can’t quite reach anyone else. What’s here is fine—fine!—but what was left in our board-game box carried greater potential, and built more logically off the dramatics of season one.
The Eleven stuff deserves its own paragraph, because it’s hard to articulate how Millie Bobby Brown can at the same time be the show’s best performer but also be given its worst story decisions. Every great past Eleven moment put her with other people: She meets the cook, she talks with Mike, she goes back and forth with Lucas, she saves the party from the Demagorgon. In the new season, this truth persists: She fights with Hopper, she reunites with Mike, she…she…wait, is that it? The rest of her storyline sees her going off on a personal quest to meet her real mother (did we care about that? I don’t know) and then find her not-real sister (did we care about that? Definitely not). It isolated the show’s best asset and kept her from doing what she does best in favor of a train car set piece that doesn’t quite work and a punk-rock look that, while supremely badass, is ultimately contrived and empty of meaning.
I understand everyone who says, “but if Eleven was back in Hawkins she would’ve solved the monster plot right away,” but the response to that is simple: If your monster plot is that easy to solve, you need to write your show better. Waiting eight episodes for the hero to show up is a dumb way to create anticipation; that basically orients the whole story toward a deus ex machina, which is never satisfying. Put Eleven back with the party, then give that party a real effing threatening monster that’s gonna be a huge bee-yotch to take down. Eleven’s at her best when she’s with the guys, anyway. Millie Bobby Brown and Finn Wolfhard are two of the best actors on the show who also happen to have the story’s most charming romance, but their shared screentime in Stranger Things 2 might total 90 seconds. This is a nine-hour show.
To make all this sting a bit more, the second season had a couple hacky attempts to meme-ify itself, an already annoying byproduct of season one. For one, the retroactive Barb remorse was positively eye-rolling—worry about writing a good story, not making up with fans who didn’t break up with you in the first place—but further, there seemed to be a clear effort here, from Will’s drawings to Eleven’s makeover to Dart, to make more social-media blowups out of the show’s plot. Guess what makes for boring and corny TV? Blatant attempts at “going viral.” Game of Thrones felt the dangers of this in its most recent season. The lesson: Don’t try to make your show win the Internet, just make it good.
The best part of Stranger Things 2 was its ending, with the delightful, warm, bleary-eyed Snowball scene. Everyone was together, looking at each other and thinking about each other and smiling and biting their lips and laughing and joking; it was home-like. The characters seemed to grow as individuals and as a collective more in the last 10 minutes than in the almost nine entire episodes beforehand, and that’s because they were finally given room to react to one another and think about how things are about to change. This time, when the couples paired off for the slow song, it was for significant and stirring reasons, not weird story logistics. That’s what this season should have been all along: kids learning to grow up together.
That’s what was missed most from Stranger Things 2, and bizarrely what was ignored most by the showrunners’ endless 80s inspiration. Every kid in a classic 80s movie, from ET’s Eliot to It’s Losers to the Halloween teens, comes out of the supernatural experience learning something about life or love or death or maturation. Nothing about Stranger Things 2’s sci-fi or horror tropes contributed to that, but its Snowball scene did. That’s when the kids had to face their fears or confront their insecurities or deal with old flames. Characters don’t grow from solving problems. They grow by facing their weaknesses. That’s what made the dance beautiful, and the show ultimately worth watching.
Stranger Things 3 will be another (and likely final) chance for the program to wrap us up in the odd happenings of Hawkins again. They should keep the same board, but they should place the game pieces better, and when the campaign is over and its quest is completed, it should pan out to show players sitting around the board who have learned something about one another, who are different now because of the challenges they faced together. When the show’s story delivers impact and fallout, it makes for an experience that has impact and fallout on us, too.