November 6, 1983. Hawkins, Indiana…
Young Will Byers is cycling home from a "Dungeons & Dragons" campaign at a friend's house, when a terrifying figure suddenly appears, Will tries to escape and hide, but the Monster abducts him to an alternate dimension. Will's friends Dustin, Lucas and Mike begin investigating his disappearance; while looking for Will in the local forest, the boys find a girl with a shaved head in a hospital gown, who they let stay in Mike's basement. They learn her name is Eleven and discover that she has psychokinetic abilities.
Will's mother Joyce becomes transfixed by supernatural events affecting the house electricity - she's convinced Will is communicating with her. As these strange events continue, she witnesses (and is threatened by) the same monster that took Will. Meanwhile, police chief Jim Hopper grows suspicious of the nearby national laboratory and begins researching into the facility's shady history. Mike's older sister Nancy attends a pool party hosted by her new boyfriend Steve, begrudgingly accompanied by her best friend Barb. Jonathan, Will's brother, witnesses the events of the party, taking photos. While alone, Barb is abducted by the Monster.
Stranger Things is an American science fiction horror drama television series created by the Duffer Brothers and streaming on Netflix. The brothers serve as showrunners and are executive producers along with Shawn Levy and Dan Cohen. The series premiered on Netflix on July 15, 2016. Set in the 1980s in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana, the first season focuses on the investigation into the disappearance of a young boy (Will Byers) amid supernatural events occurring around the town, including the appearance of a girl with psychokinetic abilities (Eleven). The second season focuses on Will's side effects from being in the Upside Down with its entities crawling into the real world. The third season focuses Eleven and Mike's relationship as the kids continue their battle against the Upside Down entities. The series stars an ensemble cast including Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Finn Wolfhard, Millie Bobby Brown, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Noah Schnapp, Sadie Sink, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Joe Keery, Cara Buono, and Dacre Montgomery.
The Duffer Brothers developed the series as a mix of investigative drama alongside supernatural elements portrayed with horror, science fiction and childlike sensibilities. Setting the series in the 1980s, the Duffer Brothers infused references to the pop culture of that decade while several themes and directorial aspects were inspired primarily by the works of Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, and Stephen King, as well as anime and video games. They also took inspiration from strange experiments that took place during the Cold War and real-world conspiracy theories involving secret government experiments.
The Duffer brothers wrap up their major plot points by the end of the eighth episode, but they do leave a few tantalizing threads hanging. That’s smart. You’re going to want to feather your hair, slip on some acid-washed jeans and book a return trip to Hawkins.
An occasional wink like that one aside, Stranger Things is not a campy send-up but a hugely engrossing and enjoyably paranoid suspense thriller. It opens with a cataclysmic security failure at a secretive government lab in a small Indiana town. And whatever has gone missing, the lab's scientists are wearing hazmat suits and carrying automatic weapons while hunting for it.
The lab meltdown is followed, in short order, by the disappearance of a nerdish kid named Will (Noah Schnapp) from the local junior high. Though a search for him is organized, its prospects seem discouraging: The police chief (David Harbour, State Of Affairs) has never investigated anything bigger than serial garden-gnome theft, and his idea of a nutritious breakfast is Schlitz and toothpaste.
So Will's three friends—the sort of dorky pre-teen outcasts who stay in touch by walkie-talkie and shield themselves from social persecution in marathon Dungeons and Dragons sessions–decide to do their own legwork.
They don't have much success but mucking around in the woods just outside town, they do encounter an odd little girl (Millie Bobby Brown, Intruders) sporting an unfeminine buzzcut, whose vocabulary doesn't extend much beyond "yes," "no," and "11," the number perhaps uncoincidentally tattooed on her arm above a bar code. The bar code, they soon discover, is far from her most exotic characteristic. As one of the boys says in a halting voice somewhere between awe and fear: "She … does stuff."
You don't need to be a cinematic Nostradamus to predict where things go from there, at least in broad outline. But whatever degree of predictability Stranger Things suffers from is more than made up by the wit of twin-brother producers Matt and Ross Duffer, lately of Fox's dystopian Wayward Pines, who did most of the writing.
Even the inevitable preposterous scene in which the school science teacher instructs the kids on how to tear a hole in the space-time continuum is neatly wrapped with a hilariously pompous warning: "Science is neat, but I'm afraid it's not very forgiving."
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