So. The wife and I finished off Stranger Things today. Well worth watching, in my opinion.
Warning! Spoilers ahead. If you intend to watch the series, you may want to stop reading now.
The story starts in the early 1980’s. Four friends – Mike, Will, Lucas, and Dustin – are your typical science geek, Dungeons & Dragons playing, nerds, who get picked on by the mouth breathers in school. They live in a small town, Hawkins, Indiana, and they have to deal with the usual school problems, parents, siblings, and evading boredom.
One of the friends, Will, disappears. This causes quite the buzz around town. Hopper, the town Sheriff, investigates, but without much luck. Mike, Lucas, and Dustin are convinced that something strange has happened to Will, as opposed to the run-of-the-mill kidnapping theory that all the adults share. Of course the kids are right.
While out looking for Will in the woods, they come across a girl. She doesn’t talk much, and Mike ends up hiding her in his basement, where the gang plays D&D. They soon discover she has mysterious powers. She has the umber 011 tattooed on her arms so they call her Eleven, or El for short. She knows where Will is, a creepy other dimension called the Upside Down. Part of the program she was in deals with a portal into this other dimension, guarded by the military, who have to keep going in to have a look around, in spite of losing many of the poor slobs they send in to the very monsters they are worried about.
It turns out that Eleven escaped from a governmental facility where a program is running to develop psychic-powered warriors to use against the Soviets. There are also monsters living in the Upside Down. Mike and friends dubbed them Demogorgons, after a nasty creature in D&D. These monsters break through to our dimension and cause trouble for our Heroes. Of course, now that hideous creatures are invading, El must use her powers to fight them.
The Upside Down is just like Hawkins, but if Hawkins were always at night time and everything was covered in vines, sort of like Kudzu on steroids. The vines act like a nervous system for the Big Bad, letting him know what is going on. The Big Bad and all the monsters share a hive mind (what one knows, they all know) and along with the vine have a good handle on what happening so they can stay a step ahead of the puny humans.
Will is found but he is also psychically connected to the monster trying to invade our world. At times this is helpful to our plucky young heroes, and at other times quite bad for Will. Each side uses the other’s thoughts and perceptions to spy on the enemy, but when the Big Bad gets hurt, so does Will.
Over the span of five seasons, the group finds Will and gets him back, but has to fight the Demogorgons (and other Lovecraftian horrors), governmental Men In Black and soldiers, the man running the psychic warrior program Eleven escaped from, and the rest of the humans in Hawkins who have no idea what is going on.
Each season has it own storyline, the first two dealing with the discovery of the Upside Down and the nasty creatures within it, the third season focuses more on dealing with the Russians who have a similar portal in their land, and the last two seasons where they are dealing with Vecna (another reference to D&D), the Big Bad, who is trying to take over our world.
There is one point in the fifth season where Will finally realizes he can use his connection to interfere with the Bad Guy. He has a minor success when he keeps several Demogorgons from killing his friends. Everyone is excited about this and think he will be able to use his connection to kill Vecna. Let me put this in D&D terms. Essentially, Will is now a first level sorcerer. Vecna is something like a 30th level sorcerer. In this particular scenario, it never goes well for the first level sorcerer. And for a while, things do indeed go poorly for young Will, but he does get better as things go along. He never gets as powerful as El, but he gets enough that he contributes to the fight instead of being used by the bad guys all the time. Ultimately, the gang takes the fight to Vecna on his home turf. The buildup to it is exciting and moves along well.
Overall, the characters are intriguing, and the stories hold your attention and draw you forward, making you want to find out what happens next. There are a few soap opera relationship threads mixed in, which are sometimes a little annoying. There are lots of references to 80’s culture, so you have built-in Easter Eggs for those who like that sort of thing. The acting was well done, and you feel for these characters as they go through their struggles. We see the characters grow and change over the course of the series. They have some big names serving as secondary characters, who all do a great job.
There are a few problems. The denouement was a little drawn out but that can be forgiven. They have a lot of swearing. This really offended the wife as she doesn’t like it when characters on TV shows use the Lord’s name in vain. And they do it a lot. Almost o the level of a Quentin Tarantino film where he believes the gratuitous use of the word “fuck” is dialogue. The swearing here fits a little better as the characters are usually under stress and I can see where people would swear when they are about to be eaten alive by something unnatural. Still, I think they could have toned it down a little and still had a solid story and characterization.
If you like suspenseful stories, with humor sprinkled in, characters that are likeable (even the bad guys), stories that movie along with little to no slow spots, and scary monsters that don’t go too over-the-top with the blood and gore, you might like this series.
Have you seen the series, my Hordeling? If so, leave a comment and let me know what you thought.
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