Stranger Things season 2: full recap, episode by episode, and ending explained

Episodes 1 to 3: MADMAX, Trick or Treat, Freak, The Pollywog

October 1984. Will has “episodes”: visions of a red sky and an immense shadow, which Dr. Owens, the lab's new boss, takes for post-traumatic stress. A new student, Max, beats every arcade record under the name MADMAX; her stepbrother Billy terrorizes the high school. Eleven, whom everyone believes dead, lives hidden in Hopper's cabin, who feeds her Eggos and forbids her to go out.

On Halloween night, Will has a vision in the street, and Dustin finds in his trash a tadpole he names Dart. Joyce goes out with Bob Newby, the RadioShack manager, and Nancy, drunk, tells Steve their relationship is “bullshit.”

Episodes 4 to 6: Will the Wise, Dig Dug, The Spy

The shadow enters Will during a vision: he is possessed, and sees what the monster sees. His drawings, taped by the hundreds in the living room, form a map that Bob deciphers: tunnels under Hawkins. Hopper goes down alone, gets trapped; Joyce and Bob save him, then the lab burns the tunnels, which makes Will scream in pain: he is tied to the organism.

Dart, now a demodog, eats Dustin's cat. Steve joins Dustin, Lucas, and Max to hunt it, bat in hand. Nancy and Jonathan, helped by Murray Bauman, leak a lab recording that proves its responsibility in Barb's death. Will, manipulated by the monster, sends the soldiers into a trap.

Episode 7: The Lost Sister

Eleven, gone from the cabin after a fight with Hopper, finds her mother, Terry Ives, frozen in a loop of memories, and discovers another lab child there: Eight. In Chicago, Kali runs a gang that hunts Brenner's former employees. She teaches Eleven to channel her anger, but when it comes to killing a man in front of his children, Eleven refuses. She sees her friends in danger, and goes back to Hawkins.

Episodes 8 and 9: The Mind Flayer and The Gate

The demodogs attack the lab. Bob, who stayed to reopen the doors, is killed in front of Joyce. Taking refuge at the Byers', the survivors understand, thanks to Dustin and the Dungeons & Dragons handbook, that the monster is a hive mind: closing the gate will kill its creatures. But Will, possessed, would die too. Joyce, Nancy, and Jonathan expel it from Will's body with heat, in the cabin.

While Steve and the kids burn the heart of the tunnels as a diversion, Eleven and Hopper go down to the bottom of the lab, and Eleven closes the gate. All the creatures die. A month later, at the middle-school Snow Ball, Eleven dances with Mike, Lucas with Max, Dustin with Nancy. Above the middle school, in the Upside Down, the Mind Flayer watches.

The ending explained

Season 2 ends on a cleaner victory than the first, and on a larger threat: the spider-shadow has no body, therefore no weak point. Season 3 will give it one.

The nine chapters, with who wrote and directed them

Two outside directors make their entrance: Andrew Stanton, the Pixar man (Finding Nemo, WALL-E), for chapters 5 and 6, and Rebecca Thomas for the Chicago episode. The nine episodes were released the same day, October 27, 2017, four days before Halloween, the holiday around which the season is built.

“Stranger Things 2”: a sequel, not a season

The Duffers insisted on calling the season “Stranger Things 2,” like a movie, and not “season 2.” They conceived it as a sequel in the cinema sense, with the mission of making the first two seasons a complete whole, while laying elements to continue if the show was extended. The platform hesitated at first, sequels having a bad reputation; the brothers answered with the list of sequels that had surpassed the original.

They had first considered something else entirely: either a miniseries with no sequel, or an anthology, or a “sequel” set a decade later, with the characters grown up and newcomers called back to Hawkins. The success of the first season, and the audience's attachment to the kids, convinced them to stay in 1984 with the same group. The renewal was announced on August 31, 2016, but the decision had been made even before the Season 1 release.

The writers' room proposed so many ideas that some had to be dropped. Several of those unused 1984 ideas ended up, according to Ross Duffer, in the fifth and last season.

What the season pulled off

On Rotten Tomatoes, the season shows 94 % favorable reviews on 151 critics, for an average score of 7,8 out of 10; Metacritic gives it 78 out of 100. Critics especially praised the character development, Steve first of all, promoted from secondary boyfriend to the party's babysitter, and the snow-ball finale, compared to a John Hughes film.

On the audience side, Nielsen measured in the United States 15,8 million viewers for the first episode in the three days after release, a record for the platform at the time. Parrot Analytics named the season the most in-demand digital series in the world in 2017, which earned it an entry in the 2019 edition of Guinness World Records. An after-watch magazine, Beyond Stranger Things, hosted by Jim Rash, accompanied the release.

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