Stranger Things is this cool new sorta mystery-scifi-horror-drama type deal from Netflix.
It’s set in the 80s, and it borrows a lot from the films of that time, like E.T., and
Alien.
The story begins with the disappearance of a boy called Will from the town of Hawkins,
Indiana, and the mystery quickly deepens with the appearance of a girl with psychic powers,
a shadowy government agency, and a monster from another dimension.
By the end of the season Will is found but there are still heaps of unresolved questions
– like what’s up with Hopper and the g-men?
What is the monster, and how does the Upside Down work?
What happened to Eleven?
And why did Nancy hook up with the douchebag Steve instead of the sensitive Jonathan?
Was it the hair?
It was probably the hair.
But still let’s have a look at what happened in Stranger Things Season 1, beginning at
the very beginning.
In the fifties and sixties, the CIA conducted secret experiments in a program called MKUltra,
using drugs like LSD to investigate mind control, brainwashing and interrogation techniques
– which is a real thing that happened, by the way – but in Stranger Things, some of
these experiments take place at the Hawkins National Laboratory, led by a certain Dr.
Brenner.
And one of Brenner’s subjects back in the day was a woman called Terry Ives.
We learn that Terry was pregnant while she was being experimented on with drugs, so naturally,
her child was born with psychic powers – like telekinesis.
Terry named the child Jane, but Jane was taken away from her by Brenner, who covered up the
kidnapping saying Terry actually had a miscarriage.
Terry tried to sue Brenner to get her daughter back, but these attempts failed, and Terry
seems to have declined into a drugged-out stupor.
Meanwhile Jane grew up in the Hawkins lab, where she was tattooed with her new name – Eleven.
Eleven calls Dr Brenner “papa”, which might mean Dr. Brenner lied and told El that
he was her dad, or maybe he really is her dad, maybe he had some relationship with Terry,
we don’t know.
But in any case El is treated cruelly at the Lab.
Brenner subjects her to lots of experiments – making her break things with her mind,
and perceive things from a distance.
Sometimes he put Eleven in a sensory deprivation tank, where Eleven’s able to psychically
project herself into a weird dark void where she can interact with people who are far away
– this is during the Cold War, so Brenner and his CIA buddies use her to spy on Russians.
But also in this darkness Eleven encounters a monster.
The monster presumably isn’t physically in this dark space, but is in its own dimension,
the Upside Down, just as the Russian is in Russia, and Eleven’s in the tank, but by
projecting herself through this dark space, Eleven is able to reach across the dimensions,
and under the orders of Brenner, she makes contact with the monster, somehow causing
“a tear in time and space”, making a gate, a portal into the monster’s dimension, allowing
it to emerge into Hawkins.
In the commotion, Eleven escapes the Lab by crawling through a drain pipe, meanwhile the
monster starts to hunt animals and people in Hawkins – at the start of Episode 1,
it takes Will.
So this kicks off the human drama of the story – we see Will’s mother Joyce frantically
trying to connect with her son, and Will’s older brother Jonathan searching, in his angst
and alienation.
We see the cop Jim Hopper, still haunted by his daughter’s death.
And when Eleven escapes from the Lab she groups up with Will’s friends Mike and Lucas and
Dustin, who teach her loyalty and normalcy and love, there’s also Mike’s sister Nancy,
who’s growing up, trying to work out who she is, discovering sex – like, when we
first see Nancy, Dustin offers her some sausage and pepperoni pizza, which Nancy declines,
and this refusal to ‘take the sausage’ kinda foreshadows her conflict over whether
to sleep with her boyfriend Steve, or to listen to her friend Barb and stay a virgin.
Barb, for her part, dies and no one seems to care, but Steve gets a redemption of sorts,
after being an asshole early on.
In the end, Nancy and Steve are together, but there’s still a bit of a love triangle
with Jonathan.
So yeah, there’s some interesting drama happening, but the really juicy mysteries
surround the Upside Down.
The Upside Down seems to be a sort of “alternate dimension”.
It has the same stuff in in it as the real world – all the buildings and trees and
cars of Hawkins are there – but everything’s dark and dead and decayed, cold and empty.
When stuff moves or changes in the real Hawkins, nothing seems to change or move in the Upside
Down, so it’s almost like this is a snapshot, a frozen moment in time, perhaps of what Hawkins
was like at the moment of contact, when Eleven touched the monster – maybe it was at that
moment that this whole dimension was created.
Or maybe the Upside Down used to be alive and normal like Hawkins, but it was infected
by this weird toxic growth we see in the Upside Down.
There are vines or tentacles on the ground, slime on the walls, particles in the air,
the gate seems to grow, and wherever the monster goes, slime spreads.
Maybe this is like an interdimensional disease, spreading from parallel world to parallel
world, infecting the multiverse.
Or maybe this is a time travel thing.
Maybe the Upside Down is the future of Hawkins, it’s what it’ll become after being infected
– by its own future.
This is all wild speculation, but whatever the Upside Down is, it’s clearly closely
connected to Hawkins – the dimensions affect each other in lots of different ways.
Activity in the Upside Down can cause electrical disturbance in Hawkins, Will and Joyce can
even use lights to communicate, though we don’t how this works on Will’s end – how
can he even see the lights and letters from the Upside Down?
Some people think this means Will has psychic powers like Eleven – which could maybe also
explain this weird gate-like thing Will seems to open – but the evidence still isn’t
strong.
Anyway the Upside Down can also affect Hawkins through magnetism – apparently the gate
has a strong electromagnetic field.
And sound can cross the dimensions – Jonno hears Nancy when she’s in the Upside Down.
The very walls in Hawkins can give way to the Upside Down – which allows the monster
to enter.
The monster, also called the Demogorgon, is a creature that looks kinda like a human,
but with long arms, and five unfolding ‘petals’ of teeth instead of a face.
After Eleven makes the gate, the monster is able to make small portals of its own, crossing
into Hawkins, to drag prey into the Upside Down.
Like a shark, it’s apparently drawn by blood.
The monster hunts for food, but it also uses prey for other purposes – in Episode 8,
we see that Will has been stuck in some gross organic fleshy web, like in Alien, with a
slimy tentacle down his throat like a Facehugger.
Maybe, like in Alien, the creature uses human hosts to reproduce.
Maybe the little slugs that emerge from the bodies of Barb and Will are little baby demogorgons.
Though that doesn’t explain the hatched egg we see earlier on in the Upside Down – maybe
that’s the egg the monster hatched from, but if so, what laid the egg?
It looks too big to come out of a Demogorgon.
Also, the first time we see the monster, it looks like its eating that same egg.
So between the monster, the eggs, the facehugger-tentacles, and the cough-up slugs, there must be some
complex symbiotic life-cycle happening here, there must be more creatures involved – maybe
there are big egg-laying slug queens, or juvenile demogorgons out there.
Maybe this creature is an alien.
Or maybe the monster is something more human.
One popular theory is that the monster somehow represents Eleven’s darker half, like, maybe
the monster is a psychic manifestation of her anger and fear, and her suffering at the
Hawkins Lab, and that in that moment of contact when the gate was made, she brought the monster
out of her subconscious and into the real world – maybe that’s what El means when
she says “I’m the monster”.
This idea could help explain some similarities between El and the monster, like in Episode
1, we see the monster open a lock without touching it, just as Eleven locks a lock – the
monster appears to have telekinetic abilities, just like El.
Also, Eleven seems to recognise a photo of Will without having met him before – maybe
she recognises him because her other half, the monster, has abducted Will.
When El defeats the monster, both she and the monster disappear, as though they kinda
cancelled each other out.
Maybe El and the monster merged back into one, the monster returning to its place in
El’s consciousness – maybe changing her for the worse.
All that said, if El is the monster, how do we explain the complex biology of the Upside
Down?
Could that have possibly come from El’s mind?
Finally, it’s very interesting that when El uses her powers, we see the same weird
electrical effects that are associated with the Upside Down, so there’s gotta be some
link here.
It’s all very uncertain, but there are clearly strong connections between Eleven and the
monster and the Upside Down.
At the end of Season 1, El and the monster disappear, Will comes home, and we get a ‘one
month later’, where everything seems calm and normal.
The Byers have Christmas dinner, the boys play D and D. Steve and Nancy get Jon a camera
to replace the one Steve broke.
All seems well.
But we see some newspaper clippings that show there’s still a lot going on.
Joyce has told the media about Brenner’s experiments at the Lab, leading to a “massive
investigation”.
The coroner who was involved in Will’s fake body has been caught, and there’s a shake-up
among the State Troopers, who worked with Brenner’s people to cover stuff up.
It seems that the secrets of the Hawkins Lab are being revealed to the world – but it
may be that nothing comes of this, because MKUltra was supposedly exposed before.
But there are more cool details.
The article quotes someone called Ives expressing disgust about the Lab, which is weird cause
Becky Ives doesn’t seem to believe any of this conspiracy stuff, and Terry Ives doesn’t
seem to speakj – so what’s going on?
Is Terry talking again?
Could she maybe have a reunion with her daughter, Eleven?
Finally, the article mentions Brenner.
Last we saw him, he was attacked by the monster – but this suggests he survives, and comments
from Brenner’s actor and the Duffer Brothers have all but confirmed that we will be seeing
him again.
Which brings us to Season 2.
Season 2 of Stranger Things is set for release in 2017, and there’s already a lot of info
out about it.
The show’s creators, the Duffer Brothers, have said the season will be like a “sequel”
to the first.
Apparently it’ll explore the repercussions of everything that happened last season, while
also introducing “new problems and questions”.
There’ll be new characters, including Max and Billy and Roman.
Max is a sort of a tomboy with a complicated history, Billy is her step-brother, hyper-confident
and violent, and Roman is an outsider with a rough past who seeks revenge for a great
loss suffered at an early age.
All these guys sound potentially interesting, it’ll be cool to see how they fit with the
existing cast.
Also, a teaser trailer for Season 2 has released nine episode titles, which give tantalising
hints of what’s to come.
The first title, Madmax is evocative of the Mad Max movies, but probably refers to the
character Max.
The Boy Who Came Back to Life has a Harry Potter vibe, but we know this refers to Will,
just like on the newspaper.
A lot of the other stuff could kinda mean anything – the pumpkin patch could maybe
be like a field of eggs like in Alien, the palace could be some kind of important base,
the storm could be general metaphorical conflict or maybe, more literally, some kinda interdimensional
Upside Down-y kinda storm?
A pollywog is a tadpole, like the pokéman, which could perhaps refer to these slugs if
they’re, like, baby demogorgons.
The secret cabin sounds like a good place for Eleven or someone to hide.
And the brain could maybe refer to some intelligence behind the creatures of the Upside Down, maybe
some hivemind shit.
Finally the lost brother might refer to a test subject like Eleven who was taken away
from their sibling – maybe this is the “great loss” Roman suffered.
So there are a million cool new possibilities for Season 2 here, but let’s also have a
look at what might happen to the characters we already and love.
Season 1 ends with this creepy scene where Will coughs up a slug, just like the one that
came out of Barb, and then then seems to flicker for a moment into the Upside Down.
Apparently the Upside Down has done something bad to Will, and there are a lots of different
theories about what this may be.
Since he got facehugger-tentacled, some people think he’s got monster eggs or monster slugs
growing inside him, or even that he’s turning into a monster.
Another possibility is that his time in the Upside Down has given him some kind of power
to see into that dimension, that he’s connected somehow.
But there also questions about how this has affected Will as a person.
Like, he’s seen some shit, right?
He struggled to survive in a nightmare bizarro world, hunted a horrific monster, isolated
from all he knows, for a week, at the age of, like twelve – that must have had an
impact on him, surely, so Season 2 might explore this.
But the character we really care about here is Eleven, right?
When and how will she come back?
We do know that she’ll be back if only cause of those waffles Hopper leaves out for her.
But what’ll happen with her character?
She’s got this great identity conflict, where one hand she wants to be pretty, and
she wants to be normal, while on the other hand, she grew up as a government “weapon”,
and sees herself as a monster.
This is why her relationship with Mike is so beautiful – he doesn’t want her to
wear a wig, or be a weapon – he accepts her for who she is.
But El still has a long way to go in working out her identity, and hopefully Season 2 will
continue to explore this.
There are also questions about her powers.
We’ve seen El throw a van into the air, levitate people, smoosh peoples brains, make
a kid pee.
Project herself across space and dimensions, rip holes in spacetime itself.
What else might she be capable of?
We got a taste of her greater power in her confrontation with the monster – her eyes
go kinda red and she goes all Super Saiyan on the monster’s ass.
There are lots of parallels here with the Marvel Comics character Jean Grey, who transforms
into a massively powerful psychic being called Dark Phoenix.
The comic in which this happens, X-Men #134, is specifically referenced in Stranger Things
by Dustin and Will.
So maybe, as with Jean Grey, we’ll see a wilder, much more destructive side to Eleven
in Season 2.
Another great character is Hopper.
Season 1 explored his grief over the death of his daughter Sarah, and we see his memories
of her driving him in the search for Will.
It seems like he still needs some closure here, and there are hints that there might
be more to reveal about Sarah’s death – Hopper’s actor describes it as a secret.
Some fans speculate that Sarah might have had powers like El.
Also there are also questions about Hopper’s connections to Brenner and the government
men.
In Episode 8 we see Hopper get in a black government car – what’s he up to?
We know earlier in the Episode Hop made a deal with Doctor Brenner – Brenner let Hop
and Joyce through the gate, and in return, Hop gave Brenner… what?
The likely answer is that Hop told Brenner where to find Mike and El – that’s how
Brenner knew to come to the high school gym.
You can argue that that was the right strategic move – Will’s life was at stake, and Eleven
can protect herself, but still – Hop totally betrayed them.
If Joyce and the boys find out, we could have problems.
Finally, it’d be great to find out more Brenner and the Lab and the government men,
the “bad men” – we don’t even know what to call these guys cause we really don’t
know who they are.
Hop suggests “the CIA, the NSA, Department of Energy”, others say they’re military,
we know they were working with the State Troopers, but it’s really unclear who these guys are.
We’ve seen them do some extreme shit – they murdered Benny and made it look like a suicide,
they drugged and bugged Hop, they moved Barb’s car to make it look like she ran away, they
made a lifelike fake corpse of a dead child.
They listen in on everyone’s phone calls, they use these Hawkins Power and Light guys
to spy.
Whoever they are, these guys have heaps of resources, and are ruthless in pursuing their
goals.
But what are their goals?
Clearly they’re interested in Eleven’s psychic powers, but there must be more to
it – why was Brenner so keen to get El to make contact with the monster?
What do they know about the Upside Down?
Who else might they have experimented on?
If Eleven is the eleventh subject, are there ten or more other subjects out there?
The Duffers have promised “a lot more backstory” bout Brenner and Eleven and all that, so it’ll
be awesome to dig deeper into that history.
So basically Season 1 of Stranger Things was pretty bloody great, and the sequel Season
2 is looking pretty good too.
What questions would you like to see answered next season and what do you want to see next
from Alt Shift X?
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