Things Are About To Get Strange… Stranger Things Returns For Season 2

Posted by Stranger Things | @strangerthingstv

You heard it right, Stranger Things is returning to Netflix October 27, just in time for Halloween. *spoiler alerts below!*

Season One Recap

Set in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana, Stranger Things tells the story of four boys, Will, Mike, Dustin, and Lucas, who spend most of their time in the basement playing the fictional game Dungeons & Dragons. Everything is all in good fun until Will goes missing one night after playing the game.

After multiple failed investigations conducted by local authorities following the disappearance, the boys decided to take it upon themselves to find their friend.

Enter Eleven, a tiny bald-headed mute girl who can only ever muster a few words at a time. The boys referred to her as a “weirdo” for almost half of the season, but little did they know she would be the key component in finding where their missing friend had gone.

A few weeks after Will went missing, his “body” was found washed up at a lake. However, when Joyce (Will’s mom) went to identify the body, she was certain that it was missing a birthmark. Sherriff Hop, realizing that something was fishy, broke into the morgue where Wills body was being kept and discovered that it was indeed a fake body double. If that wasn’t Will, where was he?

After spending more and more time with El, the four boys discovered that she knew where Will was and could help them find him. She reveals that Will has gone to the “Upside Down”, an alternate universe from ours that looks just like ours — just a lot darker, foggier, and creepier — that can only be reached by entering through a “wound between space and time” called “The Gate”.

Most of the season was spent trying to communicate with Will via energy waves—whether it was the boys trying to reach him with walkie-talkie signals, Joyce trying to communicate with him through the energy in the lights, or El trying to communicate with him via sensory-deprivation tank.

After a few weeks passed with limited communication to Will, Hop and Joyce went into the laboratory and demanded that they allow them to search for him. The employees at the lab hesitantly allowed them to do so, assuming that A: they would never find him and B: that they would probably get lost themselves in the process of finding him.

However, after hours of trekking through the dark world of The Upside Down, they found Will. Limp, lifeless, unresponsive and wrapped up in a spider-web like substance, it seemed like he was gone for good, but by some miracle, he came back to life after multiple rounds of CPR were performed on him.

Everything seems fine and dandy at the end of the season. The boys are back to playing games in the basement, Will seems to have fully recovered from his incident, Eleven has returned to wherever she came from, and normal life has resumed for all of the characters.

The Byer’s family is enjoying a nice Christmas Eve dinner when Will abruptly excuses himself from the table, saying that he forgot to wash his hands. Walking into the bathroom, Will stares into the mirror and coughs up a slug-like creature. Shortly after, he flashes back to the Upside Down for a moment. He walks back to his family, sits down and assures them he is fine—though we knew that he is far from it. The screen cuts to black and the credits start rolling—talk about a cliffhanger!

Season Two Preview

“It’s 1984 and the citizens of Hawkins, Indiana are still reeling from the horrors of the Demagorgon and the secrets of Hawkins Lab. Will Byers has been rescued from the Upside Down but a bigger, sinister entity still threatens those who survived,” reads the official description from Netflix.

The official trailer, which premiered at Comic Con earlier in the year, is daunting to say the least. It starts out with the four boys having harmless fun in an arcade when all of a sudden, Will looks out the window and sees something very similar to what he saw in “The Upside Down” — pieces of snow-like particles floating through the air. Before he can turn to tell his friends, the screen goes dark and Will is back in “The Upside Down”.  Cue the intro to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Will tries to explain to his mom that he is seeing things—strange things if you will. The trailer concludes with the return of Eleven as we see her hand reach through a hole in the wall at the same place where she disappeared in the final episode of season 1.

Season Two Predictions

VALLEY’s predictions for the next season?

Lots of new disappearances. Will and Barb went missing in season 1, and it seems like the monster that took them may have either reproduced or grown stronger (next seasons trailer shows the silhouette of what looks like a seven headed monster!), so who knows who is next on the list of going missing?

The last scene showed Will looking in the mirror and coughing up some kind of creature. What does this mean? Is Will slowly but surely turning into a monster? Are these flashbacks to the Upside Down going to continue until he is ultimately stuck back in the upside down for good?

What about Eleven? The trailer hints that she is going to make a return this season… but how? Is she going to find an easier way to travel back and forth between “the Upside Down” and the real world? Will her love interest with Mike grow even stronger or only end in heartbreak?

Stranger Things is slated to return for at least two more seasons, maybe even three after much fan speculation, according to this popular slashfilm.com.

Catch up on Stranger Things season 1 on Netflix to prepare yourself for the new season premiere, and tweet your season 2 predictions to VALLEY @ValleyMag!