I won’t spoil any more of the mystery of Season 2, but I will say that much of it plays like a lukewarm rehash, with a bit more red meat thrown in to cover up the mustiness. It’s a classic sequel form, really. There are some welcome inventions—particularly in casting Paul Reiser as a kindly government scientist, a witty counterbalance to Matthew Modine’s villain from last season. But mostly the show just regurgitates itself, making Stranger Things Season 1 another of its reference points, joining the likes of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Aliens, and Jurassic Park, all alluded to this season.

The trouble is, Stranger Things hasn’t yet earned canonization the way those hallowed properties have—so the second season’s self-regard lands badly; it’s premature. Having the great David Harbour and Winona Ryder do the same desperate shtick from the first season and hoping we’ll affectionately say, "Oh, right, remember?" doesn’t really work when the thing only aired last year, and when the series has been ubiquitously joked about and parodied since. This is a common peril, but it’s especially concentrated here, this feeling that the show exhausted itself with its own success. It’s why everyone at HBO interested in a second season of the perfectly ended Big Little Lies should watch Stranger Things 2—a meandering, intermittently entertaining follow-up that dims our memory of the original fun, of that excitement and sense of occasion. I still ate it up in one big gulp. But I was hungry again an hour later. Only, not for more of the same.