Today I will be doing a spoiler-free review of season 2 of Stranger Things. This is my least favorite season of the show, but it’s still really good. This show doesn’t have a bad season at all, and the fact this is my least favorite is crazy since it’s still very fun and has a lot of fantastic moments. I’m not gonna go through the main characters again, as they’re the same from the first season. The only difference is the one new character, whose name is Max. She just joined the main group of kids and she fit in really well. She isn’t my favorite character or anything, but she has a lot of really good chemistry with a lot of the other characters. One of my favorite parts of the season was the formation of the Dustin and Steve friendship. This is where Steve started taking a bigger role in the show, and he absolutely crushed it. Currently up there with my favorite character on the show, and he has fantastic chemistry with every single character. He fits so well as the “babysitter” which he’s referred to a lot throughout the show too. Another standout this season was Will, who’s still dealing with a lot of the aftermath from season 1. I love the continuation of his trauma and the introduction of the new villain for this season which is the Mind Flayer.
As I mentioned, the Mind Flayer is the villain this season who is a “shadow villain.” He enters people’s minds and haunts them while eventually taking over how they act. Using this with Will was a fantastic choice, as it just makes you feel so bad for his character with all of the trauma he continues to go through. Most episodes are good in this season, but there is 1 bad episode. This episode tries to dive into Eleven’s backstory more, dealing with her family. While that’s a good idea, I just think it was poorly executed and very boring. Besides that, every other episode in this season was very good and entertaining. The action is very good when they use it, but they don’t overuse it which I like a lot. A lot of this season is still focused on building the story up to the big final battle at the end. The show uses this formula a lot, but it works really well for them so I’m alright with it. The score is fantastic again, just like it was last season. They incorporate a lot of really good older music, along with more eerie music. This combination works perfectly and sets the tone perfectly.
I always rate shows I watch and I rate them based on 10 things in the show. Those things are action, acting, cinematography, pacing, score, characters, ending, plot, protagonist, and antagonist. I rate all of those pieces 1-10 and then after that, I add up the scores of all 10 of them and get a total score out of 100. I gave this season a 88/100, and like I said there’s a lot of great in this season, and it’s more great than bad. However, that 1 bad episode is just really tough to get through, and that brings the overall pacing of the showdown too. The plot because of them focusing on Eleven’s backstory gets a little jumbled sometimes as well.
