'Stranger Things 2' focuses on the past, in more ways than one

*cue synth music*

It's hard to make a good sequel. Our pop culture landscape is littered with failed follow-ups, successors to what probably should have remained one-hit wonders. Some of these were bad enough that they not only destroyed themselves, but cast a retroactive pall on the original that spawned them.

As the decade that truly began the modern blockbuster, the 1980s produced sequels of its own: the original-justifying Empire Strikes Back, the middling Back to the Future Part II, the retread Ghostbusters II, and many others.

The cast and crew of Stranger Things 2 (self-stylized as such, not as Stranger Things: Season 2) surely had all of these examples in mind when they set about their work. For various reasons (explained at greater length here), Stranger Things became one of the biggest and most popular surprises of 2016. It could have been--and almost was--a literal one-off, a self-contained story that did not continue, but the Netflix overlords demanded more. And that meant the biggest question would not be one of the dangling threads left in tantalizing fashion by a one-time story. It would, instead, be a more classic inquiry: Can the sequel be as equal?

For now, the answer is (mostly) yes. I didn't think Stranger Things was quite the flawless masterpiece it was held out to be, and I think more or less the same of Stranger Things 2. It has many of the same strengths as its predecessor--a perfect atmosphere, excellent acting, cool sci-fi stuff--as well as many of the same weaknesses: questionable plotting, strange character decisions, and those darn kids. What make Stranger Things 2 a bit of a comedown from the first season, though, are an excess of ambition, as well as a sense of repetition that bodes ill for the future of a show with purportedly several seasons to go.

There's a lot going on here

One of the biggest weaknesses of Stranger Things 2--or so you might think--is the lack of a clear antagonist. The Hawkins Laboratory and its functionaries, as well as the beast from another dimension that they unwittingly unleashed, were the clear villains of the show's first season. Things have changed somewhat this time around: the Hawkins Lab, now personified by Dr. Sam Owns (80s film vet Paul Reiser*), is now more or less on the side of our heroes. And while this season tries to compensate for the lack of compelling human villains by multiplying the extra-dimensional beasts, their animalistic impulses can only frighten so much.

This is an apparent weakness, however, because Stranger Things 2 does not want the central villain to be anything concrete. The main foe the lovable residents of Hawkins, Indiana must face this season is, instead, the past. As befits a sequel to something that loomed so large in the pop cultural landscape as Stranger Things (and much of whose appeal derives from a backward-looking nostalgia), Stranger Things 2 makes it clear that its characters have not moved on from the events that transpired a year ago. Chief among them is Will Byers (Noah Schnapp). Will spent most of last season trapped in the Upside-Down, an alternate/parallel dimension from which all evil seems to spawn. And in the closing moments of season one, he vomited up a slug, flashed back to the Upside-Down, and then...acted like nothing was wrong. This bothered me immensely, as I thought it ridiculous that any main character in that show's universe would have any incentive to hide anything about the paranormal anymore. Fortunately, the show seems to have realized this. In the early parts of the second season, Will is openly discussing his lingering paranormal maladies (that have some connection with a lingering presence from the first season) with his mother Joyce (Winona Ryder), and with the consultation of Hawkins Lab. Much like the first season, the second season ends up being about Will. Physically absent for most of the first go-around, he is this time emotionally distant, and, finally, literally not present, merely a vessel for some evil from the Upside-Down. As Will, Schnapps not only proves himself a good fit for the famous kid ensemble that is the source of so much of this show's appeal (for reasons that are beyond me), but also worthily anchors an entire season more or less around a character we mostly only knew through inference before.

Noah Schnapp as Will Byers 

Will is not the only one dealing with the trauma of the past. Perhaps in response to fan reactions, Nancy Wheeler (Natalie Dyer), as well as Jonathan Byers (Charlie Heaton) and Steve Harrington (Joe Keery), the show's next level up of adolescents, are dealing with the trauma of having to lie to everyone--including her parents--about the death of the (in)famous Barb (Shannon Purser). As in season one, their characters' journeys, again, lead to some of the show's more cliched territory: teen sex, angry drunks, love triangles, and a conspiracy nut (Brett Gelman) of the sort whose absence from the show's first season seemed dubious to me. But that this trio would still feel lingering guilt over the aspect of the cover-up that most directly concerns them provides an intriguing dimension to the trauma-driven theme of Stranger Things 2.

Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and Chief Hopper (David Barbour) are dealing with the past as well. Following the events of the first season, Hopper has taken Eleven in secret, letting her live a clandestine but very real life with him while the world believes her dead. Tension inevitably results in this closed setting, itself representative of two ways to deal with trauma: to keep it bottled up or to let it all explode outward. In life, and in this season of Stranger Things the former obtains until the latter prevails.

To the extent Stranger Things 2 is a meditation, of sorts, upon dealing with the past, it succeeds. Where it fails, however, is in its increased ambitions. Sequels often are tempted to get bigger, to expand the universe, to do more. Some succeed at this, but not all. Stranger Things 2 tries this in several ways. A few of them are harmless, and even beneficial: expanded backgrounds and scenes for characters like Dustin, Lucas, and Steve Harrington; new characters who fit right into the show, like the thematically-named Bob Newby (Sean Astin, playing up and off his roles in The Goonies...and in The Lord of the Rings???**). Newby is not merely well-cast, but also supplies, in his aggressive normalcy, a glimpse for Joyce and others around her of what life could be like on the other side of chaos. Other expansions of the universe seem more like harmless but also thoughtless ratchetings-up of the dial: season one had some contemporary 80s music? Well, season two will have even more. Season one extensively referenced E.T. (among other things)? Season two will reference Aliens and The Exorcist.  Season one had one monster? Well, season two will have two, no three, no, like, six, no twelve...no...

At least you can't accuse the Duffer brothers of just introducing these guys for the toys

Other ambitious expansions seem more like straightforward misfires. A fractious pair of stepsiblings, fresh from California, introduce some contrived drama into the proceedings: Max, a redheaded girl (Sadie Sink), peer to the boys, introduces some prepubescent romantic tension into the lives of Dustin and Lucas, and Billy (Dacre Montgomery), a mullet-sporting heartthrob does...well, what, exactly? Pointlessly antagonize the main characters? Display all the dramatic depth of an after-school special? I greeted Billy's arrival onto the show with skepticism, but patience, hoping that some kind of payoff would result with his character, but none truly ever did. He could have been removed from the season without any harm to its arc.

But the biggest misstep of this season, one that has already been widely recognized as a sort of curious aberration, comes in episode 7. Eleven, smarting from her repression at the hands of Hopper, alights to the big city, where a psychic vision has promised potential reunion with a fellow experimental subject at Hawkins Lab. Meeting 8/Kali (Linnea Berthelsen) there, she finds her in charge of a random gang of 80s stereotypes, gets a makeover, and learns some things about herself before deciding it's not the life for her and showing up to rescue everyone in Hawkins just in time.

The Duffer brothers probably had in mind The Empire Strikes Back when they created this Eleven side adventure (and hopefully not a backdoor pilot). There are certainly clear indications of that, especially when Eight successfully trains Eleven to lift a heavy object Eleven thought she couldn't lift herself ("do or do not...there is no try"). They borrowed another aspect of The Empire Strikes Back as well: using events to split up the main characters for the duration of the story, and making the dramatic climax hinge on their reunification. This is basically what happens in Stranger Things 2, when Eleven's return to all of the main characters sets in motion the simultaneous resolution all of the second season's troubles.

It's important to know your roots

It has to stumble through some awkwardness to get to that point, although maybe this is just the sort of thing that bothers me and me alone about the show. Why, for example, do the "demidogs" hunt and threaten only the show's main characters? Why, when some of those characters tried to lure them with raw meat, did not other predators (coyotes?) take the bait? Why do the boys continue to insist that their Dungeons and Dragons expertise (as well as anything else about their persons, really) equip them to face this threat?*** Why did Dustin, who faced off against a literal monster in the first season, become so endeared to one of them this time around? How, in the tripartite climax, do the kids conveniently know exactly when to distract the demodogs from the other players in the plot? These and a couple other little questions sufficed to take me out of the show in considering them. They also underline one of the main ways in which season two's excess of ambition undermines itself: It's often like the show has plotted so much that it forgets that other things are happening at the same time as one another, or that they need to make sense instead of merely hurtling toward a climax.

The end goal of the Duffer brothers, one presumes, was to create another Empire Strikes Back: a darker, fuller sequel that at once expands upon and justifies the original. At a surface level, one can say they have done that. But it doesn't take much to go below that surface and find a product that is more Ghostbusters II than Empire Strikes Back: i.e., more of the same. Stop me if this sounds familiar: Will is in trouble, other people have strange ways of communicating with him, someone hides Eleven, Eleven saves the day, monsters threaten them from another dimension, the season ends with a hint of greater evil. All describe the basic beats of season one. For the time being, Stranger Things can get away with this; its cast and crew have the talents to make it interesting. Eventually, though, the mystery and the teases need payoff. Otherwise, Stranger Things may end up another one of those failed sequelized properties that litter our pop cultural landscape.
  
*Perhaps Paul Reiser's most famous role is the smarmy corporate hack in Aliens who eventually gets killed by one of the titular beasts. If you've seen Aliens and watched Stranger Things 2, you'll know exactly what scene in the latter plays on his role in the former.
**Whether intentional or not, several scenes in Stranger Things 2 seemed quite similar to scenes from Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, in which Sean Astin played Samwise Gamgee:
-A character death occurs in a fashion strikingly similar to that of Gandalf in Fellowship
-Eleven's convenient return has echoes of Gandalf the White's reappearance in The Two Towers
-A final climax involving one group distracting monsters from a pair who have the power to destroy evil for good is basically the same way that Return of the King ends
***For me, one of the most satisfying moments in the whole show so far comes when Hopper basically tells Dustin to shut up after Dustin pointlessly compares a monstrous creature in the real world to something that exists in the Dungeons and Dragons universe.