Stranger Things Season 2 Teaser Debuts During Super Bowl L1

This past weekend was the Super Bowl, which meant a lot of things to a lot of people. For Atlanta fans, it was a day that will live in infamy until the heat death of the universe. For Lady Gaga fans, it was the closest many of them will ever get to being able to afford seeing her perform live. For the rest of us, it was a prime opportunity to see some of the biggest commercials and movie trailers of the year. Chief among those was a roughly 30-second spot for Season 2 of Netflix’s runaway hit original series, Stranger Things. The show’s retro 80s aesthetic was on full display as footage from a vintage Eggo ad glitches and morphs into a shot of the main characters - Mike, Lucas, and Dustin - dressed up as Ghost Busters. We also get a few snatches of the boys riding around on their bikes, Sheriff Hopper doing some dirty work, and what appears to be more Department of Energy personnel before dropping a very appropriate release date.

Hint: It's the only time of year this is appropriate school dress.

If anything’s clear from the bits and pieces I’ve seen so far, it’s that Eleven is still nowhere to be found, the rift to the Upside Down is still open, and things are still coming through. One of the final shots of the teaser shows a many-legged creature, several stories tall, towering over the suburbs of Hawkins. Whatever it is, it makes the Demogorgon from Season 1 look like an action figure by comparison.

We're gonna need a bigger slingshot...

Some more plot details about the second season also came out in Entertainment Weekly later in the week. Some choice tidbits: as hinted at the end of Season 1, Will Byers is still seeing visions of the Upside Down. Whether this is real or all in his head remains to be seen, but my money’s on the former. His mother Joyce, to cope with the events of the last year and give her sons some sense of normalcy, is dating an old high school classmate, Bob, played by Sean Astin of Goonies and Lord of the Rings fame. Sheriff Hopper is also struggling to adjust, tasking himself with trying to cover up all the weird things that happened. But the characters carrying the most baggage from the first season are going to be Mike and Nancy Wheeler, who both lost someone to the Upside Down. There will also be some new additions to the cast. Brother-sister duo Billy and Max move into town, and while Max is immediately friendly with the group - possibly sparking a love triangle between her, Lucas, and Dustin - her brother is decidedly more antagonistic. A non-human addition is in the mix as well, with Dustin forming a bond with some presumably cute extra-dimensional critter. This still leaves plenty of questions. What’s up with the new guy running the lab? What is the spindly-legged creature? Where the heck is Eleven? All those answers, and probably some new questions, will arrive when Season 2 hits Netflix on Halloween.