A thread for Stranger Things, the "Goonies meets X-Files" new Netflix series (with SPOILERS!)

okay so i know 11 is hardcore leggo my eggo but surely modine fed her something else during the 12 years she was in the govt facility.

by the way the supermarket scene was badass

Probably soylent protein gruel 7d/w in the facility

11 is gonna grow up to be the lead singer of the band Savages.

"okay so i know 11 is hardcore leggo my eggo but surely modine fed her something else during the 12 years she was in the govt facility."

see i don't think she got anything like that living in the lab and that's why she wanted the junk food all the time.

Yeah

Soybean paste fortified with lsd

vs whatever the fuck an eggo is

how did the town process any of this information??

idk, it reminded me of how at the end of Buffy episodes all the townsfolk just go on about their lives like it's not at all weird that the world almost ends every couple weeks.

11 is Imperator Furiosa, surely?

font also quite reminiscent of this: http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1306028600l/190958.jpg

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Saturday, July 30, 2016 12:34 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's the most bored looking kid fantasy hero that I've ever seen! Dude is like, "I'd rather be hitting the bong and listening to Return to Forever".

i thought this was really lovely

contextually it did help that all the other big-ticket neflix shows (OITNB, JJ) have left me totally cold. i liked how clear and focused this was.

i didn't mind the shaggy ending either; showing the loose ends is what an episodic show ought to do.

so, Hop is a fed now?

got a stupid question: so, were there two monsters? or did the one that was shot, beaten and burned, and crawled bloodily back to the library, quickly recover and head to the school to feast on the feds? also why didn't it feast on the feds instead of going after the kids? (ok that one is a stupid question to which i know the stupid answer.)

i think it DID feast on the Feds. right? the brraaap of the guns fell silent. and then it was still hungry. for a late night bite of raw child.

no idea about how many monsters there were.

totally loved the dream-like physical frustration of grabbing the stones from the backpack, passing them to lucas, lucas firing, the shots not working, grabbing another stone, passing it to lucas...

One monster, I believe: not wounded badly enough (normal-world injuries seem slight to it, see all the machine-guns emptied into it) though it totally looked a bit singed. And I don't think it went after the kids so much as it went after Eleven — he chased her right through the gate in the first place, after all. That last one a bit of rationalisation of the obvious reason, tho

i really think my favorite part was the entering of the tree. because it was such an amazing illustration of something you should never ever do in a million years. it was 200% wrong.

Rivals the first scene from The Stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZRdPNlLG4s

hi

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/stranger-things-survive-talk-their-creepy-nostalgic-score-w431789

i liked hearing from those guys! that score really is dope

these kids today with their cassettes and vhs tapes

It was only a matter of time before someone did this, but the Randy Newman song is an inspired choice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0K0VpPjMjQ

Ended up quite unintentionally binge-watching most of this, after kinda halfheartedly working through the first few episodes... at first it felt like it was coasting too much on the E.T. and Stephen King trappings (juiced up with Akira/Evangelion stuff), like it knew that the (awesome) set-dressing and costumes and stuff would be enough to hook 80s kids like myself. In particular - and I don't watch a lot of contemporary TV so maybe this is common - it felt really jumpy in the editing, like no scenes could build up tension, characters would respond to something someone else said before you'd really absorbed it yourself, just no air in the scenes. Even extends to the opening credits, where they barely let one title fade out before the next one pops up.

But either that got better or I just got used to it because once the plot really got going I was hooked. I do think it could have been an episode or two shorter - especially in the first half there felt like a lot of padding, like how many scenes do we need to re-establish that Winona Ryder is doing this stuff with the lights and freaking out, or that the kids are frustratedly trying to communicate with El? But ehhhh, setting that aside, it was a nice little supernatural tale in a milieu I was happy to see on screen. I mean, we had a Volkswagen Rabbit, feels right seeing one in a movie. Pandering maybe but in a way it's amazing this hasn't come along before - American Graffiti came out barely a decade after the period it was trying to lovingly reconstruct.

Ate up every scene Harbour was in (though it was kinda weird how in one episode he just suddenly switches to punching people out left and right, after all the slow, I've-got-a-nagging-feeling detective work). Wish Ryder had been given more room at the start to go through some non-hysterical notes so we can see how she gets to the point she stays at for like five shrieking episodes. The kid actors were all great (though Toothless was clearly coached into doing way too much of a loud Chunk part - liked him better when he was doing anything else). Wish they'd dialed down some of the D&D/X-Men stuff, even just for the sake of variety in the script, but also for the sake of better or more convincing nostalgia - like they could had some lamer or more forgotten interests ("I got these binoculars by selling GRIT!"), and D&D is so on the nose re: E.T.

I do agree there's some plot-hole stuff where people who should be communicating things they've discovered just never get around to it. Eventually there's too much going on and you accept that there's no time but there's definitely a mid-season stretch where it started to get distracting though I can't now remember what the examples were that nagged at me. It did seem awfully convenient that the bad guys don't seem to have actually bothered bugging the Byers house (and that our cast just accept that it's "safe" for no really good reason). Particularly in the last couple episodes, while Jonathan and Nancy are going back and forth to that house, it's like, really? No goons were set to watch the place in case they come back there with El in tow?

Re: speculation stuff - my interpretation was that Modine (aka Gendou Ikari) initially were using El to spy on the Soviets or read minds or whatever, a natural extension of their MKULTRA remit from the 60s. The black emptiness is either a visualization of her sensory-deprived mind-state as suggested above, or some kind of no-place in between dimensions. At some point they/she become aware of the existence of the upside-down world and the monster, and have her psychically try to make contact. Somehow, this triggers the opening of the gate - maybe the monster, or maybe El, have the power to make that tear between dimensions. I haven't gone back to check this, but what I told myself was that the room they used for El's immersion tank is the room that became the overgrown, sealed-off gate zone where they're doing their experiments now - like there's some sequence we didn't see of total mayhem after she makes contact, and they have to quickly seal off this whole part of the building, which is gradually being overtaken by, basically, invasive upside-down species. So El blames herself for the monster being able to get into our world, but she didn't really create it, and the whole thing is a case where the government's mandate has expanded crazily beyond their original project but they're so deep into cover-up territory that they just keep pressing ahead.

Tracer OTM about the late 70s look/feel of that early 80s period, perhaps most dramatically in children's hairstyles. It just pours out of my family photographs but most "80s retro" stuff misses that entirely. Would be interested to read interviews with the design team or whatever - I kept imagining them perusing Sears catalogs and stuff and going, OK, for the working class house, they'd still have accumulated stuff going back to the wedding, but the rich kid house will be '82, '83. Agreed with those saying the music cues didn't quite nail this sweet spot though - the Smiths move in particular. Would have felt more real to have something like, I dunno.... in the kinda King-esque bestseller A Boy's Life by Robert McCammon (1991), set in a small Alabama town in the early 1960s, the most exciting, renegade, spellbinding music for our early-teenage protagonist is "I Get Around." I buy that. It doesn't have to be the coolest most underground music for an 11-year old to be hypnotized by it and want to rewind the tape and play it again. (I would have bought Murmur though.)

OTM, the music was a little hip. No "I Love A Rainy Night"? No country music ffs!

I got the feeling that Modine and his goons were operating outside the letter of the law and couldn't just start tailing everyone willy nilly for fear of drawing attention to themselves. Kind of a don't ask don't tell operation.

i loved hearing Trooper's "Raise A Little Hell" briefly. probably my favorite song in 1979.

I'm pretty sure that it's El's powers that open up the rift between the "real world" and "upside down" as it appears to be her reaction (terror) to the monster which causes it.

"Should I Stay or Should I Go" did chart and was reasonably successful by a big name band by 82-83 who was touted by Rolling Stone, et al, so that wasn't exactly coolest or most underground.

yeah, whoever did the costuming got it so right. and they didn't go overboard. they could have just been looking at one of my high school yearbooks.

i remember watching The Ice Storm and thinking that they went a little overboard with the nostalgia. like 4 layers of brown on a person. it's probably really tempting to go nuts.

but Barb, man, i KNEW Barb. you know?

only on episode 5

been having fun naming all the 80s music and artefacts in the show

it also opened up a discussion about 4th dimension stuff with the gf last night which was fun

I've seen a few people suggest that the monster is one of the previous experiments (1-10) gone wrong

just a little too early for this picture to be in nancy's locker. very big with the girls in my hometown.

http://www.globalarray.net/user/cardboardstars/soloflexbodyyy2208072011.jpg

so i wanted to wait til i finished watching the entire series to bring this up (only on ep5) but

i vaguely remember reading online about a conspiracy theory that involved the us gov't/cia/fbi (don't remember which) interrogating an alien, named patient something-or-other (some numbers i believe), who was confined to a particular cell. the theory is really about the experiments they did on it

anyway i don't see enough of these types of shows/movies or read about aliens enough so i'm assuming this is just a reference to a popular conspiracy theory/incident in real life

Oh god I remember that Soloflex ad.

I always felt bad he couldn't get his shirt off completely.

Is that Scott Brown?

ab phallus.

Just finished. Loved it absolutely. Yes, it was insanely reference-heavy, but it didn't feel like fanwank to me. I cared about pretty much all of the characters and found the mystery compelling -> a much greater feat than pure homage could pull off.

there's some sequence we didn't see of total mayhem after she makes contact

We see onscreen, as she's screaming with fright at the monster in the black space, that her psychic terror opens up the cracks between the worlds.

I do agree there's some plot-hole stuff where people who should be communicating things they've discovered just never get around to it.

Also, stuff like this is never a plot hole! This is how people behave! Yes, you're shouting at the screen going "tell them tell them, pool your resources", but *that* would be the TV/movie convenient option, not the real-world option.

Do agree that the use of bugs/surveillance definitely seemed a bit hit-and-miss in a way that even kind of incompetent bureaucrats would have managed to get more right.

Do agree that the use of bugs/surveillance definitely seemed a bit hit-and-miss

This was one of the only superfluous plot devices imo. If it served any purpose at all, it was not enough to waste time on.

the only real inconsistency i spotted was in episode 8, when one of the feds tells hopper and joyce that the atmosphere is poisonous so they have to wear those hazmat suits. i'm assuming he meant the entrance to the upside down is poisonous, because others (including hopper) had already been inside the upside down without any protection, but it's not clear only outside the entrance is poisonous, and if this were true, it sounds a bit too silly

but i really dig this show

I don't know, I didn't really read that as inconsistent. Lots of things are noxious or poisonous or dangerous in some way, that doesn't mean that everyone who is exposed will die or even get majorly sick. People survived the nuclear bomb. People survived Chernobyl. People survived working with asbestos. People survive gas leaks all the time. That doesn't mean those things weren't/aren't incredibly hazardous, it just means that you don't *necessarily* get sick, and that minor exposure might not even do you any noticeable harm. A government facility that has easy access to hazmats would definitely use them, though.

Also, see Will - he definitely became ill after prolonged exposure. Obviously you could attribute it to fear, hunger, exhaustion, etc, but he looked actually ill from being in that world for so long.

(Also I'm p sure Silent Hill atmosphere was poisonous and most of them didn't die through the atmospheric conditions... plenty of other things to git ya)

fair points

The non-communications...after some more reflection I think there were two that really bugged me. #1 is Jonathan hearing about the no-face guy through Nancy, which he immediately connects to his mother's story. That happens in the fourth episode but he never talks to Joyce about it until they're at the police station together in the seventh. IIRC we're meant to accept that Jonathan doesn't bring this up because his mother's very upset and so on, and the only time they're together in that stretch is for Will's funeral, but you'd think he'd have said SOMETHING given that their last conversation was the big public argument about her being crazy.

#2: Hopper discovers the fake Will body, then heads immediately over to break into the evil laboratory even though he now has reason to believe they're involved in a massive conspiracy, and (I assume) has figured out this conspiracy probably killed the diner guy to cover their tracks. Fine if he wants to risk his life, but shouldn't he let Joyce know that she's not crazy and that the body is fake? Or pass around notes or something to let people know of this flagrant, tangible evidence of a huge criminal conspiracy? Because if they do kill him, the truth dies with him. It all comes right at the end, but that was one that really did bug me at the time - everybody is just leaving Winona Ryder freaking the fuck out when they've all got proof that she's not nuts! I know, it's a pacing thing, and it is satisfying when we finally, through an unlikely chain of events, have all the heroes together and on the same page.

Also a bit odd: the show seems to strongly suggest that Eleven is the daughter of the MKULTRA victim Hopper and Joyce visit (rather than that kid being say, Three or Seven) - seems kind of strange that neither of them say anything to El about this, during the long evening preparing the makeshift sensory deprivation tank. I get that there was a lot going on, and nobody knew how it was all going to end, and that finding out her mother was a catatonic wreck might be upsetting, but it feels like something one of these characters would do.

Obvious angle for the next season: everybody's looking for El (good guys and bad guys) while Hopper is trying to mop up other loose ends -- - better known as One through Ten. MKULTRA goes far enough back that its children could be whatever age - could totally see a Sylar-from-Heroes-esque deranged killer wandering around, say. Not sure this would be a great way to show but it is a dangler that totally invites some new stories.

#1 was dealt with upthread, but it wasn't just because his mum was upset, it was because his dad was there, which changed the situation completely, both psychologically and practically. It wasn't so much that his dad was persuasive about not making it worse for Joyce, but that he was physically present at any opportunity Jonathan had.

#2 I do agree with. It seems foolish, even in the heat of the moment, to go straight to the Big Bad Conspiracy people rather than to go to your potential ally. But I guess he's a very tropey "grizzled loner with tragic backstory" kind of guy, so it's not world-jolting to me. (Actually what was world-jolting was in the first episode where it was revealed his daughter was dead, I actually let out a groan b/c it's just too obvious a backstory. I think they did manage to pull it off without it being too horrifically cornball, though.)

#3 - not sure. Bear in mind that Eleven doesn't even really have a concept of having a mother. It sounded like she was taken pretty much right from the womb. It might be a bit much to throw that into the mix as well as sending her off to a parallel universe.

Btw, did anybody else assume that the numbers referred to clones rather than just test subjects? There's nothing really there to indicate it but that was my first thought, in fact I didn't even really entertain the idea that there would be non-identical test subjects until after halfway through.

my interpretation was that Modine (aka Gendou Ikari) initially were using El to spy on the Soviets or read minds or whatever,

No interpretation about it, I thought that was pretty clearly telegraphed?

Yeah, that was shown on screen. They didn't actually say "oh, and now it is time to spy on Soviets", but they did make her find a guy who was talking Russian and then she broadcast it to them.

Also I was sure that El was going to be Hopper's daughter for a while, glad that turned out not to be the case.

Yeah at that point I just thought "oh of course, she's being developed as a spy tool, should have realised that".

Oh yeah totally - the part that was not explicit was the exact sequence of how their scheme developed. I was speculating that, specifically, it began as spying and expanded dramatically into the Upside-Down and the monster only after they discovered those things through their use of El. Then there's another serious uptick when the contact opens up the gate, and they have to redesign the facility and the program around containing and exploring this other dimension. As opposed to, like, their ultimate goal was always the exploration of other dimensions but they worked their way up to it gradually or something, y'know?

(I was also addressing speculation like Number None's suggestion that El created the monster, sunny successor's confusion as to the location of the portal, the discussion over what the black nothingness was,)

The thing about the Jonathan/Joyce thing is, okay, he doesn't want to talk about it while Lonnie's around, fine, but.... how about you wait til Lonnie leaves, and then tell her? Or leave a note or something, since you're going off to face possible death hunting the monster with Nancy? I get that he's a teenager and might make poor decisions but he's spent days with his mother on the "you need to STOP THIS!" tip, you'd think it'd be a really important thing to him that she's right.

I guess I basically accept the genre-trope answer to Hopper not communicating with anybody. He seemed interested in bouncing ideas off the other cops earlier, though, even just to talk himself through the cockamamie theory forming in his head. Maybe it only bugged me because, again, we've seen SO MUCH of Joyce freaking out on her own, nobody believes her, etc., that it seems cruel to her. I related to her character and it was galling that no one was telling her anything for a couple episodes there. I guess that does raise the tension - oh man, if Hopper bites it, everything he's found out will be lost! But to me the minuses outweighed the pluses.

Finished watching this over two evenings, really loved it. From what I'd read about it I thought the genre/era details might be distracting but they weren't at all. I like that they've left just enough loose ends for a sequel to follow on.

Something Tuomas said upthread:

* The black nothingness wasn't the upside world, it was merely a visual shorthand to show how Eleven perceived things when she was trying to contact someone with her ESP powers. We saw the same black nothingness when she was spying on the Russian agent(?), which happened before she even made contact with the upside down world.

Reminded me that when Eleven was trying to explain the upside down world to the others she used the all-black underside of the D&D board, so that makes sense.