The Stranger Things Season 2 chapter titles, first seen in the teaser announcement released in August, might not be the same when you fire up Netflix to watch the second season when it premieres sometime in 2017. According to series creators Matt and Ross Duffer, that means you should forget everything you thought you knew about the plot of their long-in-the-works follow-up to the first season smash hit.
The Duffer Brothers gave an interview to the Hollywood Reporter saying that the episode titles from the teaser video aren’t permanent, but could still give hints at what we can expect.
“I do think some of the titles will change. There were titles we didn’t want to put on there because we felt like it would give too much away,” Matt Duffer told THR. “The whole season was already broken when we did this.”
So what titles do we think could potentially change? For one, probably not the first episode, “Madmax.” Matt Duffer also told THR “We did a wide, wide search for one new kid that we’re adding. She’s a cool new character,” seemingly confirming rumors that the new female lead would be named Max like in the chapter title. But what else?
When we tried to unpack the new chapter titles, the more broad ones like “The Storm” or “The Brain” seemed to be both frustratingly vague because nothing is known about the season, but also because they seemed to lack the literary flair of the titles of the first season. Even Season 2 chapters like “The Pumpkin Patch” or “The Pollywog” have a bit more of an energy to them than just “The Brain” despite their possible links to characters or new plot details.
Matt Duffers comments should also be surprising to Stranger Things fans who waited all summer to find out whether Netflix would renew the series or not. It seems the streaming service was waiting for the excitement to reach a “fever pitch” — as Matt Duffer put it — before Netflix announced Season 2 despite the fact that the show was already green-lit. The secrecy allowed the Duffers to work on the second season all throughout the summer, hence the spoilery chapter titles.
Hopefully they had enough time to make the second season as good as the first.
