1x02 Chapter Two: The Weirdo on Maple Street

[7.1/10] I definitely liked this one less than the premiere. Ideally, with some of the throat-clearing necessary for any pilot, the show could focus on the most cool and compelling elements. Instead, it seems like we made incremental progress here and there, with more focus on the parts I’m less interested in.

That definitely includes Nancy’s storyline here. As Nancy herself puts it, it’s just such a cliché. The good girl who’s hooking up with the bad/rich boy, while her friend disapproves is a pretty stock scenario. Shotgunning beers and messing around while parents are out is equally tired. I might feel differently if the show had some kind of wrinkle or twist to any of this, and maybe it’s just that Nancy will feel guilty and/or be targeted by the authorities when folks start investigating Barb’s disappearance. But we get a lot of this Dawson’s Creek-type material, and it’s not particularly good or interesting.

But I do like that we’re deepening the quick bond between the crew of young boys and Eleven. There’s a lot of E.T. to Mike’s attempts to hide Eleven from his parents. One of the strongest elements of the show continues to be that trio of young kids, who are surprisingly good actors for their young age and have great chemistry together.

Likewise, Millie Bobby Brown does a superb job of communicating the sense that there is something off about Eleven, but also that she is someone recovering from abuse and suffering from PTSD. Her being able to communicate and comprehend, while not knowing words like “friend” or “promise” starts to become a little far-fetched, but her acting and those of her scene partners makes a lot of the material work.

So does the superb direction and sound work here. One of the most striking moments in “The Weirdo on Maple Street” is when Eleven is forced to hide in a closet and has a traumatic episode when she remembers the last time she was forced into a cramped space like that. The lighting, tight framing, and sound design make the experience as claustrophobic for the audience as it is for her.

In the same way, shots of the search party still hunting for Will, with the trees looming large above and the ground stretching out below helps convey how tiny these volunteers are in the scope of what they’re trying to search. Hopper and his deputy gazing down at the ravine helps set up that, by god, someone is going to be taking that plunge before the season is over, and it won’t be pretty. And the late-episode sequence where Will and/or the monster tries to make contact with Joyce is a superb dose of suspense and terror.

Despite the fact that the writing isn’t as good here, the acting, directing, and production design are picking up the slack.

That said, I’ll be honest that I’m not loving Wynona Ryder’s performance here. It’s a tricky thing to do, because you want a mother who cannot find her son to feel ungrounded, and it’s tough to do that without it feeling like it’s too much. Ryder is doing a solid job, but both she and the story go back to the same sort of distressed affect pretty frequently over the first couple of hours of the series, which lessens the impact.

Similarly, clichés abound when Jonathan Byers goes out to see his deadbeat dad. The show sets up that there’s likely to be some kind of connection/attraction between him and Nancy, and goes through the usual daddy issues routine here, to the point that it all feels kind of rote. His creepy photo session seems likely to come up when Hopper and company are investigating Barb’s disappearance, but otherwise his role here seems to be to fill an archetype and to table-set for things down the line.

Hopper’s quest is also a little tiresome here. The audience basically knows that something supernatural is going on here, so sending Hopper on wild goose chases toward more terrestrial causes just feels like a waste of time. Again, maybe this sets up that Hopper has incorrect theories about Will stopping to steal fries at Benny’s and accidentally stumbling onto the real truth at the Department of Energy, but for now it feels like wheel-spinning. At least we get a touch of character development for Hopper as he wonders if he’s been cursed and learn that he came to Hawkins from the city and has some type of beef with Joyce’s ex.

That said, the supernatural stuff that eludes Hopper is well-teased. We get hints in the form of Eleven’s telekinetic powers, more flickering lights and appliances, and a board-flipping indication that she recognizes Will and thinks he’s “hiding.” There’s more snooping around by the mysterious agents and hints at their plans and sense of what really happened here. Barb’s disappearance and the impression of the monster through the Byers family’s wall are the icing on the cake, firmly indicating that the freaky stuff isn’t over with.

That’s a plus, because the freaky stuff is more interesting than the regular stuff in this hour. The nice thing about Stranger Things, or at least its first season, is that you could tell a good story just about a small town reacting to a missing child. The supernatural elements enhance it, but grounding it in that real fear gives it weight. But as the normal goings on in Hawkins start to feel more paint-by-numbers, the spooky and scary events start to seem like the real draw.