By Nick Owens – Sports Editor

The Netflix blockbuster “Stranger Things” returned for Season 2 and gave fans everything they wanted and more.

(WARNNG: This review is full of spoilers, so if you still have yet to watch the show you have been warned.)

“Stranger Things” is a show that is set in Hawkins, Indiana, just a small normal town until one kid named Will Byers goes missing riding his bike home one night. His group of friends seek out their own investigation as well as the town sheriff who just goes by “Hopper“ also starts an investigation and you get to unravel the story of the weird things happening in the town from two different perspectives. At the end of the first season, we leave off with Will getting found and not knowing what happens to the fan favorite character Eleven. Will still has part of the upside down as a part of him.

At the start of this season, you’re thrown off a little bit when the show starts in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and you’re watching a bank robber’s chase with the police. The bank robbers turn down a tunnel to and the cops are on their tail but then the girl you see in the passenger seat you realize has some kind of power to her. The tunnel begins to crumble in front of the police which cause all the police to hit the brakes and crash into one another. But then the cop in front steps out of the car to see the tunnel is fine and he stopped for no reason. Everything just seemed to disappear. Then it’s revealed the girl in the passenger seat has a number on her arm just like Eleven did. 

Then we meet all of our favorite characters once again as they go to the arcade and play on some cool old time 80’s arcade machines. But then everything changes for Will as time stops and everything goes dark. He finds himself once again in the upside down. The door to the arcade opens and you can see red clouds outside almost like a storm. Will proceeds to go outside and in the distance you can see a big black shadow that looks like a big monster in the distance which freaks will out but then Mike calls out to Will and we are snapped back to reality. We learn that Will has these “moments” often. He visits a new doctor at the sketchy lab that we see in Season 1 but the old scary looking doctor of the place has been let go. A doctor tells Joyce Byers, played by the amazing Winona Ryder, that Will’s case is basically nothing it’s gonna get worse before it gets better but the most you can do is be there for him. Joyce is a little upset by this she just wants her son to be OK.  

Later on in the show Dustin (one of the boys) discovers this nasty alien life form in his trash can but be friends it as his pet. He shows him to the other boys in the janitor’s closet but they tell the new girl who just wants to fit in with the group to stay outside. After showing the boys the pet which he names Dart. The boys freak out not knowing what it might grow into and Dustin defends Dart and protects him from the other boy. Then the new girl open the closet door trying to figure out why no one is telling her anything. As she opens the door, Dart runs out the door and the boys have to find him as he gets loose through the school. It was the end of the school day, so at this point the school is pretty much empty. While the other boys are trying to find Dart, Will goes off on his own and has another one of his “moments” and gets chased by a big shadow through the halls of his school. Before he came to school that day his mom’s new boyfriend, Bob, gave him a whole speech about facing his fear head on. So Will once again sees the big scary creature in the distance but decides to try and face it head on. It was the wrong choice, though, because this allowed the monster to have full control over his body. When Joyce finds Will in the school yard he is frozen and can’t move so they rush his to the sketchy science lab doctor.

We then cut to the sketchy lab and they are trying to ask Will some questions. As they got him to come down from being frozen, he started to come back a bit. As the doctor is asking him questions he starts to talk in third person. That’s when we first get to see him being controlled by the monster. He starts to talk about how you can’t stop what’s coming.

As this is all happening, Hopper discovers something weird about this pumpkin patch at a farm we are introduced to in the beginning of the show. All the pumpkins were dying and Hopper starts to realize there’s something more going on here. He starts digging in the dirt in the pumpkin patch and discovers that there is a big tunnel under the ground and Hopper, maybe not making the smartest decision, decides to check it out. He jumps down and starts looking around, but as he’s looking around, he gets sprayed by something off the wall that causes him to pass out. As he hits the ground, you see something start to come over him and try to consume him.

We jump back to Joyce and Will and Joyce starts to see Will acting weird. She asks him what’s going on and he says, “it’s Hopper, I think he’s in trouble.” So Joyce, Bob, and Will go and try to save Hopper. They save him and they try to figure out what this tunnel is. This is only the beginning of the climax in the show.

To find out how this all wraps up you are going to have to watch the show yourself.