Stranger Things – Season 2 – What We Know – Trailers, Recaps & More
October 27th sees the long awaited return of Netflix smash Stranger Things. The show was a huge success last year, capitalizing on the current craze for nostalgia, specifically from ages 20 – 40 where nostalgia around the 80s is especially massive. With nods to many 80s movies, tv shows, even foods, the show was a brilliantly written thriller/horror and hit all the right marks. So when a second season was green-lit fans waited with baited breath for any news and with the season 2 premier less than three months away, we now have a raft of information so check out our guide below to all you need to know about Stranger Things season 2. We’ll recap season 1, provide videos clips from season 1 as well as trailers and teasers for season 2.
So, firstly, lets recap season 1, it’s quite lengthy and if you need no reminding, then skip below the guide for all things season 2.
Season one kicked off in 1983 in the town of Hawkins, Indiana. Here a scientist is attacked by an unseen creature while working at the Department of Energy. Later, Will Byers, who’s cycling home after playing Dungeons and Dragons with his mates encounters the same creature and disappears. The next day we meet a young girl with a shaved head, who’s found in a hospital gown stealing food from a diner. The diners owner, Benny, feels sorry for the girl and gives her food before calling social services. Benny decides the girl is named Eleven after finding this tattooed on her arm. Soon a woman pretending to be a social worker appears and kills Benny, terrifying Eleven who escapes while the woman and armed men search for her. While this happens, Wills mother Joyce alerts the police that her son is missing, but believes she can hear Wills voice on a crackling phone call. While out in the woods looking for Will, his friends Lucas, Mike and Dustin find Eleven.
The boys bring Eleven to Mike’s house and let her sleep in the basement before nicknaming her El. El doesn’t talk much, but says bad people are looking for her and doesn’t want to meet Mike’s parents. Scientists from the lab go to Joyce and Wills home and discover something oozing from the walls. Back at Mike’s El see’s a photo and immediately recognizes Will prompting Dustin and Lucas to want to tell Mike’s parents about El, but a terrified El uses her psychokinesis powers to stop them, showing the boys how powerful she is. The boys science teacher Mr. Clarke continues to search for Will and discovers a hospital gown outside the Department of Energy. Later, Mike’s sister Nancy goes to a party at her boyfriend Steve’s house accompanied by her friend Barb. Near Steve’s house Will’s brother Jonathan, while searching for Will, hears screaming, but on close inspection only finds Steve, Nancy and their friends playing around by the pool at the party. Keeping out of sight Jonathan secretly photographs the group. When left alone Barb disappears. Barb wakes up and finds herself in a dark, rotting, empty version of the pool she was just at. She tries to escape, screaming for help, but is dragged away by an unseen creature.
Back at Will’s, Joyce gets another phone call from Will before hearing music coming from his room where she seems somethings trying to come through the wall. She proceeds to string fairy lights up around the home in a way to communicate with Will. She establishes a code using the lights to talk with Will who tells her he is alive but isn’t safe and tells her to run away before a creature starts to climb through the wall. Dr. Martin Brenner, the labs director allows Chief of Police Jim Hopper to view the security footage from the lab, but Hopper realizes the footage is fake and tells his deputies to look into the lab, Brenner and Terry Ives, a woman who says Brenner took her daughter from her, but is difficult to believe due to her frantic mental state.
In flashbacks, we see El at the lab with Brenner, who she calls Papa, and Brenner has El locked away as punishment for refusing to use her powers. Steve and his friends discover Jonathan’s photos taken at the pool party, and after humiliating him, the break his camera and destroy the pics, but not before Nancy spots a photo of Barb at the pool, alone. She returns to Steve’s to look for a missing Barb and finds Barbs car still parked near the house before spotting the creature in the woods. At a quarry, a body, apparently Will’s is discovered.
Proving Will is still alive, El talks to Will through Mike’s walkie-talkie before the boys give El a makeover in order to get her into school. At school, they use Mr. Clarke’s ham radio and are able to hear Will and Joyce talking. Joyce goes to identify the body but refuses to believe it’s Will, later hearing Will through her homes walls, she tears away the wallpaper and sees Will behind a transparent membrane. She smashes through the wall but only discovers her front porch.
Nancy, now with Jonathan looking for Will and Barb spots something behind Barb in the photo and Jonathan realizes it’s the creature his mother described. Nancy then tells the police about Barb and has to admit to her mother that she slept with Steve. When she tells Steve she’s spoke to the police he’s only concerned about not getting into trouble. Hopper interrogates the trooper who found Will’s apparent body and ends up admitting he was told to lie. At the morgue Hopper discovers that Will’s body is a dummy then deciding to break into the lab.
Lonnie, Will’s father, comes to town upon hearing about Will, but decides Joyce is hallucinating what she tells him she’s seen and heard. The boys work out Will is in an alternative dimension, a place El calls the Upside Down. In the lab, Hopper finds a portal before being knocked out and wakes up later in his own home where he finds hidden microphones. At Will’s funeral, Mr. Clarke tells the boys that high-energy space-time tear could in theory create a passage between dimensions. The boys work out that a tear in space-time would effect the Earths electromagnetic fields and use their compasses with El’s help. During another flashback, El remembers being places in a sensory deprivation tank where she encounters the creature, and scared of what she and boys will now find, El redirects the boys compasses to throw them off the trail When Lucas notices something is wrong, he confronts El and the boys end up fighting before El uses her powers to throw Dustin off Mike and during the commotion El runs away. While out searching in the woods again, Nancy and Jonathan find the creature and following a trail of blood Nancy crawls into a hole in a tree ending up in the Upside Down where the creature is which realizes someone is there with it. Terrified she escapes back through the tree and Jonathan takes her home, where Steve spots the pair in Nancy’s bedroom. The next day Nancy and Jonathan decide to kill the creature and after buying supplies they’re spotted by Steve and the pair fight before Jonathan is arrested for accidentally hitting a police office.
When Joyce and Hopper track down Terry Ives, Terry is in a catatonic state looked after by her sister Becky. Becky tells Hopper and Joyce that Terry was a part of MK Ultra testing at the lab but was unknowingly pregnant during the testing. After giving birth to a daughter, Jane, Terry believes this is when Brenner kidnapped Jane who it’s hinted at is El and Joyce and Hopper make the same summation. El flashes back again and it’s discovered that the testing at the lab trying to use El to communicate with the creature is what opened the portal to the upside down. El later saves Mike’s life (who’s out with Dustin looking for El) who is forced to jump from a cliff by bullies, Troy and James. But El levitates Mike to safety before dispatching Troy and James and the three head back to Mikes.
Lucas contacts Mike on the walkie-talkie to tell him he’s spotted agents heading to his house, so El, Mike and Dustin flee. The agents spot them and follow, but El uses her powers to flip and van, blocking the agents path, and Lucas makes up with Mike and El following their fight after El threw Lucas through the air. Joyce and Hopper go to the police station to get Jonathan following his arrest where Jonathan informs them of the monster and that Joyce was right. The group meet with Mike, Lucas, Dustin and El where they ask if El can find out where Will and Barb are, but she’s too weak. To help increase her powers they build a make shift sensory deprivation tank at the school where El discovers that Barb is dead but Will is alive and hiding in his backyard fort, but isn’t safe for long when the monster breaks into the fort. Joyce and Hopper break into the lab again before being apprehended by security. Nancy and Jonathan get their monster killing supplies from the police.
At the lab, Hopper tells Brenner where El is in exchange for being able to go into the portal. Joyce and Hopper go into the upside down. Nancy and Jonathan meanwhile set traps for the monster before Steve arrives to apologize for the fight, but is interrupted when the monster arrives, the trio try to stop the monster but is escapes back to the upside down. Back in the school, Mike asks El to the school dance, but Brenner and his agents arrive to get El. El uses her powers to kill most of the agents before collapsing. Brenner holds El but the monster then appears killing Brenner while the boys whisk El off to hide in a classroom. Joyce and Hopper find Will, unconscious with a tendril down his throat. Back at the school, the monster finds the children but El uses her powers to disintegrate the monster before disappearing into thin air. Hopper and Joyce rescue Will who’s taken to hospital before Hopper is picked up by a mystery black car. A month later Nancy and Steve are a couple again and now friends with Jonathan, El is still nowhere to be seen, Hopper leaves Eggo waffles and other food in a box in the woods. In his bathroom, Will secretly coughs up a black slug like creature and sees his surroundings as the upside down.
Also, you have to check out this fan video recap of season 1.
So, onto season 2, what do we know?
Well season 2 will debut on Netflix on October 27th around the world. It’ll be nine episode long, so one more episode than season 1. All the main season 1 cast will return (unfortunately not Barb though), and Will has been promoted to series regular now he’s been found, and although he was apparently killed in season 1, Mathew Modine will return as Brenner. And as well as the season 1 players, we’ll also get some new characters in season 2.
Goonie’s alum, Sean Astin joins the cast as “Bob Newby, a former schoolmate of Joyce and Hoppers who runs the local Radio Shack and is now dating Joyce meaning Hopper isn’t a fan of his.
Paul Reiser (Mad About You, Aliens) will play Owen, an executive from the Department of Energy who’s been brought in to try and clean up and contain the mess from season 1.
Linnea Berthelsen joins the cast as Roman, a woman who was emotionally damaged as a child and has come to Hawkins due to events tied in with the strange events of the town.
Brett Gelman (Twin Peaks) will play Murray Bauman, a former journalist that became a conspiracy theorist, who visits Hawkins to go after a cold case.
Will Chase (Nashville) as Neil Mayfield, the father of a family of recent transplants to Hawkins, Indiana from California.
Season 2 will take place around Halloween 1984, a year later than season 1, and will explore more of the mythology surrounding Will’s disappearance and the upside down. While trying to return to normal, Joyce struggles to help Will who’s suffering with post traumatic stress following his time in the upside down. Mike and Nancy are struggling after losing their friends Barb and El, unaware the El is still alive, and more of El’s backstory will be explored in season 2, while Hopper struggles after having to cover up what he and Joyce did in season 1 in order to protect Joyce and Will. The portal to the upside down is still open and now run by Dr. Owens. Show creators, the Duffers, explain that the residents of Hawkins will have to deal with new horrors in season 2, different but as terrifying as the monster from season 1. The Duffers also released tentative episode titles for season 2, and they are;
Episode 1: Madmax
Episode 2: The Boy who Came Back to Life
Episode 3: The Pumpkin Patch
Episode 4: The Palace
Episode 5: The Storm
Episode 6: The Pollywog
Episode 7: The Secret Cabin
Episode 8: The Brain
Episode 9: The Lost Brother
Check out some trailers below, the first aired during the Super Bowl and the second was shown at Comic Con.
Also, check out some cool Instagram posts from the cast and show below
Check back soon when we’ll discuss some fan theories for season 2..