Chapter 2: If I Get One More Three Musketeers I Am Going To Kill Myself

It wasn’t good.

Well, let’s be fair. There are parts that are sincerely enjoyable. The Ghostbusters thing is still actually funny. Max Mayfield gets introduced and she’s easily a top three character in this show, as well as her older brother Billy, an unrepentant scumbag who is one of the few antagonists who can carry actual weight. “If I get one more Three Musketeers, I’m gonna kill myself.” Hopper and Eleven’s thing starts out interesting. That’s the overall pattern for this season, actually— starting off with a strong foundation, then petering out as it struggles to fill out even its scant runtime with continuations that keep up that momentum.

Mike continues to be the central POV character of the kids on bikes, despite having the most passive plot. He mostly spends his time moping after Eleven, treating people badly because he’s moping after Eleven, following Will around, and not paying attention to the plot relevant shit his friends are doing because he’s moping after Eleven. Nancy starts out in a compelling spot— her girl best friend died in a hell dimension, said friends’ grieving parents are about to mortgage their house in the hopes of finding what happened to her, she and her fuckass on-and-off boyfriend are stuck between keeping quiet for their own safety and being tormented because of what they know— and once again, her plot is completely derailed into asinine love triangle bullshit. This time facilitated by one of the newly-introduced, most annoying characters in the show! Awesome!

Hopper and Eleven’s plot has not aged well; Hopper is the embodiment of the Grizzled Antihero Overprotective Dad, an overplayed card that’s lost quite a bit of appeal over time, and he’s not even a particularly well-executed example. It’s not fun to watch him scream at the young girl he supposedly views as a daughter, it’s not fun to watch her yet again stripped of her autonomy in the name of safety, it’s not fun that she gets maybe an episode of reprieve before being shuttled right back, with a heartfelt, hollow apology that he will spend the next season undoing.

You can follow the threads of each character from season 1 and see the unexplored paths cut for time and pacing. Season 2 has all the room and time in the world to expand these threads, and simply chooses not to. The plots are lopsided and meandering, the focus between them divided. There’s a boatload of new characters that have to shuffle through lengthy introductions to make them seem like organic, meaningful inclusions, up until the last few episodes where half of them die. All this is at the expense of the existing characters, who almost never are faced with the true threat of death and instead are forced to spin their wheels as they’re shuffled from threadbare plot point to the next. Could you imagine being the showrunners of a burgeoning multimedia franchise and killing off your universally beloved, iconic characters in the second season? Perish the thought! We need Eleven around to eat Eggos™ with Hopper and drink our season-mandated amount of Coca-Cola™! If you thought the product placement in the first season was bad, it gets on some Truman Show shit by this season, and it will somehow only get worse from here. “You know what I love? Capitalism,” indeed.

Another element that makes itself known is the showrunners’ increasing adherence to audience reaction. A “breakout” character from the first season was Barb, the Demogorgon’s third victim after Will and a random scientist from the first episode. Barb is introduced as Nancy’s friend, a bookish normie type who doesn’t fit in with Nancy’s current company of mean boys and girls. She gets a handful of scenes across three episodes before she bites it. Despite no real intent from the showrunners to make her more than a sacrificial lamb, Barb captured audiences’ sympathies in a big way— people made an uproar about her unceremonious death and lack of appropriate response from other characters in comparison to Will. She’s visually and narratively designated as an outcast, a soft-spoken nerd who’s nothing but supportive to her friend, who pays her back by ditching her for the popular kids and going off to bang her not-boyfriend while Barb gets mauled by a Xenomorph knockoff. Her being vaguely queer-coded also helped. Barb was so hyped despite her relatively miniscule screentime that #JusticeForBarb became a widely repeated refrain on social media^{1Nast, Condé. “How the Internet Made Barb from Stranger Things Happen.” Vanity Fair.} and her actress was nominated for an Emmy^{2Drysdale, Jennifer. “‘Stranger Things’ Star Shannon Purser Reacts to Emmy Nom and Finally Getting Justice for Barb (Exclusive).” Entertainment Tonight.} . Some people even got sick of her overexposure and actually wrote backlash pieces about Barb Strangethings (a statement that feels more emblematic of the time than any of the Funkos and tie-in MLP merchandise (real)) about how she sucks, that she’s a bad character because she’s lame and a nerd and you’re all projecting. It’s fascinating in 2026 that people actually got angry over this because Barb is barely a character at all, and in another show with a longer runtime, I doubt people would have become so caught up in the fervor.

Well, the Duffers noticed, and because being a good showrunner means changing things because your fans demand them of you, they gave the viewers what they wanted— nearly all of Nancy’s (initial) subplot in season 2 is about Barb. That might sound actually kind of good on paper, a female character actually getting to explore an arc about bringing a woman’s unsolved death to justice, but because the show is what it is, it devolves into almost literal railroading of Nancy and Jonathan’s apparently achingly obvious burgeoning romance. Barb is retroactively assigned a character, which is that no one cares about Barb: “The question and the feelings that Nancy has that no one ever cares about her friend Barb, are very much present in the beginning of the season.^{3Longeretta, Emily. “‘Stranger Things’ Season 2 Scoop: Sean Astin Playing Winona Ryder’s “Boyfriend” & More.” Hollywood Life.} ”

I don’t think this is an inherently bad direction to go, but it sets a precedent for how the show will handle such characters from then on. Strangethings throws new faces into the cast like they have all the time in the world, sometimes keeping them around after initially planning to kill them off (this is what happened with Steve Harrington, which is insane considering how recognizable he now is for the series). Because it doesn’t have the space to organically develop any previous relationship between them and the existing cast, it just materializes history between them offscreen. The characters exposit this in long, emotional monologues, painting a vivid image of their bond without the hassle of ‘writing an arc’ or ‘development’ or ‘character interaction’. This is actually present in the first season somewhat; Dustin has to turn to the camera and tell us his own relationship with his friends of many years; but at least in that season it’s justified to keep with the episodes’ breakneck speed (that is the case because they chose to do 8 episodes).

But season 2 isn’t like that, and it’s still written that way. The show is so entrapped in its self-produced formula that it rarely takes steps against its own status quo, uninterested in developing what it has further than the first pass, it instead opts to repeat structures for plots that really aren’t suited for them. To be fair, usually the new ideas the Duffers come up with are shit, but it’s not like they know that. The show already began with an unwieldy amount of characters, and is now unwilling to let go of any of them because they make the showrunners too much money— not to mention the last time one of them died, everyone got really, really upset.

The only subplot that does not bend to this trend is Will Byers’. His arc is consistently intense, emotional, and thoughtfully explored. It feels like the second half to his role in the first season, where he was the narrative focus but couldn’t meaningfully be explored character-wise because he was in the alien hell dimension. Now we get to see the emotional fallout— while the other kids who were spared the true horrors of the Upside Down are able to hop back into normal life fairly easily, Will is physically and mentally pulled back time and time again. There’s an underlying CSA framing that lends this otherworldly plot a genuine sense of weight. Will’s mind and body was continually violated throughout season 1, to the point of being literally impregnated with a Xenomorph-esque slug; he recounts, “I felt frozen [...] like how you feel when you’re scared and you can’t talk or breathe or do anything. [...] Like it was looking at me. And I couldn’t do anything about it.” At the same time, he’s frustrated by everyone treating him like a fragile object. His family struggles to give him emotional support and space to himself, with the very real possibility that the terrifying forces that took him could return at any time.

This is good shit. Unfortunately, it has to share space with three other subplots with a different handful of characters for each. For every scene that made me wonder if maybe this show was actually alright, another scene came around to quash my hopes and make me feel stupid for starting this whole endeavor.

Season 2 released a little over a year after the first, October 2017. The tail end of a year that everyone sincerely hoped would be better than the last; time was rapidly closing for things to perk up, and it wasn’t looking great. That was the year of the Women’s March, millions of people joining across 420 marches nationwide (and more across the world) to protest Trump’s inauguration, and ten months later he was still sitting in the White House signing executive orders for Muslim flight bans. People wanted 2016 to be a bad dream which they’d eventually wake up from, that some momentous event would jar the timeline back on track— but for the people who weren’t already soured on the idea of things ever getting better, it became clear that it wouldn’t be that simple.

Stranger Things, among a lot of other shows, was comfort media for a lot of people. Its earnest, nostalgic tone resonated with younger and older viewers alike; its stated message of looking out for the outcasts of society was something that many people, especially young queer fans, needed to hear. It wasn’t all rainbows. There were criticisms of the show’s simplistic handling of gender and race even then^{4Camryn, Garrett. “We Need to Talk about Race and Gender in Stranger Things.” Womensmediacenter.com, WMC. 5merryana salem. “Male Gaze, Abelism & Racism: Problems with the Women in Stranger Things.” Wordpress.} . A fanbase of millions of people fixating on a show featuring charismatic child actors was always going to get weird and people were really, really weird; Finn Wolfhard and Millie Bobbie Brown were getting thirst comments at age 14 from grown-ass adults (infamously, the latter would begin a whole thing with known teen-kisser and alleged rapper Aubrey Graham). But the hype was unmistakable, and the strength of the series as a multi-million dollar franchise was only growing. This season’s teaser was aired during the Super Bowl.

I finished season 2 in about a day and a half, the same amount of time I got through season 1. I still foolishly held hope in my heart— not that the show would start being good, that ship had long since sailed. But it couldn’t get that much worse, right? These first two were supposed to be the good ones, and I wasn’t even enjoying myself. I’d been warned, but how bad could it really be?

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