Chapter Two: Vecna's Curse

The whole teen drama here is completely overexposed and blown up to a magnitude of parody. It just feels infantile. What are the writers trying to covey here has completely missed the mark if there was even one - do you even proofread those scripts?

Huge fan of the series, but so far i'm barely hanging to it.

The second episode is not as strong as the first of the season, but it is still very good. The creepy feel and the dark tone of the show is really great and if this continues this might be the best season so far.

The big cast and all the coincidence that often drive the plot is still the bad about the show and have been so from the start but this is very promising. The last two seasons could have been a lot better and was an average of 6/10 but this season is starting much stronger.

Very happy so far.

The opening scene gives us more information on Jim Hooper, how he survived and his whereabouts. Joyce and Murray try to find out more through the mysterious Enzo.

All-in-all a great second episode, filling in more background and simultaneously moving the action along on multiple fronts and generating suspense in ST's inimitable style. El's social problems multiply, eventually she reacts radically to the bullying, which will have consequences.

MBB is fabulous, as ever, but the star of this episode is Winona Ryder, wide-eyed and determined in her quest to find out what happened to Hooper.

I know that this will all come together in the end, but the things that Happen to El this episode were too much to be the least enjoyable. I often felt uncomfortable during ST, but never in this way, always in a spooked kinda way... The rest was great, love the dynamic of the group in Hawkins and also that Nancy gets to investigate again. I'm also curious if they are gonna continue this body horror thingy in the next episodes, definitely very spooky and well done.

...But then I remembered that one-third of the episode was the continuation of the boring and trite bully trope and kinda ruined the episode. I'm not saying don't do the bullying, because they're definitely going somewhere with this, but at least do it in a way so we don't think we've seen this a million times before, ok?

Like I don't know why every "horror" movie and show about the 80s has to have a bullying of our main character subplot. I get it, it's high school, you can't have it all fine and dandy and make a movie about it without there being any conflict for our main character, all I'm asking for, is to be more creative with your conflict and do something other than throwing a clichéd bully character in there, or if you're doing a bully, at least make it a little different than the other thousand bully character we've seen before.

But I don't know why I'm expecting creativity from Stranger Things, since the show's whole premise is nostalgia baiting and retelling other horror stories and characters, and I also never forget that they just rehashed seasons 1 and 2's plot for season 3.

Other than that, I think it was a good episode with lots of developments for every plot line, even the bullying one, even though I didn't like how long and over the top and clichéd it was.

One thing that made Stranger Things great in season one was the fear of the unknown element of the monster it had, but they seem to have ditched that after season 2 and we get to see the monster from episode 1, so the element of suspense and tension and also the fear of the unknown is practically gone from the show, but I still like it.

It's not like I watch ghost horror movies anymore or I get scared by them.

I loved the body horror at the end of the episode and I hope to see it more. At least that's more entertaining than cheap jump scares.

If they're gonna go really dark with this season, I think killing one of the main characters (and definitely not bringing them back in the next season) would really benefit the show and just put the stakes high. So far - and in the previous seasons too - the only people that the monster(s) kill are some side character that we only got to know about in the last episode or two, or some character that joined the group for just that season. So that makes me see a formula here and I can already guess from these two first episodes who they're gonna make us like throughout the season and kill at the end. I hope that's not the case and they'll surprise us and not do the same they did for 3 seasons because you know what they say about the definition of insanity...