Everyone Calm Down — Stranger Things Season 2 Will Address the Barb Situation
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I know you miss Barb, with her oversize glasses and her horrendous, ruffled button-up shirts. But the fact is: Barb is dead. She is clearly, clearly deceased, as shown in season one of Stranger Things. Is it the fate she deserved? No, but it's the one she got. The problem here is that since the first season dropped on Netflix, interest in this short-lived fictional character named Barb has spiked. People are trying to come up with theories for how she could be alive, convinced she'll live on in the Upside-Down. (She won't, she's dead.) Barb has become such a "thing" that the creators, Matt and Ross Duffer, have had to talk about the future of Barb. In an August interview with IGN (before Stranger Things was officially granted a second season), Matt talked about what the plan would be:
"Barb will not be forgotten. We'll make sure there's some justice for Barb. People get very frustrated, understandably, that the town doesn't seem to really be dealing with Barb. That stuff is all happening, we're just not spending any screen time on it. It's not like her parents are like 'Oh, Barb left. She died!' Season one actually takes place over the course of six or seven days — it's a really short period of time. So part of what we want to do in the hypothetical season two is to explore the repercussions of everything that happened. Everything was left a bit of a mess in that there's a little bit of cleanup to be done. It was so messy that it's impossible to completely clean that up so a lot of it bubbles to the surface in season two."
In October, after months of Barb mania, actor David Harbour (aka Jim Hopper) addressed Barb during a panel at New York Comic-Con. He does confirm that, again, she is dead, but he also said, "We do deal with the loose ends in season two, and we do deal with some of the internet rage over Barb's death. We will have justice for Barb's death in some sense."
Justice for Barb isn't the same thing as reviving Barb, but that's as good as it's gonna get — and we should all just accept that. Now stop worrying about Barb and focus on finding the perfect high-waisted jeans for your Halloween costume.