Stranger Things: Season One

This is the latest, much heralded series that you can binge in one watch.  Rich in nostalgia, it celebrates its genre heritage with pride.

In November 1983, a 12-year-old boy, Will Byers, goes missing in Hawkins, Indiana after witnessing a strange creature on his bike ride home. Soon after Will disappears, a mysterious young girl appears at Billy’s, a local fast-food joint, wearing a hospital gown and with a shaved head. The owner, Billy, calls the authorities and a woman arrives, saying she is a social worker. She immediately shoots him, and the young girl runs away from the restaurant. Will’s friends Lucas, Mike and Dustin find her in the woods during a storm.

Of course, over the eight episodes the plot widens and deepens. There are friendships that develop, meaningful relationships that change, small-town dreams and creepy conspiracies. Hawkins Laboratories are found to be a place of evil where bad things happen. The origin of the mysterious girl, later named as ‘Eleven’ or  ‘El, is revealed and found to be connected to the strange events going on. Will’s apparent death is more than it appears to be.

Created, produced and at times directed by The Duffer Brothers, the series is anything but duff.* (Apologies: couldn’t resist it.) Stranger Things looks like a TV series from the 1980’s and the characters feel like that they are from a Steven Spielberg movie of that time. The plot puts the Spielberg-type characters into a set up worthy of a Stephen King novel, or a John Carpenter film with a touch of Ray Bradbury’s small-town nostalgia thrown in.  It is a time of VCR’s and video shops, of walkie-talkies rather than mobile phones. The producers know this (“You ever read any Stephen King?” says a character at one point) and clearly use it to their advantage. There are references to all of these throughout scattered like Easter Eggs. The music also helps – Peter Gabriel singing David Bowie’s Heroes (from a much later album, but presumably used because the rights for the original were not available), New Order, Echo and the Bunnymen, Joy Division – all help set the series in a particular place and time.

The acting is generally superb. Of the actors you maybe do know, Winona Ryder, in her first major role for many years, is terrific and shows what a great actress she can be. Portraying Joyce Myers, the divorced mother of the missing Will, she balances a steely determination to find her missing son with a deliberately off-kilter performance as a mother who seems to be succumbing to grief. Matthew Modine (Full Metal Jacket, Birdy) gives a much less demonstrative role, yet one that is scarily effective, as the scientist Martin Brenner, leader of a mysterious scientific experiment.

Like The Goonies and E.T. before it, it is the youngest cast members who excel. Will’s friends Lucas, Mike and Dustin are all uniformly brilliant, but of particular notice is Milly Bobby Brown as El/Eleven, whose wide-eyed innocence and other-worldly presence are particularly winning, if a tad reminiscent of Firestarter. The boys are typical outsider nerds, who spend their time riding their bikes, talking comics, avoiding bullies and playing board games. “Do you even remember what happened on the Bloodstone Path?” says one of them at one point, referring to a point in their Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game.

Though different, an older group of teenage actors and actresses are equally of merit. Their world is different to that of the younger geeks, more Ferris Bueller’s Day Off  and The Breakfast Club than E.T., being one of boyfriends and girlfriends, early crushes and sexual relationships, hanging out by the pool and social subdivisions. Nancy, Mike’s sister, is the female lead in this group whose first serious boyfriend is the often unpleasant Steve. Nancy also forms a friendship with Jonathan, Will’s brother, who is taking pictures where Will’s bike was found when Barbara, Nancy’s friend, also goes missing.

Of the negatives, there are few. There are times when it gets a little shouty. Occasionally the series’ emphasis on creating a time and place fills up the screen-time a little too much, and I’m not entirely sure how the 1980’s will play out to a contemporary audience. It is in places, particularly at the beginning, a slow burner, concerned more with place and backstory than plot progression. But when it steps up a gear, it really works. The development of the characters is such that when the scary things happen, you care about what happens.

The ending is a satisfying accumulation of what has gone before. It makes watching the series worthwhile.

Netflix should be applauded for having the courage to develop a series that is original whilst steeped in nostalgia. I enjoyed it more than other Netflix original series Daredevil or Sense8, and more than the first season of USA Network/Amazon’s equivalent series, Mister Robot. This one has heart, likeable characters and none of the lapses of logic that have marred the other series for me.

I would like a second season, should they wish to do so.

Stranger Things

Season One on Netflix (US/UK), June 2016

8 Episodes, 400 minutes (approx.)

Review by Mark Yon

*Duff: Not just a brand of beer in The Simpsons, but according to the Cambridge Dictionary, an old English slang term for something that is “bad, not useful or not working”. Similarly, a ‘duffer’ is someone who is ‘a person who has little skill or is slow to learn.’ (Not true here, either.)

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