In the Netflix series Stranger Things, the story begins in Hawkins, Indiana with the mysterious
disappearance of the young boy Will Byers. Most assume this is a typical missing kid case,
but Will’s friends Mike Wheeler, Dustin Henderson, and Lucas Sinclair suspect
something stranger was afoot. While looking for Will they discover a mysterious young girl with
a shaved head named Eleven. Eleven has escaped from a government facility, Hawkins National Lab,
where experiments conducted on her have given her psychokinetic abilities.
Eleven agrees to use her powers to help her new friends try to find and save Will,
while the trio of Mike, Dustin, and Lucas teach Eleven what it’s like to be a normal kid.
Along the way, Mike and Eleven even begin to develop romantic feelings for each other.
It turns out that Will is trapped in a place known as the Upside Down,
a dark alternate dimension that Hawkins Lab was investigating that also happened to be inhabited
by monstrous creatures known as Demogorgons. From his dangerous new location, Will finds a
way to communicate with his mother Joyce, who believed there was something more mysterious
behind her son’s disappearance. Joyce manages to convince the town’s carefree Sheriff Jim Hopper
to move forward with an unconventional investigation. When Hopper begins to
suspect that experiments at Hawkins Labs might have something to do with Will’s disappearance,
he is constantly deterred by higher authorities. This emboldens Hopper to
dig even deeper, disobeying his superiors and going rogue to uncover the truth.
Meanwhile, Mike's older sister Nancy is dating popular bad-boy and hair icon Steve Harrington.
When Nancy’s friend Barb goes missing, she teams up with Will’s outcast older brother Jonathan,
the target of bullying from Steve’s friend group, to investigate the strange things happening in
their small town. Nancy and Jonathan are unaware that Barb had been taken into the Upside Down
and killed by a Demogorgon, meaning everyone would need to act fast to save Will from a similar fate.
As season one comes to a close, the various characters begin to move closer to the truth,
putting them all in increasing levels of danger. Hopper and Joyce use a portal in Hawkins Labs to
enter the Upside Down to find and rescue Will. This also brings catharsis to Sheriff Hopper,
who was still haunted by the grief of losing his young daughter Sara to cancer.
Meanwhile, Nancy and Jonathan plan to attack and kill the Demogorgon, luring it to the
Byers residence. An unaware Steve shows up at the worst possible moment, roping him into the plan to
kill the monster. The trio fight and injure the creature, but the Demogorgon manages to escape.
The head of Hawkins Lab, Dr. Martin Brenner, has his team track Eleven
and her new friends to the local middle school. The injured Demogorgon arrives,
seemingly killing Brenner and his team before turning its sights on Eleven, Mike, Dustin,
and Lucas. Eleven uses her powers to defeat the creature, sacrificing herself in the process.
As the season comes to a close, Hopper heads into the woods and leaves behind some Eggo waffles,
Eleven’s favorite food, hinting at her survival. Annnnd Will Byers has been returned home safely,
but then secretly coughs up a slug-like creature and has a vision of the Upside Down,
meaning he hadn’t quite escaped danger just yet.
Season two of Stranger Things picks up nearly a year after the events of season one.
Mike still hasn’t given up hope on somehow reuniting with Eleven,
Will begins to suffer from increasingly severe Upside Down visions, and Dustin
and Lucas have begun pining over the same new girl, Max. In other relationship developments,
Nancy and Steve break up, and Joyce has a new boyfriend, the lovable Bob.
Oh, and Eleven is actually alive and well and has been secretly living with Hopper out in a
secluded cabin this entire time. Although Hopper insists to Eleven that her living there in secret
was for her own safety, Eleven grows angry and resentful toward her new surrogate father. This
leads to Eleven breaking the rules and seeking out Mike. Unfortunately, Eleven misreads an encounter
between Mike and Max as flirtatious, and decides against reuniting with her crush. Instead, Eleven
goes off in search of her biological mother, whom she’d been taken from at birth. Eleven finds
her mother catatonic and mentally broken by her experiences with Hawkins Lab. And so, Eleven goes
off on another search, this time finding Kali, another girl taken by Dr. Brenner to experiment
on. Kali takes Eleven under her tutelage, training her to use her anger to strengthen her powers.
It’s eventually revealed that Will Byers has been infected by a villainous shadow monster dubbed
the Mind Flayer. Will begins creating seemingly erratic and random drawings that actually turn out
to be a map of an Upside Down network of tunnels underneath the town of Hawkins. Hawkins Lab has
rebranded and installed a new director, Dr. Owens, to right their previous wrongs. They attempt to
destroy the tunnels, but this causes Will to break down in agonizing pain. Will is taken to the lab,
where Dr. Owens hypothesizes that eradicating the tunnels could prove to be fatal to Will.
And it’s not just the Mind Flayer that our heroes have to worry about. Packs of loose,
young Demogorgons, nicknamed demodogs, have been unleashed on the town. A newly single and
heartbroken Steve Harrington teams up with Max, Lucas, and Dustin, who adopts a demodog named
Dart, to stop the creatures from destroying Hawkins. The group fend off the demodogs,
then track them to Hawkins Lab. Along the way, they team up with Nancy and Jonathan who have been
trying to expose the truth of the Upside Down to the public in an attempt to get justice for Barb.
Inside Hawkins Lab, Hopper, Joyce, Bob, Mike, Will, and Dr. Owens are attacked by the pack
of demodogs. Dr. Owens stays behind to help the others navigate safely out of
the overrun lab and Bob sacrifices himself to help the others escape.
The entire group retreats to the Byers’ residence as the demodogs give chase.
And that’s when Eleven finally returns, sensing Mike was in danger,
and saves everyone by defeating the creatures. After a very brief and celebratory reunion, the
group formulates a plan to defeat the Mind Flayer, which would save Will and the rest of the town.
Joyce, Nancy, and Jonathan take Will to Hopper’s cabin where they overheat him to
burn the Mind Flayer’s virus out of him. Steve leads the rest of the kids to the vine tunnels,
now able to destroy them without hurting Will. This serves as a distraction,
luring the remaining demodogs to them while Hopper and Eleven return to Hawkins
Lab to permanently close the portal to the Upside Down. Eleven successfully uses her
powers to close the gate, killing all of the remaining demogorgons, including poor Dart.
As the season comes to a close, Dr. Owens gives Hopper a forged birth certificate for
Eleven, allowing her to live publicly as a normal child. Hawkins Lab is then permanently shut down
after Nancy and Jonathan team up with disgraced journalist and conspiracy theorist Murray Bauman
to expose the lab’s experiments. At the middle school dance, everything was finally back to
normal. Steve helps Dustin be cool, Lucas and Max kiss, Mike and Eleven kiss, oh and the Mind Flayer
is revealed to still be alive, towering over the school and keeping watch over our heroes.
In season three of Stranger Things, the kids of Hawkins are trying to put their crazy
pasts behind them and just be typical teenagers. Dustin returns home from summer camp with a new,
long distance girlfriend, Suzie, that his friends speculate is made up. Max and Lucas have developed
an on-again-off-again relationship, and Mike and Eleven are still going strong. So strong,
in fact, that Hopper goes full over-protective father and threatens Mike to stop seeing Eleven.
This creates a strain on the relationship, which results in Eleven breaking up with Mike.
The Starcourt Mall has been newly built in Hawkins and becomes a hotspot for the kids to hang out at.
As for the adults, Steve is unsure of what to do with his life and takes a job working at the
Scoops Ahoy ice cream shop in the mall. There, he befriends and flirts with his new co-worker,
Robin. Jonathan and Nancy both become interns at the Hawkins Post.
And Hopper develops romantic feelings for Joyce, who rebuffs his advances.
When Dustin tries to communicate with his girlfriend Suzie via radio,
he accidentally intercepts a mysterious Russian transmission. He teams up with Steve, Robin, and
Lucas’ younger sister Erica to decode the message, revealing that Russians were unloading mysterious
shipments at the Starcourt Mall at night. Upon further investigation, the group discovers an
elevator leading to a Russian lab deep below the Mall’s surface. Inside the lab, the group finds
Russian scientists attempting to reopen a portal to the Upside Down. Steve and Robin are captured
and interrogated by the Russians, but are saved by Dustin and Erica. Following his brush with death,
Steve confesses his true feelings for Robin, who in turn comes out to him as a lesbian.
Meanwhile, Joyce begins to notice demagnetization around her home and office and brings Hopper in to
help her investigate. At first they suspect the answer to once again lead back to Hawkins Lab,
but instead find out from Hawkins’ corrupt Mayor Kline that the Russians had been buying
abandoned properties throughout town, including the newly constructed Mall, for some mysterious,
nefarious purposes. Eventually, Hopper and Joyce befriend a kind Russian scientist named Alexei,
who doesn’t speak any English. They take Alexei to conspiracy theorist Murray Bauman to help
translate. Alexei confirms to them that the Russians were attempting to
reopen the portal to the Upside Down below the Starcourt Mall.
The group is pursued by a Russian soldier named Grigori who kills Alexei for his betrayal.
Nancy and Jonathan begin investigating the home of
an elderly woman named Mrs. Driscoll who was concerned about rabid rats eating her
fertilizer. Nancy and Jonathan discover that this wasn’t an isolated incident,
as rabid rats are spotted all over town eating fertilizer. Soon, Mrs. Driscoll herself is
eating fertilizer, and Nancy and Jonathan realize that she has been possessed by the Mind Flayer.
Also possessed by the Mind Flayer? Max’s older step brother Billy. The
Mind Flayer uses Billy to amass an army of other possessed victims.
Eleven uses her powers to locate the Mind Flayer by going inside the possessed Billy’s mind.
He reveals that the Mind Flayer wants to kill her as revenge for closing the portal in season two.
The possessed army then begins to dissolve together to form a giant organic mass:
the physical embodiment of the Mind Flayer. The Mind Flayer attacks Eleven’s group,
seriously wounding Eleven. The group then teams up with Nancy and Jonathan to head to the Mall to
rescue Steve, Robin, Dustin, and Erica. Eleven defeats the Russians, but collapses due to her
wound from the Mind Flayer. She realizes a piece of the Mind Flayer had been embedded inside her,
and upon removing it she suddenly loses all of her powers. Hopper, Joyce, and Murray arrive
at the mall to save the kids and destroy the Russian machine that was opening a new portal.
As the kids try to leave, the Mind Flayer and Billy trap them inside the mall.
Eleven manages to get through to the possessed Billy, recounting his
happiest memory with his deceased mother that Eleven had witnessed when previously
inside his mind. Billy then realized all of the terrible things he had done
and sacrificed himself to the Mind Flayer in order to save his sister Max and all of her friends.
Down in the lab, Hopper, Joyce, and Murray race to the machine, guided by Dustin via radio.
To shut down the machine, the trio needed to crack a safe that held the necessary shutdown keys. The
combination to the safe was the quantum mechanics equation for Planck’s constant. Fortunately,
Dustin knew exactly who to call for the solution and radios his very real camp girlfriend
Suzie. Suzie, unaware of how dire Dustin’s situation was, forces him to duet the theme song
from Neverending Story before giving him the code. Hopper and Joyce open the safe and grab the keys,
ready to shut down the machine. Unfortunately, Grigori arrives and attacks Hopper. Hopper kills
Grigori by throwing him into the machine, causing the whole system to malfunction.
Hopper is left with no way to escape, and gives Joyce the signal to destroy the machine anyway.
A distraught Joyce turns the key, closing the gate and saving the day, but vaporizing Hopper in the
process. With the gate to the Upside Down closed, the Mind Flayer in the mall collapses and dies.
Three months later, Starcourt Mall is destroyed and the corrupt Mayor Kline is arrested. The Byers
family take in the now orphaned and powerless Eleven and prepare to leave Hawkins for good.
Mike and Eleven reaffirm their love for each other as Eleven departs.
Meanwhile, over in Russia, Hopper is revealed to be alive and held prisoner as his captors
continue their experiments on the Upside Down and its villainous inhabitants.