Storylines that can be contained within one episode are dragged out across an entire season, while other storylines that need more room to grow fester in the show’s underbelly.” The fact that it’s modeled after a sequel acts like a double-edged sword. “While Stranger Things 2 deserves credit for taking a big risk and pulling it off (for the most part), there are some problems with its pacing. Julia Alexander at Polygon says the show’s decision to do a sequel rather than a normal followup season was a mixed bag:
(Don’t worry, this is a spoiler-free roundup.) Here’s a sampling of what the initial reviews had to say. Early reviews reveal that the series’ second season-or, as the creators want you to think of it, sequel-delivers the goods, even if it could have done so a lot faster and with fewer episodes. Only, not for more of the same.With so much great television on the air, it’s tough to find a show that it seems like everyone is watching and talking about. Netflix’s Stranger Things became just that last year, earning fans from what felt like every corner of our lives during its first season. But with success comes the burdens of expectations and Stranger Things 2 has a lot to live up to.Įven with so much hype to live up to, it appears that we shouldn’t be too worried. It’s why everyone at HBO interested in a second season of the perfectly ended Big Little Lies should watch Stranger Things 2-a meandering, intermittently entertaining follow-up that dims our memory of the original fun, of that excitement and sense of occasion. This is a common peril, but it’s especially concentrated here, this feeling that the show exhausted itself with its own success.
Having the great David Harbour and Winona Ryder do the same desperate shtick from the first season and hoping we’ll affectionately say, "Oh, right, remember?" doesn’t really work when the thing only aired last year, and when the series has been ubiquitously joked about and parodied since. The trouble is, Stranger Things hasn’t yet earned canonization the way those hallowed properties have-so the second season’s self-regard lands badly it’s premature. But mostly the show just regurgitates itself, making Stranger Things Season 1 another of its reference points, joining the likes of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Aliens, and Jurassic Park, all alluded to this season. There are some welcome inventions-particularly in casting Paul Reiser as a kindly government scientist, a witty counterbalance to Matthew Modine’s villain from last season. I won’t spoil any more of the mystery of Season 2, but I will say that much of it plays like a lukewarm rehash, with a bit more red meat thrown in to cover up the mustiness. Though the end of last season suggested that not all is right with poor, sensitive, moon-eyed Will. Her geeky friends all miss her, especially Mike (Wolfhard), but they are also happy to have their friend Will (Schnapp) back safely in their group. Eleven, the poked and prodded experiment subject played by Brown, has disappeared after using her powers to defeat a monster. Picking up a year after the events of last season-which involved an inter-dimensional monster, a telekinetic young girl, and bunch of scrappy kids with a few scrappy adults working to save the day-Season 2 finds our heroes older, perhaps wiser, and certainly more self-aware. That has a huge effect on Stranger Things’s second season, which drops on Netflix on October 27. Instead Stranger Things got memed into an annoyance-a very real danger of loving something in this content-flood era. At some point in the last year, I kind of forgot that I loved the first season of the show, that it was alluring and evocative and traded in a rare kind of decency. The central kids from the show- Finn Wolfhard, Caleb McLaughlin, Gaten Matarazzo, Noah Schnapp and especially Millie Bobby Brown-became near-instant viral stars, the novelty toasts of town. The first season of the show, from the brothers Matt and Ross Duffer by way of a zillion old sci-fi and fantasy titles, was an unexpected pleasure, a surprise summer phenomenon that nimbly trod a tricky path between cute and cloying. We devour and degrade things with alarming speed, which is why Stranger Things 2-as the second season of Netflix’s smash hit sci-fi show is insisting we call it-has such a difficult, perhaps impossible, task set before it.
When does a meme die? Or if not die, at least grow stale, repetitive, irksome? It can happen awfully quickly, passing around the Internet and proliferating until some kind of critical mass has been reached in mere days or hours.