Note: This article contains spoilers of “Stranger Things” seasons one and two.
The first thing you notice about “Stranger Things 2” is the bigger budget. The season opens by sending several new characters on a high-speed car chase through Pittsburgh. As a fleet of police vehicles tries to follow a gang of squatter punks into a tunnel, its entrance collapses—or so it looks that way to the cop driving the lead car. A few minutes later, back in Hawkins, Indiana, Devo’s 1980 hit “Whip It” plays as Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) and his mom Joyce (Winona Ryder) roll up to the local video arcade.
It’s not as flashy as an action sequence or an expanded cast, but the sync is another early tell that Netflix upped the show’s budget by $2 million per episode for season two. The soundtrack for the first season, which wasn’t exactly a low-budget affair either, included a few well-known tracks. But, while it only runs one episode longer, the second season features 60 syncs to the original’s 39. That new batch includes a lot of hits, from Scorpions’ “Rock You Like a Hurricane” to Duran Duran’s “Girls on Film” to Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers’ “Islands in the Stream.” The finale deploys showy cues like fireworks on the Fourth of July: “The Way We Were”! “Love Is a Battlefield”! “Time After Time”! “Every Breath You Take”!
There isn’t anything inherently wrong with spending tons of money on a soundtrack, especially one designed to complement original music as wonderful as S U R V I V E members Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein’s John Carpenter–style synth score. In this case, though, the syncs are only one manifestation of the biggest problem with “Stranger Things 2”: It just feels too obvious.
Season one found a team of nerdy middle schoolers battling a monster from a dark parallel realm nicknamed the Upside Down to rescue their friend Will, with help from his teenage brother Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), his single mom, and the local police chief (David Harbour) she’s destined to marry in the series finale. Their desperate attempt to communicate with Will entails a sort of paranormal art project that takes over the Byers’ home. Meanwhile, Jonathan, an outsider who loves the Clash and the Smiths, is tangled in a web of high-school romantic drama straight out of a John Hughes movie. His rival Steve (Joe Keery) gets his pretty-boy face beaten to a pulp. An endearingly goofy minor character becomes collateral damage. In the end, it’s the kids’ new buddy, a telekinetic tween known only as Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), who vanquishes the creature. The whole harrowing ordeal, which began in mid-fall, is over by Thanksgiving. A month later, it’s Christmastime, and the people of Hawkins are celebrating—but an ominous final scene confirms that the Upside Down isn’t done with them yet.
It wasn’t a mind-blowing arc, especially if you’d seen the Carpenter, Hughes, and Steven Spielberg films the creators, twin brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, were openly referencing. But that didn’t really matter because the show was so entertaining, the kids were so adorable, and we all needed a distraction from the election-driven 2016 news cycle.
While we could certainly use another break 15 months later, the most delightful thing about season one was that it was such a surprise. Despite what some fans would like to believe, this ‘80s pastiche was never going to be profound or original, and that would have been fine if its second season still felt fun and novel. Instead, it’s basically a more expensive rehash of the first. Every single plot point in the season one summary above recurs in “Stranger Things 2.” The only difference—besides an embarrassing episode in which Eleven travels to Chicago to meet the squatter punks from the premiere—is that the cast, the monsters, and the special effects are all bigger. Considering that Joyce’s new boyfriend Bob (Sean Astin) was this year’s Barb (Shannon Purser) and forces of evil have attacked Hawkins two autumns in a row, locals whose names begin and end with B should probably start going into hiding as soon as sweater weather hits.
The Duffers have a knack for paying unsubtle tribute to the movies of their childhood without taking viewers out of the show. Their kid heroes may be even more lovable than Spielberg’s, and even their most overt homages (see: the new season’s Exorcist-inspired exorcism) feel true to the story. Although Will’s pals and their growing pains are still a highlight, “Stranger Things 2” feels less like a celebration of the Duffers’ cinematic heroes than a celebration of their first season. In other words, it’s a too-easy victory lap.
You can hear that in the soundtrack, too. Season one uses its few conspicuous syncs wisely. Pop-rock hits like Toto’s “Africa” and Modern English’s “I Melt With You” appear in scenes featuring Steve and his popular friends, while Jonathan’s Clash and Reagan Youth tapes illustrate how disconnected he is from that teen mainstream. Nothing conjures a cozy, Middle American holiday season like Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” which appeared in the finale.
Most of the cues in season two are immediately recognizable, and a few are pretty great. Cheesy hard rock tracks (“Rock You Like a Hurricane,” Ted Nugent’s “Wango Tango,” Metallica’s “The Four Horsemen”) help develop a new racist bully character, Billy (Dacre Montgomery). It’s a stroke of genius to have Joyce and Bob dance to “Islands in the Stream,” a song that is comfortingly sweet, silly but genuinely good, and odder than it sounds at first—just like Bob himself. In the season’s final scene, “Every Breath You Take” plays as the camera zooms out of the school Snow Ball and the frame inverts itself to reveal the Upside Down. It’s a hit love song, but also a creepy stalker anthem. This is a happy ending with a sinister edge, of course.
But, in part because there’s just too many of them, a whole lot of the syncs don’t feel so brilliant. “Love Is a Battlefield” and “Time After Time” both play at the Snow Ball, and have about as much thematic resonance as they would at any other ’80s middle-school dance. With lines like “oh, she’s a little runaway,” Bon Jovi’s “Runaway” makes a thuddingly obvious accompaniment to Eleven’s Chicago trip, and wastes an opportunity to play something legitimately rebellious. When the first season’s unofficial theme song, the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” gets revived in Jonathan’s efforts to free Will from the smoke monster who’s possessed his body, the show is literally just reverting back to its old hits.
This isn’t incompetent music supervision. The pop cues are ear-catching, smoothly executed, sometimes charming, but relatively uninspired. That might be forgivable if the same weren’t true of the season as a whole. Sadly, neither the plot nor the soundtrack puts these new episodes in the same league as “GLOW,” “Halt and Catch Fire,” or “The Americans”—three very different shows that tell truly original stories set in the ’80s and do them justice with period-appropriate syncs that feel purposeful and fresh. In comparison with those great series, “Stranger Things 2” feels like an old Demodog who’s incapable of learning new tricks.
