Stranger Things 2 is a bloated sci-fi sequel: EW review 

was karaoke cinema, but circa July 2016, what else was on offer? A bored thirteenth 

. So by late July you were getting invitations to 

And it’s never the wrong time for ’80s nostalgia, an itch pop culture has never stopped trying to scratch. The algorithm behind 

‘ particular nostalgia (the nostalgiorithm?) was obvious. A group of

bikes with their pal Dark Phoenix, while the local teens 

It helped that the Duffers locked into the lost possibility of regular-person protagonists, a bygone notion in our era of Chosen Ones. And the performers, many previously unknown, were great. A character like young Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) got the kind of third-banana spotlight that Marvel usually reserves for SHIELD agents. Local police chief Jim Hopper (David Harbour) was the hero-as-human wreckage, drunk and dissolute and wounded, the kind of lawman-with-a-cruddy-house who popped up a lot before traumatized 

And Millie Bobby Brown was a genuine discovery. Eleven as a character could’ve felt like a stunt: She’s every horror-movie kid 

 she’s the first alien girl disrupting the land of boys. But Brown’s sad eyes suggested reservoirs of real pain, and those same eyes could narrow into murder-slits of righteous rage. I compared her to Dark Phoenix a second ago because 

literally did that, but the ravenous ’80s superhero Eleven 

reminds me of is Alan Moore’s Kid Marvelman, another orphan ravaged by mad science, a god of pure childish id.

to its more obvious inspirations made the show feel sanitized. It wasn’t as sociopathic as vintage King, not as funny as old-school Carpenter, not as inventive as Spielberg. Midway through 

, returning character Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) actually explains the plot of the first season to a new character. The newer character misunderstands Lucas’ confession and thinks he’s spinning a fictional story. “I just wish it had a little more originality, that’s all,” the character says, sounding like every critic cranky enough to high-horse the show’s homages.

this show’s problem. When you go to see an ’80s cover band, you’re not listening for new material. You could appreciate how writer-directors Matt and Ross Duffer took the extra fanfictional step of throwing all their action figures together into one lost Amblintopia, making Hawkins, Indiana, their own hyper-specific version of

Once Upon a Time‘s Storybrooke. So many other white-dude directors who grew up in the Reagan era are approaching middle age having made careers from rebooting our most beloved franchises with much simpler strategies, 

Star Wars But With The Death Star Again, 

: There are worse ideas than Girl Talk-ing ’80s genre classics into a synth-heavy stew.

And there was the possibility that the Duffers would get 

ambitious in their remixing. Could they empty 

, there’s a moment where a little girl is playfully pairing off two toys, He-Man and Barbie (or some offbrand variations). Surely 

is some sort of truly wild nostalgia-baked fantasia in the brewing, swordsy high fantasy mixed with accessorized consumerist fantasy, two (happily retired!) avatars of gendered playtime mixing together into one wondrous whole.

 ripped off the greats. This season, it’s ripping off 

begins roughly a year after last year’s finale. Mike (Finn Wolfhard) misses Eleven. Dustin and Lucas share a crush on a skateboarding gamer named Max (Sadie Sink.) Will (Noah Schnapp) is haunted by visions of the Upside Down, the alternate dimension that looks exactly like Hell in 

. Mike’s sister Nancy (Natalie Dyer) loves reformed bad boy Steve Harrington (Joe Keery), but exchanges lingering glances with Will’s brother Jonathan (Charlie Heaton.) Joyce (Winona Ryder) has a new boyfriend (Sean Astin), but she’s mostly just really worried about Will. Hopper is investigating curious disturbances around town. And Eleven is…somewhere.

first half of this pointlessly overlong, quarter-baked season of television. Yes, after an unexpected opening scene that looks like a worse version of 

settles in for five straight hours of pure unfiltered Netflix bloat. Tantalizing possibilities are hinted at, then hinted at again a full episode later.

The cast remains full of delightful performers, but they sprawl in different directions, many of them boring. Nancy feels sad about Barb, a storyline that feels like a sop to Barb fandom (people, she was 

in this show!), which has the doubly ruinous effect of sending Nancy circling back through plot leftover from the first season. And that’s the effect of a 

of this season, actually. Joyce is freaked out by the possibility that Will hasn’t recovered from his time in the Upside Down, a subplot that gives you flashbacks to the last fifty times Winona Ryder looked really really worried. Will’s in a bad place, which you already knew from last season’s cliffhanger. Full credit to Schnapp, a phantom presence last year, for delivering a sensitively freaked out performance. He’s smaller than the other performers and seems constantly likely to break into dust from sheer fright.

But whereas Will’s disappearance was an immediately inciting incident last year, this time Will’s gradual upward descent slow-burns for a long time. Will Has A Scary Vision, whoops, I just spoiled the first few cliffhangers. Will Has To Be Saved, but didn’t you see this one already? 

was slow, too, but there was a feeling of discovery on all fronts. Eleven was getting to know the boys, and the strangeness in the government facility was gradually coming into focus.

There are some fun character beats in this new season, but they exist separate from the plot, as if the writers plotted two-episode arcs for all the characters and then split them across nine episodes of all-too-familiar supernatural stuff. In place of Matthew Modine, 

gives us Paul Reiser as a new Mysterious Doctor. And there’s a new shadow monster, very large, with more tentacles. Other weirdlies linger about. The creature effects were a low point in the original 

, and the show wisely held the Demagorgon back in evocative shadows. This season, there are more creatures, a horde of undifferentiated 

climbing cavern walls and haunting corridors, always threatening to kill only the characters you barely care about.

, a film we must now tragically refer to as merely the third-worst 

. “How can the same s— happen to the same guy twice?” pondered our man John. New s— lingers on the margins. While everyone else on 

feels locked on rails, Eleven (MINOR SPOILERS FOR POINTLESS PLOT) is busy doing almost nothing! She spends the first half of the season in a remote cabin, the kind of subplot 

weekly, the decision to silo Eleven would be an all-time calamity, a month-plus wait for something to happen. In binge mode it’s just a bore, which only gets worse when Eleven sets off on a mission to uncover her (sigh) secret origin.

 involve the only real notable bit of experimentation in 

There is a breakaway episode, with a different setting, a different supporting cast, and a lot of graffiti inspired by Grant Morrison’s 

. I’m a desperate fanboy of breakaway episodes — my favorite scene from

 is Tony yelling at Red Rock Canyon — but even this bold departure doesn’t add much. It feels like the Duffers want to world-build toward a larger narrative, and start to encapsulate some notion of ’80s culture beyond nerd-friendly genre.

Eleven gets eyeshadow, and Bon Jovi’s “Runaway” plays on the soundtrack, and so does the Runaways’ “Dead End Justice.” There’s a character with a mohawk, and a character who brags about “stealing from war criminal billionaires.” This rebel energy feels beyond the show’s spirit. Like, if you were wondering what the punk aesthetic would look like when refracted through a sanitized version of everything that was mainstream when punk was punk, the answer is Chapter 7 of 

There’s a whiff of Disney-level conservatism bubbling throughout

, the faceless government types are maybe not as bad as you thought, the monsters shorn of any personality that could make their motivation even vaguely recognizable. Because Joe Keery is a charming actor, Steve Harrington has morphed completely from James Spader in

, which means that the whole cast is now as nice as a like button. The only vaguely nefarious new character is a George Michael lookalike who spends 95 percent of the season driving angry. In a single scene, we learn that he’s the product of an abusive household, a moment of cold-water brutality with little followup that makes this season’s various genre explorations feel even more divorced from any emotional reality.

And keep in mind: This season is set in 1984, the same year that 

 treats as High Gospel. So there is no excuse for wheelspinning through tired story beats. But maybe you think that’s the

that the oddly gutless storytelling reflects how safely the show has hermetically sealed itself off from the stresses of today. In lieu of a second season, Netflix has thrown a nine-hour 

party, watch along on social media, click here if you recognize the reference! But no one wants to stay at a party

long, and it’s worth pointing out that no classic ’80s movie mentioned in this review ran over two hours. No one will complain if 

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