- Hey, I'm Sadie Sink!
- And I'm Noah Schnapp!
- I'm Caleb McLaughlin. - And I'm Gaten Matarazzo.
- I'm Finn Wolfhard, from the show, Stranger Things.
- Everybody is excited for season three--
- Us included! - But in case you haven't seen
seasons one and two, or you just need a quick refresher,
we're here to catch you up and get you nice and ready
for the new episodes.
- Here we go. (Caleb trilling)
(both clicking)
(electronic music)
- Super fast, here's a quick rundown
of all the important characters in the series.
- There's Mike, Will, Dustin, and Lucas,
the most awesome one, who are all best friends.
- Mike has a sister named Nancy
and Will has a brother named Jonathan.
Nancy's dating this really cool guy named Steve Harrington
and is best friends with Barb.
Will's mom is Joyce Byers and the Hawkins chief of police
is Jim Hopper.
- Oh, we can't forget Eleven, but we just call her El.
- Hawkins, Indiana, here we come.
(electronic music)
- So season one opens in Hawkins, where we see
a big, scary laboratory, something is clearly
going wrong, because alarms are going off
and lab coat guys are panicking,
but we'll get back to that, because right now,
our boys, Mike, Will, Lucas, and Dustin
are playing a game of Dungeons and Dragons
in Mike's basement.
- [Mike] The Demogorgon! (boys yelling)
- We're in deep shit.
- (coughing) Nerds.
- So anyways.
- After the game, they all go their separate ways
and while biking home, Will gets attacked
by this scary monster that we can't see.
Spooky.
- Everyone starts freaking out about Will missing,
but as the search goes on, we meet El,
a girl with a shaved head in a hospital gown
who doesn't seem to speak,
and has some scary Men-in-Black types after her.
- You must be Benny Hammond.
- I'm afraid I am.
- Who should she run into and end up becoming friends with?
That's right, the boys.
- Except for Will, of course.
- Yeah, he was busy at the time.
- [Will] (On Phone) Mom?
- Will?
Anyway, while Will's mom, Joyce, and Hopper
are looking for Will, Nancy and Barb
go to a pool party at Steve's house.
And while Steve and Nancy are kissing upstairs,
the Demogorgon attacks Barb
(monster roaring)
and brings her to the Upside Down.
- The Upside Down is a mirror world of our own
except everything is awful and creepy and ruled over
by hideous monsters of unspeakable terror.
(monstrous roaring)
But again, Eleven can communicate between our world
and the Upside Down, so that's pretty neat.
- Now, at this point, Will has figured out
how to communicate with his mom from the Upside Down
using various Christmas lights
which he can flick on and off.
- This leads to Joyce covering the whole house
in tons of Christmas lights and figuring out a system
of inter-dimensional communication all her own.
- Which makes her look like an absolute crazy person.
She's not.
- I don't care if anyone believes me!
- Also, we get some gnarly flashbacks that show us
El was used in these terrible experiments
where she's sent into the black void
at the lab near Hawkins.
- Eventually, state troopers find
what appears to be Will's body in the water
of the local reservoir.
As you'd imagine, everyone's pretty shocked and upset.
- But Hopper, bless him, is suspicious.
- Okay.
(thwack)
(thump)
- [Sadie] and discovers that
the tiny child's corpse in question
is just a stuffed dummy.
Hate when that happens.
- Totally.
- While the school has this assembly for Will,
one of the bullies tries to fight Mike,
but Eleven, in disguise, of course,
stops him using her telepathic powers
and makes him pee his pants in front of everyone.
- Dude, Troy peed himself!
- A fair, but brutal, punishment.
- Brutal, indeed.
So Hopper decides to break into Hawkins Lab
to see what the hell is going on,
since they faked a child death and whatnot.
Unsurprisingly, he gets caught, drugged, and returned home,
where he wakes up and discovers
several secret listening devices.
- The boys, along with El,
go looking for the non-deceased Will in the woods,
as do Nancy and Jonathan.
Nancy gets stuck through a hole in a tree,
and then into the Upside Down,
but Jonathan is able to pull her back through the goo hole
before she gets barbed by the Demogorgon.
- Never say "goo hole".
- Will's mom, Joyce, and Sheriff Hopper -
- Just Hopper.
- Right, Hopper and Joyce go and find El's birth mother
and get a better idea of what's going down at Hawkins Lab.
Which clearly involves kidnapping newborn babies
with cool powers.
- And the boys, out by the old quarry,
looking for answers, are attacked by the pee pants bully,
Troy, who, despite having a knife
and a lot of pent up anger -
- And sucks!
- Gets his arm broken by El's mind.
(crunching sound)
(Troy screaming)
[Sadie] Oh, and El also makes Mike fly.
Or, maybe should we just say hover?
- [Finn] I can say that that is awesome and very rad.
The squad from Hawkins Lab
knows about El hiding out with the boys at Mike's house.
The "Bad Men" as they're called, set out to kidnap her back.
Luckily, her superpower mind is able to flip the vans over,
which rules very hard.
(whooshing sound)
(glass shattering)
- Very, very hard.
- Now the boys and El are in hiding,
and it's a full-on manhunt
from scary Bad Men in black suits.
Luckily, Hopper finds them first,
and the whole team concocts a plan
to build a sensory deprivation tank
which will allow El to find Will in the Upside Down.
- [Mr. Clarke] What is this for?
- Fun.
- El finds Will in the Upside down
using one of her classic telepathic tricks,
and while the boys wait with her in the gym,
Hopper and Joyce speed off to Hawkins Lab,
where they're convinced
they'll be able to find the entrance to the Upside Down.
- Unsurprisingly, they're caught almost immediately.
[Security Officer] Don't move!
- [Finn] And taken to see the head bad dude, Dr. Brenner.
Hopper convinces the lab guys
to let him and Joyce go into the Upside Down and find Will
since the entrance is in the lab.
On the condition that neither of them saw anything
or admit they they were there in the first place.
- We're gonna find her son,
and then we're gonna forget that any of this ever happened.
- [Gaten] While all of this is happening,
Nancy and Jonathan,
and an unwitting Steve who is being a jerk,
have set up a trap for the monster,
who they catch,
and set on fire using a bear trap and gas,
as one does.
(monstrous screeching, fire roaring)
- Unfortunately, when the fire goes out,
the monster is gone.
- [Nancy] Where'd it go?
- Guess what?
Government agents working with Hawkins Lab
find the kids at Hawkins Middle School,
- They found us.
- And after El makes their eyes start bleeding,
which is very cool,
the monster smells blood
and is off to join everyone at the school.
- Demogorgon!
(screeching)
(bricks crumbling)
- So the Demogorgon is just busting up stuff,
leaving a real mess of bodies and school supplies
as the kids run around trying to stop it.
- In a final showdown,
Lucas clumsily tries to find more rocks
to slingshot at the monster.
- Get the rocks! Get the rocks! Get the rocks!
- I am getting the rocks!
- El shows up, using all the powers she has,
annihilates the hell out of the Demogorgon, and it dies.
It's a horrible monster,
and it definitely ate Barb alive, so it's fine.
- Sadly, though, El disappears at this point, too,
and nobody knows where she went.
But Joyce and Hopper find and rescue Will
from the Upside Down,
so that's good.
- Smash cut to a few months later,
everything seems back to normal.
- Will is herald "The Boy Who Came Back",
but still seems to be slightly affected by his ordeal.
- Where am I?
- He also burps up a black slug,
which is probably not great.
- But on a more positive note,
we see a final scene where Hopper treks off into the woods
and leaves a stash of Eggo Waffles,
El's absolute favorite food,
in a dropbox.
Leaving us on a hopeful note we might see her again.
- And then -
- We forgot to talk about the part where
Jonathan beats the crap out of Steve,
- Kick his ass, man!
- [Nancy] No, stop!
(crunch)
- But other than that-
- That does it for Season 1, but what about Season 2?
(funky music)
We've still got all the boys.
We've got Will, Mike, Lucas, and Dustin,
Nancy, Steve, Jonathan, Hopper, Joyce,
and, of course, Eleven.
No more Barb, though, due to being eaten.
- Yikes.
And we also meet some new characters,
but we'll get to them in a bit.
- [Finn] We open on dark Pittsburgh,
where a group of masked individuals are fleeing the police
and eventually are able to escape
because one of the people in the group has special abilities
to project images in the police's minds.
In this case,
a tunnel collapsing and blocking the cops' way.
(Tires screeching)
(Sirens)
(Glass shattering)
- We see her nose bleeding just like Eleven's does,
so that's probably connected.
The scene changes back to good old Hawkins, Indiana,
where the boys are at the local arcade,
trying to figure out
who the new high scores on the machines belong to.
A mysterious character named Madmax.
- Cool name.
- Who's Madmax?
- Better than you.
- We also find out
that even though Will is back from the Upside Down,
he's not all the way back.
- He walks outside the arcade
and is struck with the dark vision
of the horrifying shadow monster
looming over the entire town.
- Will,
(gasp)
- Are you okay?
- It's no big deal.
- Back at school,
Nancy and Steve are still going steady,
and we meet two new transfer students in from California.
The devilishly handsome Billy,
and his step sister, a young skater named Max.
- Like Madmax, maybe?
- Oh, and Joyce is now dating the manager
of the local RadioShack.
- Our old friend Hopper is called out to the local farm
where he discovers
all pumpkins are rotted all the way through.
- Will is seeing a doctor from Hawkins Lab, Dr. Owens,
who's helping him deal with his PTSD.
But we all know it's something more than that.
- Time for some good news.
It turns out El is alive and well,
and living with Hopper up in a remote cabin in the woods.
- She's living in the woods,
and getting extreme cabin fever.
And also occasionally visiting Mike
through her little void space
(static) [Eleven] - Mike?
- Because government bad guys
are really looking hard for her,
even a year after her disappearance.
- While the boys are trying their hardest
to make friends with Max,
Hopper heads into the woods
to explore more of the weird goo stuff
that is killing all the pumpkins.
And discovers that the problem is seemingly emanating from,
yup, Hawkins Lab.
- Oh, and Nancy and Steve have a huge fight
at a Halloween party,
and by the end of the night,
it seems like she's actually warming up more
to Will's older brother, Jonathan.
- [Nancy] Jonathan?
- While the boys are out Trick-or-Treating,
Will has another terrifying run-in
with the mysterious shadow monster.
This time, in full view.
Gotta tell ya, it's pretty scary.
(roaring)
- Meanwhile, El, who wasn't allowed to Trick-or-Treat,
because it might expose her,
does her own void black space trick to go see Mike,
who she misses a lot.
- Mike?
- After their Halloween night out,
Dustin returns home
to find some weird tiny salamander-looking creature
rummaging in his trash and adopts it.
- What are you, little guy?
- And names it the natural choice
D'artagnan. Or, Dart for short.
After the previous night's fight,
it really looks like Steve and Nancy are done-zo.
History.
Kaput.
No more Stancy.
- Whomp, whomp.
- El, fully sick of being cooped up in the cabin,
sets out on her own to find Mike
and the rest of her friends at school.
- [Eleven] Where is school?
- [Sadie] Where, coincidentally,
Dustin has managed to lose Dart.
And we're still not entirely sure Dart is.
- While the boys look for Dart,
El sees Mike with Max and runs away in tears.
(thud) [Max] Ah!
- And Will has yet another horrifying run-in
with the shadow monster, who swiftly inhabits his body.
(whooshing wind)
Again, probably not a great thing.
- There's a weird rivalry going on
between Steve and Billy, too.
Cool guy drama, I guess.
- [Steve] Maybe you should just shut up and play the game.
(thud)
- While Joyce and Hopper try to make sense
of these new drawings that Will keeps making
of the shadow monster and the Upside Down world tunnels,
Nancy and Jonathan are scooped up by the government agents
for asking too many snoopy teenage questions.
- Let us out of here!
- But eventually,
Dr. Owens decides to show them the portal
to the Upside Down.
In an attempt to get them to shut the hell up.
- [Dr. Owens] We understand each other now, don't we?
- Dustin has been keeping Dart a secret from his friends
since he recaptured him,
which, I'm sure he had a perfectly goof reason for,
right?
But, surprise surprise.
- It turns out that he's a baby Demogorgon.
And he ate Dustin's family cat.
(hissing)
Whoops.
- And Hopper,
who seems to have figured out Will's cryptic maps,
starts digging in one of the desiccated pumpkin patches
and discovers an entrance to the monster's tunnels.
And, of course, because he's Hopper, he jumps on in.
- He's a brave one, all right.
But he's also stupid.
Because he almost immediately gets knocked out by
monster gas, I guess?
(Hopper coughing)
Then, the tunnel, which seems to be a part of the monster,
starts enveloping him.
(roaring) [Hopper] Wait, no! No! No!
But more on that later.
- Meanwhile, El,
who discovered Hopper's research on her origin,
heads off to find her birth mother
who we find almost completely catatonic in a rocking chair.
Unable to communicate.
- Sunflower. Rainbow.
- That's a bummer.
Oh, and Nancy and Jonathan enlist the help
of a wacky private investigator, Murray Bauman,
and end up hooking up at his weird garage.
- With help from Bob, who has a real knack for puzzling,
Joyce is able to find Hopper
and is quickly joined
by scary dudes in E.T-looking suits from Hawkins Lab,
who begin to burn the tunnel
because apparently the monster absolutely hates warm stuff.
- One unfortunate side effect, however;
Will is clearly being inhabited by the monster,
as this tunnel-burning causes him to convulse in pain, too.
And honestly, he's been acting super weird for awhile now.
(screeching)
- Dustin enlists our old friend Steve
to help him capture the now husky-sized Dart,
who is trapped in the cellar of his house.
- You ate my cat.
- But Dart is super strong and busted out.
- Uh-oh.
With Will, Joyce, Hopper, and Bob
in the hospital recovering,
Dustin and Steve set out in the woods to search for Dart.
And with the help of their friends,
erect a kind of Demogorgon fortress in the woods.
Things do not go as planned.
This is Stranger Things,
what do you expect?
- But, we do find out that Steve
is kind of a great babysitter.
In ways that only a Hawkins babysitter would need to be.
(roaring) [Steve] You want some?
(screeching) Get back!
- I still can't believe
Max's family moved into this bonkers town.
- Oh, come on.
You love it.
- While all this is happening, Will,
now operating as a kind of spy for the monster,
which, in true D&D style is called the Mind Flayer,
summons armies of Demodogs to the hospital
with great ominousness, I might add.
- It made me do it.
(screeching)
- We take a break from the storyline to rejoin El,
who discovered from her mother
that there are other kids like her,
and sets off to find them on another bus.
- She ends up in the big city,
and eventually finds her sister,
who is the girl from Season 2, Episode 1,
with the gang of masked folks.
- The gang of misfits
encourages El to work on developing her powers
and eventually enlists her help in their mission.
- Shirley Temple is gonna get us all killed.
- Which is to kill everyone involved with El
and her sister's torture as young children.
A vendetta, if you will.
Don't cross badass girls, I guess.
- But El isn't really big on the murder thing,
and, eventually, sensing trouble back in Hawkins,
parts ways with the crew
and heads back home again on a Greyhound bus.
- Back to the hospital,
where dozens of Demogorgons have broken out
and are ripping apart scientists and soldiers
all over the place.
It's just a full-on blood bath.
- Oh yeah. Bad news all around.
Hopper, Joyce, Bob, Mike, and Dr. Owens
are running around trying to avoid the monsters,
but also have to put Will to sleep
because he's a straight up
shadow monster Kapo at this point.
- He's lying! He's lying! He's lying!
- Just when it seems like everyone's screwed,
80's technology genius Bob
sneaks past the monster hoard to the security room,
where he successfully opens up a path to escape
for the rest of the crew.
Way to go, Bob!
- Tragically, Bob suffers a hero's fate,
and gets gruesomely disemboweled by a group of Demodogs.
- [Bob] No!
- (Joyce screaming)
- You're with Barb now, Bob.
The surviving gang escape back to the Byers' house,
but are eventually set upon by more Demodogs
- That's not good.
- They just can't catch a break.
- But just as they prepare to go down fighting,
a limp Demodog corpse flies through the window.
(glass shattering)
(screaming)
- [Gaten] Heralding the return of,
you guessed it,
Eleven.
As Hopper leaves with El,
Steve is charged with babysitting the kids,
which, he is, again, very good at.
- Does everybody understand that?
- Babysitter Steve.
Mom steve!
- Alas, an irate Billy comes by looking for Max,
and he and Steve end up in an epic fight.
(glass breaking)
One that is actually ended by Max,
who threatens to nail bat Billy.
- I guess that's why they call her "Mad"max, huh?
(bat whooshing)
- Joyce, Jonathan, and Nancy
try to exorcize the shadow monster from Will
before it completely consumes him.
Using the only weapon they know hurts him.
Heat.
(monstrous screeching)
(wood breaking, hissing)
- Meanwhile, Steve and the kids
head down to the tunnels
to try and burn up the monster with some gasoline.
Hard to imagine they'll be able
to do what a bunch of soldiers with flame throwers couldn't,
but you gotta admire their pluck.
- And, of course,
no monster could be fully defeated without El,
who, alongside Hopper, descends into Hawkins Lab's gate.
And as Hopper fires off a machine gun at the Demodogs
swarming all around them,
El uses her powers
to fully close the gate beneath Hawkins Lab.
(monstrous screeching)
(Eleven screaming)
- Bye bye, mister Mind Flayer,
way to go, El.
- Cut to a month later,
where the government
finally was forced to admit their role
in the death of Barb and Bob,
and Hawkins lab is shut down for good.
- And as a nice little wrap-up for our heroes,
all the kids end up at the school's Snow Ball,
where Dustin has a, let's say "new" hairdo.
El shows up looking very dolled up to dance with Mike,
and, oh, they finally kiss.
- And, oh, Lucas and Max are a couple now.
Pretty damn cute if you ask me.
- Unfortunately, in true Hawkins form,
the final shot warns
that stuff is about to get extremely real for the kids
in Season 3.
(thunder)
(lightning cracks)
- Anywho, now that you're all caught up,
you're ready to dive into Season 3.
- That was good.
(clap)
- Check it out on Netflix.
(jazzy music)