Last year, Stranger Things was a slow-burning success. It arrived on Netflix in July with relatively little fanfare, but had become one of the year’s most-talked about TV shows.
It felt as authentically Eighties as the contemporary Steven Spielberg, John Hughes and Stephen King films that it so lovingly emulated, but managed to be one of the unique, fresh and creative shows in years.
When we left the gang at the end of season one, the psychokinetic Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) had seemingly sacrificed herself to save her friends – but the Eggo waffles that police chief Jim Hopper (David Harbour) left in the woods suggested otherwise. And it is no secret that Eleven is very much back this season.
Will Byers (Noah Schnapp), meanwhile, the unfortunate soul who spent most of the first series stuck in the creepy Upside Down, wasn’t entirely free of his trauma and was last seen coughing up a slimy creature in the bathroom. Well, that slimy creature is only a hint of what’s to come in season two.
The usual teenage camaraderie and humour is there, but the creator Duffer brothers have ramped up the horror.
After what is a fairly benign opening episode, the sinister tension and the gore, drips and then flows. To any who may be wondering if this season is scary, the answer is a resounding yes.
We see a lot more of Schnapp this year and he proves himself to be just as enviably talented as his co-stars – who all wowed just about everybody with their performances last year.
Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Will’s sensitive best friend, is struggling to move on nearly as much Will and pining hard for Eleven. Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) is as garrulous, nerdy and charming as before, still frequently getting the best lines and now with a complete set of teeth, while Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) remains as cautious, cool and dynamic.
There’s a nod too, to the fact that our youngsters are slowly growing up. Their dialogue is now peppered with profanity: something that the Netflix executives were reportedly not happy about but, according to the Duffer brothers, the characters’ language is positively tame compared to that of the young actors themselves.
Winona Ryder, as the anguished but resourceful mother of Will, is now understandably reluctant to let him out of her sight. But there is some light in her life. She has a new boyfriend in the form of fellow Eighties child star Sean Astin, who plays the brainy and affable manager of the local RadioShack with an everyman appeal.
There's some other new faces in the cast, too, with Sadie Sink's skateboarding tomboy Max joining the adolescent gang, and her unnervingly aggressive older brother Billy (Dacre Montgomery), complete with menacing earring and mullet, providing an additional level of intensity.
The only duff moments if there are any, is episode seven, which takes an ill-fitting detour and is the only part which, in a show packed with nods and references, slips into cliché. Later, the show also makes use of a particular convenience that is often over-used in sci-fi and horror.
But really this remains an exhilaratingly brilliant show. The Duffer brothers have promised that this season will be bigger, darker and scarier – and they deliver in spades. The attention to detail, both in period set-pieces and plotline complexity, is as mesmerising as the electronic score.
The pressure has been on to create a season that could match the staggering hype eventually poured onto the first. This second outing more than lives up to it, reports telegraph.co.uk.
