The Good: An awesome ending to an awesome show. I’m really not sure what to say about it that wasn’t great. In some ways, it reminded me of The Lord Of The Rings, with El and Hopper going into the Gate to seal it while the rest of the gang takes on the role of Aragorn and company by distracting the evil forces with various forms of fire. And unlike the previous season, we are not left with much of a cliffhanger.

The Bad: If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m a natural quibbler, so before reading this, understand that none of this makes the show less than good. It irritated me from the start that no one tried heat on Will before this. As Joyce says, why were they giving it what it wanted for so long? Also, I wish the tension between Max and El had been more resolved in a more concrete fashion. That just felt as though it was left hanging.
One thing I meant to say in a previous post and forgot to, about Max and her douchebag older brother:

The tension that had been building around their origin and appearance was both weirdly heightened and killed by the appearance of their parents. Brother’s father had the weird effect of making me want to cheer him on by smacking around his son who desperately needed a smacking around, but also to want to shoot him because the odds are that he’s the reason his son is such a douche in the first place. We still don’t know exactly why Brother blames Max for the move from California, and until seeing the parents arrive, I thought these two were actually on their own. I leave it to the writers to wind this up in Season 3, but for now it feels flat.

And oh, gods, please PLEASE don’t really drag us through the stomach-twisting awfulness of an affair between douchey Brother and Mike and Nancy’s mom. Just barf.

Further Questions: Is Brenner alive? How and what is he doing? Obviously, the Thing in the Upside Down s still very much alive and wanting to get back to our world. Can it without some sort of assistance? We’ve met Eleven and Eight, which means there are potentially at least nine other Gifted we could encounter. Will we ever?
And is Steve really okay with where things ended up, or is he plotting something in that mind of his…

Final Thoughts: I’d really love to have some more indication on what the real nature of the Upside Down is. So far, the whole thing really has read as if it were D&D come to life, which is cute, but ridiculous. I keep wanting  better explanation, such as that it is an alternate timeline where Something Bad Came To Earth. I just find it hard to believe in a universe where things are built by no one and are always decayed.
In the course of this blog, I have seen a bit of fan speculation that Mike may be (or should be) killed off. I hope not. I think that would be the absolute wrong move. It would feel like a very artificial way to torture El and make her less human. The love story between El and Mike, and its innocence, is the heart and soul of this story. To delay it is certainly legitimate: it has to be laid on the line to make it worth something. To destroy it is to destroy the work.

The Good: I really love what they did with Bob’s character in this episode. Here’s a man who has every reason to run from the strange situation he’s been thrust into, to refuse to believe what’s going on, and yet he sticks with it every step of the way. He steps forward to place himself in mortal danger not because he wants to prove himself, but because he knows he’s the only one who can do what needs to be done: resetting the computer system. One of my favorite lines in the series has to be: “Well, teach me BASIC.” “Oh, sure Sheriff. How about I teach you German to go with that. Or French; would you like to learn French?” Likewise, Paul Reiser’s character lays it on the line, becoming a true leader. These guys are men. Real men, who do what real men ought to do.
I love — more than I can say — the fact they did something with the creature’s mind control of Will that is so rarely well done: giving him agency down to the very last, figuring out how to send the coded message to his friends. That kicked ass, being very well-established and reasonable.
And finally, there was the return of El, which was everything it should have been.
The Bad: I really hate what they did with Bob’s character in this episode. First of all, the whole “Somehow, he forgot his gun in the control room” thing was just stupid. Especially given that how he died, that gun would have been 100% useless. It was incredibly predictable that Bob would die, which is the major reason I wish they had not killed him off. Frankly, it felt like they did that just to make Joyce more miserable, and I am really tired of seeing Joyce miserable. It is taking a character who is in many ways admirable, if understandably overbearing and needy (who wouldn’t be?) and hammering her flat by never allowing her a single moment of relief from loss.
Further Questions: How will El close the Gate? And how many more will we lose? And please, please, please, don’t kill El for reals this time.

The Good: At the risk of repeating myself, I just want to reaffirm how much I love the way this show is handling its characters. In this episode, we have El, encountering her long-lost sister, Kali (008). And while El is drawn to dreams of revenge, she does not alter her fundamental character to go on a journey through a dark side, which in some ways seems preordained in fiction these days, because nothing can stay pure. Honestly, I’d have preferred that El have articulated it, but it’s quite plain that she, unlike Kali, understands that she must spare, not her torturer’s life, but his daughters’ lives. Their father. Their childhoods. That the cycle of revenge must end.
More than that, Kali does not vow instant revenge on El. Whatever her other faults, Kali and El part on friendly terms, much as they may have chosen different paths. That’s complex and unusual. I admire deeply how this series avoids the easy tropes and answers in favor of the complex.

The Bad: I have little bad to say about this episode. And since writing this post I have discovered that there was enormous pushback against it. I thought it was really well done, and if it was hard to watch, it was because El, who we care about, was being pulled really hard toward making revenge the center of her life.
If I have a criticism, though, it’s in what others have said: the utter lack of backstory for the other members of Kali’s tribe. If they aren’t like Kali and El (Hmmm. Kali-El? Superman?) then what did they have to do with the Hawkins Lab and the people who ran it? Or are we to assume there are several groups of people being avenged upon, here?

Further Questions: Will we see Kali again? And when will El arrive back in Hawkins? Before, or after the Demodogs have had their feast?

The Good: From the beginning of this episode, what worried me was that Will was going to come back from his (well-meant but) ill-advised attempt to confront the Thing In The Upside Down as completely possessed. The fact that he did not was a great relief. Such a thing, making Will a possessed victim, would have been a bad choice for two reasons: firstly, it would have been far too easy. The possessed child trope has been overdone in horror because it’s a gut-wrenching paradox: the evil that is at the same time innocent. It’s sort of the opposite of the zombie trope: rather than the enemy you get to kill with no moral qualms, it’s an enemy you have to kill despite the moral horror of it. It’s a spiritual hostage crisis.
Secondly, Will’s role in the series up until now has been almost exclusively that of the victim, despite his attempts to survive. Giving “Will the Wise” the agency of spying on this “thing” is a way to make him truly a member of the party rather than its quest, and makes him a better character.
I’m also amazed at the way they handled Nancy and Jonathan’s plan to reveal the truth behind Hawkins Lab’s cover-up of Barb’s death. It’s becoming plainer that Paul Reiser’s character is not a reprise of Burke from Aliens, but rather a sensible man who is being as honest and kind as he can while at the same time being as deceptive and hard-nosed as he needs to be. Most series would portray anyone in government service as being evil by default, but once again, the writers refuse to take the easy way out. I love it.

The Bad: I have to admit that I found it really weird that, given the way Will is talking, his friends and family did not come to the conclusion that heating Will up, with or without his cooperation, would have been a good idea.
Also, Hopper not telling El the whole story about her Mother seemed to me rather gratuitously clueless.
But the worst part of the series is also showing up here because I find Dustin to be uncharacteristically dishonest and clueless about Dart for no real reason other than to build up tension. It’s the sort of cliché the series has done well to avoid: The Protagonist Keeps A Secret He Shouldn’t.

Further Questions: What will El find when she goes to see her mother? What will Nancy and Jonathan do with their knowledge. And most importantly, what is up with Max and her weird brother and why does he think it’s her fault that they are stuck here rather than in CA?

The Good: I think the thing I really loved about this episode was the humanity of the relationship between Steve and Nancy. It’s a classic case of people being truly out of their depth, and taking it out on one another. The guilt Nancy feels about her role in Barb’s death, having essentially shoved her lonely friend outside to be eaten by the Demogorgon is understandably significant, if misplaced. It’s not, after all, as though she knew (or could have known) that there was a Barb-eating monster around. Barb herself could have saved her life by just getting in her car and going home. But that’s the way people think. It’s tearing her up, and she wants to tell Barb’s parents (who are still looking for their daughter and spending their life savings doing so) the truth.
When she confronts Steve about this, he quite reasonably points out that talking about what they know is likely to a) get them in a lot of trouble with the government and b) not really help, because after all, what are they going to tell Barb’s parents? “We know your daughter’s dead because she was taken into a parallel dimension by a monster we both fought and our psychic friend who disappeared told us she died?” No parent with any sense would believe such a thing.
Factually, Steve is right. Emotionally, he’s completely wrong, but it’s expecting a lot of an 18 year-old to successfully navigate the right response to his traumatized  17 year-old girlfriend, just as it would be asking a lot of Nancy not to blame Steve for his unhelpfulness. Neither of them are bad people, but they are acting in a very human way, which destroys them as a couple when Nancy finally lets the blame out all over herself and Steve.
Also, it was good to get the backstory on how El ended up with Hopper.

The Bad: There wasn’t much bad about this, except for Hopper’s real lack of understanding what he’s doing to El by keeping her in a state of permanent cabin fever. But again, he’s dealing with his own shit, obsessed with saving a girl that he can to make up for the daughter he couldn’t.

Further Questions: Not many in this episode except for what is that thing Will keeps seeing that looks like Great Cthulhu?

So, I’m going to take some time to talk about each Episode of Stranger Things Season 2 as I remember watching it, discussing some of the techniques from a writer’s and a viewer’s point-of-view.

The Good Stuff: In the last season’s finale, the fate of El was left very open-ended. We are unsure if she has died killing the Demogorgon or not. As an aside, I hated that El appeared to die. I reserved judgment on it, but it was one of the very few times I felt like this series dived into cliché really hard: young lovers admit their love for one another just in time for her (and it is always her) to die.
That said, I really appreciate that the series showed us El’s survival from the first, and didn’t try to extend the cliffhanger. Extended cliffhangers have become a form of literary torture in genre-fiction for the last twenty years (I’m looking at you, ghost of Robert Jordan) and I am sick to death of it.
Another thing that was left up in the air was Will Byers’ fate. Was he really unaware of his flashes into the upside down? Was that really Will Byers in that body? The answer to both of these questions was clearly revealed (No, and yes) with Hopper and Will’s mom, and Will acting like rational, but terribly confused human beings. As they should be. The series brilliantly continues to straddle the line between whether Will’s visions are flashbacks or real. Bringing up the horribly enticing question: how would you know?

The Bad Stuff: The new Lab Director seems very reluctant to even reassure Hopper that he takes his suspicions of leakage seriously. This just comes off as obtuse.

Further Questions Introduced: Is the new Lab Director really any improvement on Brenner? Or is he just more subtly evil? What is the story behind Max and her brother the new Keg King? Are they as much of a part of what’s going on at Hawkins as the mysterious “8” we see in the prelude?