‘Stranger Things’ Season 2
…including the real origin of the Demogorgon
If you haven’t seen Stranger Things on Netflix yet, STOP what you’re doing, cancel all your plans, and go watch it now. You won’t regret it.
I finished binge-watching it three weeks ago, and it was the most fun I’ve had watching a movie or TV show in a very long time. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since, and every day I’ve been going back to re-watch different scenes and consuming every podcast, forum, and news article I can find online.
It is basically a perfectly-crafted show. The casting, characters, acting, writing, directing, and music were all top-notch, and combined with the homages to 80s sci-fi and horror films they create a sense of wonder and delight that can be hard to find nowadays.
However, this is not a review of Season 1 — It’s a look ahead to what secrets and new storylines a Season 2 may have in store for us. There will be SPOILERS, so consider this your warning before proceeding any further.
How Season 1 ended
A lot of things happened in the first season, but it’s these three events that really set the story in motion:
- The monster breaks loose — will it be stopped?
The government is forced to step in to try to cover up all of the collateral damage the monster is causing. - Will and Barb vanish — will they be found in time?
This gets Joyce, Jonathan, Nancy, Chief Chopper, and Will’s friends (Mike, Lucas, and Dustin) to start looking for them. - Eleven escapes — can she avoid capture and live a normal life?
While she’s on the run, she also becomes the X factor in finding Will and defeating the bad guys.
By the end of Season 1, the monster is defeated (yay!), Will is found (yay!), Barb is dead (sadface), and Eleven sacrifices herself to save her friends (sadface).
Some fans felt that the ending had a satisfying combination of both closure and mystery, and that a sequel would ruin the magic, but I am not one of those people. I CANNOT WAIT for a Season 2, and there is still so much more I want to learn about this world, these characters, and what will happen to them going forwards.
Luckily for all of us, Stranger Things has been the runaway hit of the summer, and a second season is basically a foregone conclusion at this point. But what will it be about? Only the Duffer Brothers (the show’s creators) know for sure, but in the meantime we can definitely narrow down the narrative possibilities, especially if you’re as obsessed with this show as I am.
What we already know about Season 2
There are a lot of clues out there if you know where to look, from the easter eggs hidden in Season 1, to interviews with the Duffer Brothers. I found the Duffer Brothers’ interviews with IGN, Moviefone, and Variety to be the most informative (and most often cited by other articles) with regards to what they have planned.
It will be a direct sequel
Initially there was some speculation that Stranger Things might be an anthology series where each season has its own separate story and characters, like True Detective or American Horror Story. However, the Duffer Brothers themselves have confirmed that Season 2 will be a direct sequel, taking place a year after the events of Season 1.
[The child actors will] be a year older and all their changes they’re going through, we’ll take that into account and kind of work that into the show. […] The fact that we have to make this jump, because of the kids, we’re trying to use that to our advantage. (Source)
It will revolve around Hopper, Eleven, and the Upside Down
In the final episode of S1, the four boys are back together playing Dungeon & Dragons in Mike’s basement, and the game ends with a bit of meta-commentary that mirrors the audience’s own reaction to the show ending:
Dustin: That’s not it, is it?
Lucas: Yeah man, the campaign was way too short.
Mike: It was ten hours!
Dustin: But it doesn’t make any sense!
Mike: It makes sense.
Dustin: Uh, no, what about the lost knight?
Lucas: And the proud princess?
Will: And those weird flowers in the cave?
It’s safe to assume that the “lost knight” is Hopper, the “proud princess” is Eleven, and the “weird flowers in the cave” refers to the world of the Upside Down, monster(s) and all.
David Harbour, the actor who plays Chief Hopper, said in a recent Reddit AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) discussion that in a Season 2 we will learn more about Hopper’s complicated past (i.e. his life and career before moving to Hawkins), what actually caused his daughter Sarah to die, and who those suited men were who drove him away at the end of episode 8.
The directors also stated in an interview with Variety that “we have a 30-page document [about the Upside Down] that is pretty intricate in terms of what it all means, and where this monster actually came from, and why aren’t there more monsters — we have all this stuff that we just didn’t have time for, or we didn’t feel like we needed to get into in season one”.
Dr. Brenner is still alive
In one of the closing scenes, we see a newspaper clipping on the police station bulletin board with the headline THE BOY WHO CAME BACK TO LIFE. If you look closely and read the actual article, you’ll find a bunch of easter eggs, including the fact that Dr. Brenner is still alive(!!). At the very bottom, you can see it says:
Under legal [cut off] Brenner has issued no comment on [cut off].
And for what it’s worth, it was Matthew Modine (the actor who plays Dr. Brenner) who went on the record saying “there will be a Season 2”. Dr. Brenner was a pretty one-dimensional villain in the first season, but all this seems to indicate that he’ll be back in Season 2 and (hopefully) playing a much larger and more important role.
What should be explored in Season 2
My goal here is to identify the most compelling potential storylines for the next season of Stranger Things, based on everything we know about the characters, their world, and the Duffer Brothers’ inspirations.
It’s a mix of what I think is most likely, combined with what I as a viewer would like to see be explored going forwards.
NOTE: I’m assuming here that Eleven is still alive and somewhere in the Upside Down. I base this on the fact that in episode 8 when Eleven has the monster pinned against the wall and starts her “superpower scream”, you see a circular hole start opening up where the monster’s chest is, and a bunch of “black snowflakes” from the Upside Down start pouring out of the growing hole, and eventually both of them disappear in a large swarm of the black snowflakes.
The Lord of the Rings is referenced a few times in Stranger Things (like how the kids call the street where Will disappeared “Mirkwood” from The Hobbit), and I think Eleven’s demise and return will end up looking similar to Gandalf’s in The Fellowship of the Ring, where Gandalf sacrificed himself trying to stop the Balrog so that the rest of the Fellowship could live, but he later ended up coming back stronger than ever.
1) Eleven’s ongoing search for normalcy
Eleven went through a lot in Season 1, but she ironically ended up right back where she started — alone in a hostile environment (the Upside Down) — and her story arc is still not resolved. We are still left wondering if she will ever be able to live and normal, happy life.
The Duffer Brothers have said that Season 2 will deal with the “lingering effects” and “repercussions” of everything the characters experienced in Season 1, and I imagine this must apply to Eleven most of all. Even though we all fell love with Eleven for her badassery, we still know very little about her. My hope is that in season 2, we’re able to see things much more from her perspective, and learn much more about her past and her state of mind.
Let’s not forget that Eleven has had an absolutely horrific life until now — She is an emotionally abused orphan and child soldier who was literally stolen from her mother’s womb and has never known what it’s like to have a family or friends. And in Season 1 she was forced to kill dozens of people in self-defense. That’s a lot of post-traumatic stress for a 12-year-old child, and there will no doubt be real psychological implications from all that as Eleven becomes a teenager and an adult.
The most tragic part of her story is that she will always be seen by the government as a weapon to be controlled, than an actual human being. She’s basically a 12-year-old girl version of Jason Bourne, and it’s hard to imagine how she might ever be able to live a normal life, even though that’s what we’re rooting for.
I’m also very curious how Eleven’s sense of family will evolve in Season 2:
- Does Eleven consider Mike and his family her new family? After all, she did ask him to promise, which he did. And it’s Mike who first told Eleven that a promise is “something that you can never break. Ever.”
- Joyce was very motherly and nurturing towards Eleven when they were trying to contact Will in the makeshift sensory deprivation tank (probably the first motherly love she’s ever experienced), but was that just a one-time thing, or was there more there?
- In Episode 7 (“The Bathtub”), Hopper was very cold and distant to Eleven, presumably because he still hasn’t gotten over the death of his own daughter Sarah. But by the end of episode 8, we see Hopper leaving Eggos for Eleven in the box in the woods, even though the only people who knew she likes Eggos were Mike and then Nancy (after Mike told her). Does this mean Hopper will become more of a father figure for Eleven?
- Eleven repeatedly calls Dr. Brenner “Papa”, but what does that actually mean? Is he just a foster father to Eleven, or is he actually related to Eleven somehow?
- And what about Terry Ives, her birth mother? In the newspaper clipping above, an “Ives” (unclear if it’s Terry or her sister) is quoted criticizing the government for treating citizens as the enemy, when the real enemy is the Soviets. If Terry Ives somehow snaps out of her current mute state, what will the dynamic be between her and Eleven?
2) The government’s response to the Hawkins debacle
We learned in Season 1 how ruthless the US government is and the disturbing things they’re willing to do to gain an edge against the Soviets. Their mission in Season 1 was to re-capture Eleven and contain the monster, and they failed on both counts. The question then becomes: how will they respond to that failure?
Eleven was extremely valuable to the government as both a global spy and a soldier. Now that they’ve lost her, they’ve lost a major asset in their war against the Soviets. They have to either find Eleven, or develop more soldiers with similar abilities, and I have a feeling they’ll be trying to do both in Season 2.
3) Eleven meets her match
Eleven was a total badass in Season 1. Anyone who bothered her was either killed or humiliated. But that doesn’t mean she’s invincible — What if we learned in Season 2 that there are others with even stronger psychic and telekinetic powers than hers?
Think what happened in the Terminator movies, where Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 was an unstoppable force in the first movie but was outdated and outmatched by the fearsome T-1000 in Terminator 2.
I’ll call this new Eleven-like character Thirteen, because of the number 13's ominous associations and in honor of Terminator 2 and how they skipped a digit, going from T-800 straight to T-1000.
Thirteen in many ways would be a mirror image of Eleven, but a “less fortunate” version of her. For example, despite her horrible past, Eleven was still fortunate that the first people she ran into after escaping were Benny, the kindly diner owner and the kids, who showed her friendship, trust, and loyalty. And in her interactions with the kids, we saw that despite her past trauma, Eleven is still impressively resilient and self-composed.
But what if Thirteen wasn’t so lucky, and fell in with the wrong people? What if Thirteen has been abused and tortured even worse than Eleven was, and eventually snaps after seeing and experiencing the worst of humanity? What would that mean for the government, for society, and for the Upside Down?
4) Dr. Brenner’s redemption arc
I think there has to be more to this guy than what we saw in Season 1, especially since this show has generally been so good at making its main characters complex and multi-dimensional.
In Season 1, Dr. Brenner is a dedicated government scientist willing to do whatever it takes to protect his country and push the boundaries of his field, but by the end he has been outright rejected and called “Bad” by a child who used to call her “Papa”, and has likely been disgraced within the government for his failures in Hawkins.
I think it would be really interesting if he had a redemption arc, where he starts questioning everything he’s done to Eleven, and even though it’s too late for him to ever “win her back”, he secretly uses his knowledge and government experience to help Eleven and her friends and make amends for the wrongs he’s committed in the service of a government he no longer believes in.
5) We learn the real origin of the monster
It’s easy and natural to assume that the Demogorgon is just a wild animal from the Upside Down with zero connection to our world, but I don’t think it’s that simple.
After extensive analysis, I’ve become convinced that the monster isn’t random at all, but is directly linked to Eleven. In fact, I’ll take it a step further — I think the monster is actually an extension of Eleven herself, and a physical manifestation of her troubled psyche.
If true, this could end up being the Darth Vader “I am your father” moment of Stranger Things. Before you call me crazy, here is the supporting evidence:
- How was Eleven able to recognize Will’s face in the pictures at Mike’s house? They had never interacted with each other before that.
- The Demogorgon is drawn to blood, and Eleven’s nose bleeds multiple times after using her powers, yet the Demogorgon never comes after Eleven (until the end of the last episode).
- When Eleven is facing off against the monster in the classroom, she extends her right hand to channel her powers, and then the monster promptly does the same.
- In various interviews, the Duffer Brothers have mentioned the Silent Hill videogame series as a primary influence for the look and feel of the Upside Down. A major theme of those games is that the monsters and terrors you see in Silent Hill are a gruesome product of your own psychosis. The Duffer Brothers claimed they have “a 30-page document that [explains] where this monster actually came from, and why aren’t there more monsters.” It could be that there’s only one monster right now because there’s only one Eleven, and the monster is a product of her mind.
- Both times that Eleven had to focus really hard to find Will, the monster ended up finding Will immediately after — First with the school’s ham radio, which is when Will appears to Joyce in the wall of their house, and then with the makeshift sensory deprivation tank in the gym, shortly after which the monster breaks through “Castle Byers”.
- After saving Mike from the jump off the cliff, Eleven tearfully tells Mike, “I’m sorry. The gate… I opened it. I’m the monster.” Most viewers probably chalked that up to Eleven being overly (and metaphorically) self-critical, but what if she was being literal? What if she knew that the monster was a product of her mind, and was admitting that she had accidentally let it out and into the physical world?
If this theory is true, what would that mean for the second season of Stranger Things? If there is a “Thirteen” who is stronger and more aggressive than Eleven, then perhaps that means his monster will be much worse as well. Just like a Patronus in Harry Potter, each person’s would be different and unique to the person who conjures it.
How I imagine Season 2 playing out
It’s a year after the events of Season 1. After realizing the full extent of Eleven’s powers (and failing to recapture her), the government has secretly been working to develop a stronger, better version of Eleven in their other labs. The most promising of them is a teenage boy named Thirteen, who shows great promise but also signs of mental breakdown after years of cruel and excessive tactics to maximize his potential.
One day, Thirteen escapes from his lab in the city, and eventually ends up breaking down completely. He goes on a rampage, indiscriminately killing anyone even remotely associated with the US government, who he sees as evil and the cause of all his suffering.
The killing of government employees ends up in the national news, which alerts Hopper, Dr. Brenner, and the four kids led by Mike. They all independently start trying to locate the perpetrator, believing it to be Eleven.
Meanwhile Eleven, who for the past year has been fending for herself as a hermit in the Upside Down, can sense that something is wrong. The whole reason she exiled herself there was to protect her friends, but she senses that they are walking into danger and decides she has to go back to save them.
Closing thoughts
I hope you enjoyed my analysis and predictions. If Stranger Things was a love letter to movies of the 80s, then this blog post is my own love letter to the creators of the show for making me feel like a kid again in the best way possible.
Creating a great sequel is hard, and history is littered with attempts that failed to recapture and expand upon the magic of the original. But whether it’s Terminator 2, Aliens, The Bourne Supremacy, or Silent Hill 2, the templates for success are out there. And I take comfort in the fact that the Duffer Brothers are students of history and have proven themselves to be masters at taking the old and familiar and remixing it into something new and delightful.
More than anything, I believe the biggest challenge of Season 2 of Stranger Things is right there in its title — For a show that’s all about strange things, how do you maintain that same sense of fear, mystery, and terror in a second season? Season 1 was a classic 80's-style monsters & alien movie, but I believe that Season 2 will benefit from a more grown-up (and real) take on monsters — namely, that sometimes the most terrifying monsters of all are the ones that live inside us, and rule over us.
If you liked this, check out this thread in the Stranger Things subreddit where hundreds of other people commented on my Eleven/Demogorgon theory: The real origin of the Demogorgon
