Season one of 'Stranger Things' felt both familiar and new

*cue synth music*

There is a very meta, almost fourth-wall-breaking scene at the end of season one of Netflix's hit series Stranger Things. After reuniting with their long-lost friend Will (Noah Schnapp), young boys Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), sit down with him for a "campaign" of Dungeons and Dragons, run by Mike. The campaign ends in dramatic fashion, but it leaves some of the group unsatisfied:

Dustin: "Whoa, whoa, whoa whoa whoa whoa....that's not it, is it?"
Mike: "No...there's a medal ceremony..."
Dustin: "Oh a medal ceremony! What are you talking about?"
Lucas: "Yeah man. The campaign was way too short."
Will: "Yeah."
Mike: "It was ten hours!"
Dustin: "But it doesn't make any sense!"
Mike: "It makes sense!"
Dustin: "Uh, no. What about the lost knight?"
Lucas: "And the proud princess?"
Will: "And those weird flowers in the cave?"
Mike: "I don't know...

Shown as part of the epilogue for season one's finale, this exchange is surely meant to be something of a nod at the audience. It certainly represented how many viewers felt after watching the first season of Stranger Things: wanting only more, and desperate for answers to the lingering questions that remained. The show, created by Matt and Ross Duffer (the Duffer Brothers), snuck onto Netflix in midsummer 2016. Supported by powerful word of mouth and intense binge-watching, Stranger Things quickly grew in popularity and became perhaps the dominant pop culture phenomenon of summer and fall 2016. And with season two premiering this Friday, it's a good time to look back at what attracted people to the show in the first place, and to guess whether season two can measure up.

The poster for season one, looking very 1980s

Season one centers on the mysterious disappearance of Will, and the nearly simultaneous appearance of a mysterious girl, who only knows herself by the name Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown). As adults and children alike try to find Will, the boys at the center of the story discover that Eleven holds many mysteries, and all involved must come to terms with the entry of the mysterious and the paranormal into their lives. And looming suspiciously over it all, a modern version of the Transylvanian castle on the hilltop with lightning striking behind it, is the Hawkins National Laboratory. Supposedly an innocuous research facility affiliated with the Department of Energy, adults and children alike soon conclude it may be the source of far (ahem) stranger things.

The source of the stranger things in Stranger Things.

The setting of Stranger Things goes a long way to explaining its appeal. The story takes place in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana, in 1983, creating the perfect backdrop for the kind of Spielbergian/Stephen King-esque story the Duffer Brothers want to tell. Our pop cultural moment is somewhat obsessed, for reasons beyond the scope of this post (but not this one!), with recreating both the actual past of the 1980s as well as the fictional interpretation of that past (then present) portrayed in such films as E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, The Goonies, Gremlins, and others. (See here for a more explicit comparison of all the 70s/80s pop culture that Stranger Things hearkens back to.) It is a time of a smaller, less intimidating, pre-cell phone/Internet America, of small towns and bikes and walkie-talkies with your neighbors, of overbearing parents and untrustworthy adults, and of kids who discover entire worlds unseen or misunderstood by the authority figures in their lives. The kind of gauzy, midsummer-just-before-sunset world evoked by these movies has so merged with the actual lived experience of those who really lived the era they depict that they are essentially becoming one in our cultural perception.   

This is also the world of Stranger Things. And it is perhaps our foremost current recapturer of that somewhat ineffable 1980s vibe. A close attention to little details helps: what people were wearing, how they talked, what they talked about, how they behaved, how they filled their time, what houses they lived in, what jobs they worked, how families interacted, what kids did--Stranger Things credibly recaptures all of these minutiae of 80s Midwestern life (or so it seemed to me, though I wasn't alive then). This is all reinforced by strikingly old-fashioned (which now, unfortunately, mostly means "competent") production. I think mostly of the extensive long takes and match cuts that dominate the cinematography of the first season, techniques that require actual craftsmanship and planning rather than the staccato rapid-fire editing common today. Also helping the atmosphere is the now-famous soundtrack (by Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein of the soundscape band Survive), a moody, expressive, ambient presence throughout the season that feels both modern in its technical complexity and a throwback in its themes and tones. Thanks to all this, the 1980s of Stranger Things feels real, regardless of whether it's the 1980s we actually lived in, or the 1980s the pop culture of that era, on which we now look back fondly, tells us we lived in.

For some parents, the lack of supervision these 80s kids enjoyed may have been the scariest part of the show

Stranger Things is also driven by some strong performances by its cast. Winona Ryder, returning to the 80s in fiction after starting her career there in fact, is by far the standout performer of the first season. As Joyce Beyers, the mother of Will, her maternal motivation to find and rescue her son is the season's emotional core. Her persistence in believing him alive, despite much evidence to the contrary, and despite what many around her quite rationally interpret as evidence of her unraveling sanity, gives us a strong, complex character in which to invest. One of her few adult allies is Jim Hopper (David Barbour), the chief of the Hawkins Police Department, a gruff yet mysteriously damaged man whose efforts to get to the bottom of Will's disappearance lead him down more rabbit holes than he anticipated. These two adults are compelling, dynamic characters whom I wanted on the screen every time they were off, and who made any scene they shared twice as worth watching.

In the Spielbergian world that Stranger Things tries to recreate, though, it's the children, not the adults, who are usually supposed to have the adventures and be at the vanguard of mystery, led there by a sense of wonder not crushed by the burdens of adulthood. But it's in this regard that Stranger Things falls a bit short of perfection. The main teenage/young adult characters are basic archetypes: Nancy (Natalie Dyer), older sister of Mike, the good girl tempted by the bad; Steve (Joe Keery), the bad-boy jock who's after Nancy's heart; and Jonathan, older brother of Will, who's awkward, moody, introspective, artistically-inclined and "misunderstood." And it is through these archetypes that the show smuggles in some of its laziest and most clichéd writing, exploring well-charted territory: parties, teen sex, peer pressure, male rivalry, parents who 'just don't get it,' a half-baked critique of suburbia, and other tropes which you would have expected something like Stranger Thing to be better than, or at least to have done something new with.

And then there's the kids. Everybody loved the kids. Dustin, Lucas, Mike, and Eleven seemed to be everyone's favorite part of Stranger Things. I'll just be straight-up here: I thought the kids were the least interesting part of the show. It's not that I hate child actors. Eleven, who I am not really counting as part of the group, is great. Brown does wonders with the character, communicating warmth, trauma, resolve, courage, and a host of other subtle emotions with sparse dialogue. And the kids themselves are good actors. But the story made them too conveniently genre-savvy, too willing to leap immediately to the possibility of the impossible, and too susceptible to its weaknesses and clichés. It's through the kids that we have a plot with stereotypical bullies (resolved, of course, in rousing fashion--twice--in the kids' favor). It's through the kids that we are supposed to suspend our disbelief most powerfully (somehow, Mike manages to hide Eleven in his house, from his entire family, for the duration of the season). And it's through the kids that the devotion to the Spielbergian aesthetic gets reduced to its most slavish: You can see the E.T. homages coming from a mile away. In the pop culture that Stranger Things invokes, it is usually the kids that end up at the center of the drama. But the kids in Stranger Things simply do not measure up to the gravity of what they face*, and the show suffers for bending itself toward them to maintain this kid-centric thrust.

Pictured: the least interesting part of the show (girl on right excepted)

This isn't to say that the adults don't get off scot-free. They too suffer from some of the less credible plotting of the show. Sheriff Hopper goes from small-town cop to John McClane-style loose cannon to Bond-level superspy over the course of just a few episodes, escalating his tactics and his skills as the plot requires.** And as his investigation uncovers more and more suspicious about the town's laboratory, with strange(r) things stretching back decades, one is left to wonder: Why only now has anyone dared venture that the giant, mysterious government facility in town might be up to something? Is this a commentary on a less cynical time, or just a convenience of plotting? Where is the conspiracy nut who's 'just asking questions'? And, speaking of conspiracy, it would be harder to find one more erratically executed or enforced than that which the masterminds at Hawkins Lab are supposedly behind. They kill the first person who accidentally comes close to guessing at what might eventually become the truth, but let many other characters who come much closer to figuring everything out live? You could say these are all nitpicking, sure. But they sufficed to bring me out of the otherwise immersive experience created by the show.

Ultimately, it's the stranger things of Stranger Things that got me to watch in the first place, that are responsible for much of the show's instantly-iconic imagery, and that will likely get me to pursue its mysteries to the end. I'm a sucker for sci-fi, especially the sorts of things that feature prominently in this show: parallel universes, interdimensional gates, government conspiracies, MKULTRA, sensory deprivation tanks, cryptozoological entities, etc. The focus on this just-beyond-plausible science recalls shows like The X-Files and Fringe, in addition to the more obvious Spielberg and Stephen King forebears.

Yet even the mysterious brings its own challenges. Consider the closing moments of the first season. Will, reunited with his family, ducks out of a Christmas dinner to "wash his hands." In reality, he goes to the bathroom to cough up a bizarre slug-like creature, then has a brief vision of the parallel universe in which he spent much of the first season trapped. He returns to our reality, and to the dinner table...but tells nothing of his experience to his mother or brother. That's right: Will is vomiting up otherworldly slugs and randomly reentering an alternative universe, and he doesn't bother to tell his family? Why not? It's not like they wouldn't believe him after what they've all been through. Why hide anything anymore? Why not just have a conversation? Something like this:

Joyce: "How are you doing, Will?"
Will: "Oh, well, I am vomiting up slug-like creatures unknown to science after spending an extended period of time in an alternate dimension, from which you rescued me by pulling an eel-like creature out of my mouth, but other than that, you know, I'm good."

This points to what I wonder about the show going forward: Will it be interesting still now that the paranormal/supernatural is a given? What made the first season so compelling was seeing how the main characters came to terms with the fact that reality might not be entirely what it seems. But now, at least nine or so people (and all the main characters) know things can get weird. Now that the paranormal is a given aspect of the lives of the show's main characters, now that they know the mysterious surrounds them, can the show derive the same level of storytelling satisfaction from merely deepening the mystery as it did from slowly unraveling the reality of the mysterious in the first place? Or will Stranger Things travel a well-trod path and get lost in its own mythology? Will it continue to pull off the tricky act of taking advantage of pop culture nostalgia while also feeling like something new?

These are all questions only season two can answer. We'll have to see what stranger things Stranger Things will bring to bear.

*This is never more apparent than the scene when the boys plus Eleven finally confront the monster that has plagued the town throughout season one. The best they can do is slingshot a rock at it. Fortunately, Eleven is there to fight as well.
**Although the show seemed to suggest there's more to him than we have yet seen, so this may not end up being a plot hole in the end, but rather a correct inference on my part of greater depth to his character.