Stranger Things S02E02 Review: Revivification of the Dead

Stranger Things, Season 2, Episode 2: Trick or Treat, Freak

So I did quite like how this episode focuses mostly with the backdrop of Halloween (which is, of course, when the second season went on air last month) and disguises is a running theme throughout the episode. Everyone is trying to pretend to be normal. Will in particular, with her visions of Cthulhu. Mike, too, who thinks he is seeing and/or hearing Eleven (who he doesn't know is alive) and thinks he's going crazy. Eleven, too, having to hide in that little shack, desperate to go around with a sheet over her adorable little head, but they can't take any chances. Also Nancy and Steve -- with Nancy in particular being absolutely pissed off at keeping secrets and has one drink too many at a party where she's supposed to be a 'normal' teenager. Even Jonathan gets in at it, talking about how 'being a freak is the best!' in front of his brother, while secretly yearning for the social life that literally everyone else has.

(Steve leaves a drunken Nancy who tells him that their love is bullshit, leaving Jonathan -- who kinda tries not to come off as a creeper yet again but sort of fails in my book -- to carry her home. At least this is objectively more moral than taking pictures of her undressing.)

Oh, and the boys dress like ghostbusters to go around trick-or-treating, as well as kind of realizing that their school doesn't have a dress-up day for Halloween. They kind of make friends, awkwardly, with Max. Or at least Lucas and Dustin do -- Will is too troubled by his visions (and lapses into another one during the trick or treating), while Mike is slightly hostile, obviously thinking that Max is replacing Eleven in their group. Did like that the show restrains itself from saying it outright, too.

We also get a real answer to how 11 survived. Sort of. She got shunted to the Upside-Down, and it took a while before she could find a gateway back into the real world once more. By that time, the cops are all over the Wheeler household, and she's forced to run for it. I do like how Eleven's grown a little and trying to experiment with the extent of her powers, although I'm not quite sure if 11 throwing a flaming squirrel at someone's face is supposed to be a flashback, imagination or something that actually just happened. It's so absurd yet hilarious that I kind of want 11 to just launch flaming squirrels at people at every possible opportunity.

Hopper continues to investigate the dying pumpkins while juggling the time to get back to see 11, Hawkins Lab are up to whatever the fuck they're up to, Joyce and her new boyfriend talk about moving to another house, while Dustin investigates the sounds coming from his trash can as the final scene of this otherwise relatively light-hearted episode where the eldritch creatures only dwell in the Upside-Down.

Again, it's more buildup, and perhaps a bit too slow for my tastes considering a vast majority of the cast are already known quantities (Will and Max are the only real new ones here) so I'd rather they actually go with the plot already. But eh, this episode at least feels like a themed one, where apparently the moral is that if you can't be normal, you need to find your fellow crazies and stick together.