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Stranger Things – Season 2 (Netflix; 2017)

The much-anticipated Halloweentime return of Netflix’s buzziest binge-watching favourite about paranormal happenings and the pitfalls of growing up in the fictitious town of Hawkins, Indiana rewarded and frustrated in alternating measures. When last we peeked in on the Duffer Brothers’ 1980s genre-film revivalist homage Stranger Things, young Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) had been rescued (though far from unscathed) from the shadowy, creepy alternate universe of the Upside-Down by the efforts of his family and friends, while Eleven (the poised-beyond-her-years Millie Bobby Brown, perhaps the chief child actor here likely headed for greater things in adulthood), the mysterious young girl with psychokinetic powers, vanished after destroying not only the Demogorgon monster who had snatched Will (and others) but also the sinister Hawkins Lab government agents who had imprisoned her.

A year later, the still-haunted Will is experiencing frightening visions from the dark-mirror Upside-Down of a looming, terrifying being that is the terrible, mind-conquering power behind the Demogorgon(s) and an imminent threat to Hawkins and the world. As his mother Joyce (Winona Ryder), her new boyfriend Bob (Sean Astin, hilariously avuncular and squarely decent enough to justify the period-reference joke of his casting), and Will’s best friend Mike (Finn Wolfhard, a good young actor whose name sounds like a discarded line from the cult-fave MST3K Space Mutiny bit) try to work out what’s affecting Will in semi-cautious interactions with the kinder-gentler Hawkins Lab administration of Sam Owens (Paul Reiser, an inspired piece of casting while also a 1980s gag), his brother Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) and Mike’s sister Nancy (Natalia Dyer) seek out a reclusive, free-spirited anti-government conspiracist (Brett Gelman) who they hope will help them wring out and spread the truth about the disappearance of Nancy’s wet-blanket best friend (and almost-inexplicable Season One fan favourite) Barb (Shannon Purser). Meanwhile, local sheriff Jim Hopper (David Harbour) is secretly keeping Eleven in hiding in a cabin in the woods, though her chafing at confinement and desire to learn about her past will not allow this situation to endure long. Also, Mike and Will’s best buds Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) are dealing with a fast-growing amphibian/reptile creature (named Dart by Dustin, after D’Artagnan from Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers), the new girl in town (Sadie Sink) and her bad-boy stepbrother (Dacre Montgomery), and the bumpy road of puberty.

There’s plenty happening in Stranger Things: sci-fi/horror action, suspense, and CG effects, silly jokes and melodramas, superficial themes and metaphors, and relentless period-specific pop-cultural allusions. The Duffers shuffle and recombine their cast members, looking for productive chemistry sparks and sometimes finding them in unexpected places: Harbour and Brown take big meaty chunks out of their tension-filled surrogate father-daughter approximation subplot, and the copiously charismatic Matarazzo strikes up an unlikely partnership with Joe Keery, who plays Nancy’s jock sometimes-boyfriend Steve Harrington.

Stranger Things is a good time and consistently compulsively watchable, although the penultimate episode’s sidetrip with a former lab-mate from Eleven’s past, played by Linnea Berthelsen, simply doesn’t work, despite the bravery of the Duffers to cut away from the main action. But it remains a bit of a mess that is simultaneously over-plotted and under-plotted. Consider Dustin’s adopted pet Dart, who grows into a juvenile dog-like Demogorgon: the creature whiplashes from cute to menacing and then vanishes for much of the building and climactic action completely; it is given a moment of emotional redemption with Dustin and an absolutely heartbreaking ending, but the series can’t decide if it ultimately wants Dart to be cute or scary or both at once. Plenty of more important characters are likewise handled this way, too (Wolfhard’s Mike rallies around the afflicted Will and hangs around until the telegraphed reunion with object-of-affection Eleven), while others (like Montgomery’s greasy jerk Billy, whose bullying nature is patly explained late in the season) remain nothing but gimmicks.

In a saturated television series landscape where even boilerplate mainstream network sitcoms and dramas feature rich veins of implication and meaning, Stranger Things‘ complete dearth of subtext can be galling, as well. It’s even more frustrating when the Duffers gesture towards such subtexts and then don’t bother to follow through. This is the case in Season Two, in which the fall of 1984 presidential election between Republican incumbent Ronald Reagan and Democratic challenger Walter Mondale is established as significantly upcoming but never materializes into anything more than background detail, a set of in-universe jokes about which Hawkins homes would have which candidates’ election signs on their lawns. Stranger Things is already (very) nominally about a disturbing shadow world lying behind the safe white-bread image of 1980s suburban Middle America. It would have been uniquely positioned to build to a subversion of the cagey, disingenuous optimism of the Reaganite “Morning in America” political propaganda, but it misses this golden opportunity and furthermore seems blithely unaware of it. In this and other ways, Stranger Things is an entertaining but shallow potboiler that you just find yourself wishing would reach for more.

Dark (Netflix; 2017)

If you find yourself yearning for compelling, mind-scrambling conceptual reaches and roiling thematic subtext from a Netflix-produced sci-fi genre thriller, however, give the German-language drama Dark a whirl (do yourself a huge favour if you do: leave aside the English-dubbed version and choose German audio with English subtitles instead). Superficially similar to Stranger Things – odd quasi-dimensional happenings emanate from the high-security-science-facility-adjacent woods, embroiling families from a nearby small town – Dark is nonetheless very much its own strange and unique trip.

One hesitates to say too much about Dark‘s plot, characters, and challenging timeline ourobouros, as spoilers diminish its impact more than is the case with most texts. But suffice it to say that Dark is about disappearing children in a small German town in three time periods precisely 33 years apart, and how time-travelling quests to prevent, reverse, or solve the sinister abductions instead make the troubling events inevitable and worsen their multi-generational blows.

The co-brainchild of Swiss writer/director Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese, Dark is built out of the dramatic ironies of time-travel theories (the hoary old grandfather paradox forever haunts the margins) and more dense, significant allusions to quantum physics, nuclear power, electromagnetism, existential philosophy, Christian scripture, and classical myth than in any television work since Lost. The family connections through time can become confusing (the show’s Wikipedia page features a handy branching hereditary tree, though be warned There Be Spoilers), and the unfamiliar cast of German actors does not aid in differentiation (I personally had only seen Oliver Masucci before; he starred as Hitler in the sly satire Look Who’s Back). But in truth, this only serves to sink the viewer deeper into the enigmatic swamp of Dark. And while it is never explicit about it, there are resonant echoes of recent German history in a story of the dangers of meddling with the past. What Dark does well, it does very well, and in a streaming TV landscape where surface-level entertainments like Stranger Things huff much of the oxygen, a deep and enigmatic work that breathes mystery in and out is extremely welcome.