Netflix's hit original series Stranger Things drew heavy inspiration from the late 1970s and early '80s cinema work of Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter and Stephen King (as well as Wes Craven, to a lesser degree), while both crafting its season 1 narrative and creating its vision of the fictional Indiana town Hawkins, circa 1983. Appropriately, Stranger Things season 2 is aiming to follow in the footsteps of iconic '80s film sequels before it, with an innovative-yet-familiar approach; with Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer having name-dropped Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Aliens as being specific inspirations for season 2.
Stranger Things season 2 picks up with the same set of characters a year after season 1, but otherwise the Duffer brothers and their collaborators have managed to keep a lid on any major story details concerning the series' second season, up to this point. Netflix is using Super Bowl LI to start properly building hype for the show's return, releasing a teaser for Stranger Things season 2 on the heels of a viral tease that - as the show's fans were quick to deduce - may have already revealed the season 2 premiere date (spoiler: turns out it didn't).
A first look image from the Stranger Things Super Bowl teaser arrived ahead of the Big Game, showing three of the series' main characters dressed up for Halloween as (appropriately enough) Ghostbusters. The Super Bowl LI preview (which you can watch, above) doesn't provide anymore context for the scene depicted there, but it does allude to other season 1 elements and plot/character threads that were noticeably left dangling by the end of the season finale.
Here is the official logline released for Stranger Things season 2, now confirmed to be arriving in time for Halloween this year:
A year after Will’s return, everything seems back to normal… but a darkness lurks just beneath the surface, threatening all of Hawkins.
The Stranger Things season 2 Super Bowl promo starts out as a retro '80s Eggo Waffle commercial - a reference to Eleven's (Millie Bobby Brown) preferred snack - before settling into a rapid montage of images that are intriguing for sure, but reveal little in the way of specific plot details. One things that is obvious, however, is that Will Byers' (Noah Schnapp) experience in the Upside-Down has changed him, as the season 1 finale made pretty clear in the end. Now it seems that young Will is capable of either summoning monsters by imagining them (see the sketch that he made of the gigantic monster that closes out the teaser)... or something to similar, disturbing effect.
While it appears as though Stranger Things season 2 is going to be literally "bigger" than season 1 in terms of the size of its monsters (one of them, anyway), the show is otherwise poised to remain the same intimate story about a group of small-town friends and family and the... well, strange events that keep on happening around them. So long as the series doesn't lose sight of that with its more dramatic narrative developments (see also a now longer-haired Eleven's return from the "dead" in the Super Bowl teaser), then Stranger Things should continue to make for great storytelling, no matter where its weird story goes from there.
NEXT: Stranger Things Season 2 Episode Titles Analyzed
Stranger Things season 2 debuts on Netflix in time for Halloween 2017.
Source: Netflix