Just a few more months until the return of Stranger Things on Netflix. As we get closer to the final season, join io9’s own Hellfire Club for a rewatch of the series leading up to November’s final season premiere. If you’re new, here’s our first-season refresher.
On this month’s catch-up, we look at Stranger Things season two. The sophomore installment expanded the Hawkins crew with the addition of Max Mayfield (Sadie Sink) and the newly returned Will (Noah Schnapp), who now take part in the ongoing supernatural town happenings. Will is caught in between worlds in a way that’s a danger to him and his friends. Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) is kept hidden from Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and their friends for her protection by Hopper (David Harbour). The two become a found family and encounter danger in ways that bring the tangled web of the Upside Down’s dangers so much closer to home and raise more suspicion surrounding the new leadership at Hawkins Lab.
Here are the 10 most important takeaways from Stranger Things season two.
1. Eleven and Hopper become an unlikely family unit
Hopper takes Eleven in after the events of season one when she stumbles out of the Upside Down. To protect her from Hawkins National Lab, whose agents continue to poke about the lives of Mike, Will, and their friends’ families, he insists she stay away from them until they back off. Eleven is promised she’ll see Mike and her friends again, but Hopper keeps putting off the when, pretty much setting up their combative, overprotective father-and-daughter dynamic. But hey, she gets to stay home and have Eggo waffles all the time.
2. Max and Lucas meet cute
Max and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) becoming each other’s sweethearts is the cutest story in the season. Although we have to point out there were unnecessary issues with Max’s presence: one, having her be a girl that Lucas and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) fight over initially, and two, somehow also being seen as a threat by Eleven. That’s without even mentioning Max’s racist stepbrother Billy (Dacre Montgomery). Plot devices aside, the Max-Lucas friendship and romance evolves naturally and so does her joining the gang’s adventures. Max calls herself a zoomer because she’s fast—a special ability that comes in handy when they need a driver.
3. Dustin and Dart the Demodog
In probably one of the series’ oddest choices, that slug Will puked out and told no one about gets found by Dustin, who decides to rescue it. Somehow Dustin thinks Dart, his newfound friend, is a new normal Earth species. Despite knowing weird things come out of the Upside Down, he tries to domesticate Dart, who is very clearly a hybrid homage to Gremlins and Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors in the way it grows. Eventually the rest of the gang get in on it to try and tame Dart even though it keeps putting them through dangerous hijinks as it hungers for flesh. By the time Will finds out about its existence, Dustin is already too attached in a bizarrely antagonistic way that endangers their whole crew. They finally realize it’s some sort of Demogorgon-esque creature once it eats Dustin’s family cat and decide to name the species the Demodog. Quickly after that they discover it’s not the only one.
4. Hawkins Lab’s interdimensional gate grows
Hawkins Lab gets a new director, who seems friendlier and more interested in cleaning up the crimes being committed. One problem: there’s sort of now a huge gateway rift to the Upside Down that’s causing trouble. Hopper, who, in exchange for Hawkins’ safety and helping Joyce (Winona Ryder) with Will, helps keep quiet about the truth, is getting more and more concerned as pumpkins rot with Upside Down residue seeping through and Will keeps having disturbing visions.
5. The dawn of Babysitter Steve
Max’s stepbrother Billy takes the crown of the school’s king from Steve (Joe Keery) and makes a show of it. He goads Steve, who’s harboring a broken heart over Nancy (Natalia Dyer) distancing herself. In Billy, Steve sees how much of an obnoxious bully he was and gets some great character growth. After surviving the Demogorgon attack last season, he steps into the role of the Hawkins’ kid babysitter and starts to be a cool older brother figure to Dustin. He protects the kids during their Upside Down adventures and from real bullies like Billy.
6. Will gains the ability to see into the Upside Down
While in the real world, Will begins to have visions of the Upside Down and a large looming entity in the sky that’s attempting to gain more control. Dustin and friends refer to it as the “Mind Flayer” and Will’s condition as the “True Sight” to continue to connect their supernatural adventures to Dungeons & Dragons. Unfortunately, it’s a double-edged sword; as much as he can see over there, it also sees through him. Through this ability, the Mind Flayer attempts to use Will as a vessel to help the Demodogs burrow holes from the gate to Hawkins. Why? Well, at the time, the Hawkins crew figures that it’s to wipe out the inferior species, the humans, by ripping the fabric of reality to unleash the darkness within the Upside Down to absorb the living into its hive for more power.
7. Nancy and Jonathan’s investigative team-up
This totally platonic burgeoning photographer and journalist relationship leads Will’s older brother Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) and Mike’s older sister Nancy to connect with the private investigator Barb’s family had hired, Murray (Brett Gelman). Together they hatch a plan to expose what Brenner was doing at Hawkins Lab. As part of their plan, Jonathan and Nancy let themselves get captured by Dr. Owens (Paul Reiser), a lesser evil from the U.S. Department of Energy, who replaced Brenner as the head of Hawkins National Lab.
There they get Owens to explain that the creators of the “mistakes” are gone and show them the rift to the Upside Down that was left open, which they’ve had trouble sealing. The teens get him on tape admitting that it’s still of interest despite the danger. Owens and company want to make sure that other global powers like Russia don’t try to replicate the “mistake,” and he emphasizes that it’s why they sign so many people away to secrecy—living or dead. Oh, and Nancy and Jonathan? They do more than a little kissing.
8. El uncovers the truth about her mother, which Hopper hid from her
El’s real name is Jane Ives. Her mom, Terry, was told her daughter died at birth—but she distinctly remembered hearing her cries before Brenner snatched her away. Years later Terry did try to go back and rescue Jane from the Rainbow Room, which she shared with a similarly powered child referred to as Eight.
Terry’s fate is more tragic, however; Brenner fried her brain, making her catatonic and unable to seek out her child ever again. Eleven does get a moment to see her mom once more, but it’s a bittersweet one on her journey to discover the truth about herself and her sibling figures from the Rainbow Room in Hawkins Lab. Eight later tries to get “Jane” to join her ragtag group of superpowered teens out for revenge, but she decides to resume her identity as El in Hawkins with Hopper and her friends.
9. Will’s birthday is March 22
This comes back in a major way in a later season, but it’s a key way of finding out that Will is not himself. Through asking a series of questions, Joyce figures out something is controlling her son from the Upside Down. It admits that it’s now making him a part of the hive mind through the Mind Flayer, led by someone who is very angry. Possessed and puppeted by the Mind Flayer, Will leads soldiers into a trap to prevent them from burning the tentacles that are tunneling into Hawkins.
At one point Dustin suggests the Mind Flayer could raise an army of the undead, which we hope pays off and we could get to see those it’s absorbed or consumed in the Upside Down throughout the show’s seasons. It begs the question: is anyone who was absorbed by the hive really fully dead? Asking for a friend from a future season… a former Dungeon Master of the Hellfire Club.
10. Eleven closes the gate
After side-questing, Eleven shows up in the nick of time looking really badass to save the day. It is sadly right after Joyce’s computer-geek boyfriend, Bob (Sean Astin), gets ripped apart by Demo Dogs after helping get everyone else out of the lab with his hacking skills. Bob was this season’s MVP, and it was heartbreaking to see him get eaten in an unnecessarily long sequence. There’s no way that man could come back, but he died a hero for his city.
Eleven and Hopper go back into the lab to seal the gate, and it’s thanks to the anger Eight inspires in Eleven that she taps into her powers to seal the rift and push the Mind Flayer into its Upside Down cage. Shortly after that, the tape Jonathan and Nancy got of Owens’ cover-up hits the papers. It’s enough to make HNL shut down and leave Hawkins, but Owens pops up to keep in touch with Hopper and thanks him by giving him custody of Eleven as her father on some official forged documents. He recommends she lie low for another year, but she at least gets to go to her first Snow Ball dance with Mike and get her first kiss. Hey, she saved the town again; she earned it.
Tune in next month when we catch up on Stranger Things season three.