Stranger Things’ second season won’t premiere until Halloween, but we can certainly glean plenty of information from the Super Bowl spot.
Stranger Things will indeed return this year, but not until far later than we expected. Indeed, the Super Bowl 51 trailer included a release date for the second season of the paranormal drama: Halloween. (We’ll just use the extra time to stock up on more Eggo waffles and brush up on Dungeons & Dragons parlance.) However, in just those 30 seconds, there’s a lot to take apart.
First, as a brief refresher, here’s the trailer in full, as posted by Netflix to YouTube:
Did anyone else immediately scream “Stranger Things!” the second they heard the two kids talking about Eggos? Anyway, onto the more serious analysis, starting with the pretty-obvious. The season’s taking place in 1984, a fact previously revealed by the season 2 confirmation teaser. That would also be why we can see Dustin, Mike, and Lucas wearing Ghostbusters costumes — the original film premiered in the summer of 1984, making it a perfect Halloween costume.
However, it looks like Will’s little slug-coughing incident at the end of season 1 has had some ramifications. Netflix’s own Twitter account now has the hashtag “#WorldUpsideDown” in its profile, a phrase repeated in the teaser. The Upside Down appears to be leaking into what we might consider the real world, curiously enough, and not just in the form of a little Demogorgon anymore.
Still from Stranger Things 2 trailer. Image via Netflix.
Now, as for that monster, the obvious answer is that it’s a spider of some sort. To keep things in theme with Dungeons & Dragons‘ Demogorgon of last season, we put forward that the Duffer brothers may have been inspired by the phase spider, which appeared in the 1977 Monster Manual — which would have been the one the heroes of Stranger Things would be using at this point in time. Phase spiders, per online resources, can switch between the Ethereal Plane and the Material Plane. However, they aren’t the biggest of creatures, and we claim no expertise in the ways of the original Monster Manual.
Still from Stranger Things season 2 trailer. Image via Netflix.
And here’s Eleven, if we don’t miss our guess, with her hair growing out in the ensuing year. Where is she? Has she returned to Hawkins for good this time?
Stranger Things returns this Halloween on Netflix.