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

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.

First episode watched yesterday. Blimey, I really enjoyed this.

i like the video of the two kids singing along to the theme song. can't figure out how to link to it directly:

https://www.facebook.com/StrangerThingsTV/

love the fan art too.

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/13912632_1095694733839689_529391156152322734_n.jpg?oh=121bc051789a39f6b20922790ac1a2bb&oe=582090F6

Loved this.

http://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2016/07/27/487602000/kids-on-bikes-the-sci-fi-nostalgia-of-stranger-things-paper-girls-super-8?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social

Some interesting bits in this, on the "Kids On Bikes" genre. Some threads could be delved into much further, but it's a prompt of some kind.

Sometimes the dialogue would be so on the nose as to be cringey, which happened a handful of times in Ep 6.

Enjoys much of it otherwise.

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh loved this omg

xp yeah I thought that, like the woman in the station saying to Nancy after Jonathan punched the cop "only love can make someone be so passionate. Or stupid."

No country music ffs!

dolly parton's in there somewhere

xp yeah I thought that, like the woman in the station saying to Nancy after Jonathan punched the cop "only love can make someone be so passionate. Or stupid."

Yeah that was particularly irritating too bc it was so rong. Like no you dopey office person insulting someone's whole family would do the job just fine.

I did like that they made the boyfriend less of an outright bully, his reaction to Jonathan's amateur photography is reasonable given his limited understanding of the recent events (even if his handling of the situation is totally alpha-male). even gets upset about how his friends treated his "ex" afterwards despite seeming to be on board with it at the time.

also thankful that there are high school scenes where people with letter jackets don't make obligatory appearances every ten seconds in the hallways (though they also didn't have much opportunity to do so)

iana child psychologist but I wonder if Johnny Five Eleven will speak in full sentences in s2 because she is obv fluent in English and I'm not sure it made much sense that she didn't speak in full sentences once she started talking

She's been a human lab rat her whole life. What reason could she have to trust people she's never met?

sure, that is a reason not to speak at all at the beginning

once she obviously fully trusts her new friends it is a bit weird that she doesnt use sentences

This is ok (havent finished yet), not sure there's much more here than v thorough pastiche tbh.

wrong

Loved the performances in this, especially the toothless kid and Winona

Loved Steve's redemption/epiphany, which happened all of a sudden like the Grinch

I cried when Will got rescued. I wonder if tge ad&d insurance company demanded payback.

as far as boy on bike genre films, i think the overall emotional tone had lots of elements of flight of the navigator.

Yes!

Weirdly i wanted to watch that after finishing this series

God this gave me all the goddamn feels

I like how it partly ended up being about how mediocre parents can still be good parents, or are deep down, or when it counts or something idk quite how to articulate it

So good. SO good.

Liked this a lot but it did feel like the weight of the obvious references (ET, Alien - at one point where Hopper and Winona are in the upside down she shouts something far too close to "get away from her you bitch" for comfort) was too much for me at times. Did love that the end titles were just randomly scattered through the show - the final ep has them after about 10 minutes and I think ep 5 has them about 5 minutes before the end.

Because you know I love nitpicking, how credible is it for the science teacher to have The Thing on VHS in late '83 or alternatively that it was on broadcast TV that soon after release?

One mystery I haven't seen discussed anywhere is Hopper finding his daughter's stuffed tiger in the upside down. It's implied in one of the flashbacks that she's seeing something that isn't there, could that be an early attempt at breaking through? Also could her leukaemia just have been exposure to the toxic environment of the upside down?

When the boys were looking for Eleven after she'd run off and shouting for her I couldn't get this out of my head, which spoiled the tone a bit:

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

haha yeah i was thinking about that lift scene too aldo!

There are some very obvious, very big references to certain films all through this show. It has me wondering if it's a pastiche, a period drama or something else.

This sort of thing happens a lot more in music than on the screen - taking a confluence of ideas and tropes, mashing them together and updating them/putting a new spin on them, like say Haim or whoever you wish to pick. Stranger Things is like a DJ set of remixes of all your favourite teen horror films. I spend a lot of the time thinking 'that's ripped from Donnie Darko' or just wanting to shout 'GO INTO THE LIGHT CAROL-ANNE!'.
As such, you can't expect credibility to get in the way of a good storyline in Stranger Things. Would a smalltown cop really be able to bash his way into a high-security FBI unit like he did?
What I do like is how we get to see the development ofWinona's mum character. Source-material characters are ephemeral to plotlines. They're either overbearing sceptics or simply not there at all - 'Honey, I'm going out, don't eat anything!'

*source material parental characters is what I meant there.

My personal theory is that 11 somehow manifested the monster/s herself through her sheer terror of the sens-dep experiment.

Or maybe it was just that the monsters were always there but she softened the wall between the worlds <- obv more likely but i like my theory better :)

I think she was so afraid of what she had done that she didnt want to face them down & accept that she could control or stop them.

I really loved that moment with 11 & Winona when 11's in the sens-dep & she's rigid with terror & winona's telling her "don't be afraid, don't be afraid, I'm here" it was v powerful

Stranger Things is like a DJ set of remixes of all your favourite teen horror films. I spend a lot of the time thinking 'that's ripped from Donnie Darko' or just wanting to shout 'GO INTO THE LIGHT CAROL-ANNE!'.

this seems about right - even there though it's a pretty narrow subset of (mostly) 80s films. All of the direct rips/refs do take me out of a bit, I find myself thinking more about the construction of the show overall rather than getting drawn into the story.

Yeah, I know what you mean. When they first showed the foresty underworld and the dead deer, I just knew they'd show the monster feeding off it just like a specific scene in Harry Potter. At the same time, there's enough source material to be referenced (and it's not just 80s horror - there are lots of kids films and sci-fis and stuff in there, and as I say, Harry Potter and Donnie Darko aren't 80s films).

Donnie Darko is a pastiche of 80s films

^^^

honestly the only non-80s stuff I've really noticed has seem to come from that Voice of the Beehive remake I forget the name of

(altho fair pt about the deer-feeding, I hadn't caught that)

All of the direct rips/refs do take me out of a bit, I find myself thinking more about the construction of the show overall rather than getting drawn into the story.

― Οὖτις, Monday, August 8, 2016 12:22 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Remember when directors would reference like Truffaut or Kurasowa or whatever and Stranger Things is all like the Alien scene that was parodied in The Critic and the Commando scene that was parodied in UHF, and critics are falling all over themselves to praise what is, in a lot of ways, a stylized Family Guy episode

My new show JURASSIC GUMP is gonna clean up once I finish my Netflix pilot

I never identify with "takes me out of it" criticisms tho, doesn't really resonate with how I experience things xps

ok lol @ JURASSIC GUMP

you know what else keeps popping into my head while watching this is Beyond the Black Rainbow. Which was much more specific and abstract and strange than this (also had a really stupid ending) but did kind of a similar v specific late 70s/early-80s sf horror pastiche. Better soundtrack too.

oh man JURASSIC GUMP. the nineties revival is in full swing elsewhere so that's only a matter of time really.

and agreed with Veg about that Winona scene - - - a moment of comparative subtlety for the show, too, like it lets you think about the upbringing El's had to this point, and the power of a parental figure that actually is concerned for her well-being, and the comfort Winona has been dying to give to Will, and so on.

Looks like somebody itt doesn't understand the difference between parody and pastiche.

critics are falling all over themselves to praise what is, in a lot of ways, a stylized Family Guy episode

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Monday, August 8, 2016 11:41 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nah

i watched this with pals who are not really wide cultural consumers (or at least not in the way so many ilxors are) and when i made the now standard, boring, observation that it looked like 80s movies, they were all 'ohhhhhhhhh yeah i see that.' all the specific call-outs seem like easter eggs for media nerds like those itt, who spend all day thinking about movies and music etc. i think most ppl can grok that it's a pastiche, but i don't think they're having the jarring experience you're having, whiney -- it just scans as narrative, not as a series of references or gestures to other, specific movies

Yeah, I know what you mean. When they first showed the foresty underworld and the dead deer, I just knew they'd show the monster feeding off it just like a specific scene in Harry Potter. At the same time, there's enough source material to be referenced (and it's not just 80s horror - there are lots of kids films and sci-fis and stuff in there, and as I say, Harry Potter and Donnie Darko aren't 80s films).

― TARANTINO! (dog latin), Monday, August 8, 2016 12:32 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

What in particular did they use from Donnie Darko? It's been years since I've seen that film.

Commando scene that was parodied in UHF

But surely that was Rambo: First Blood part II?

https://media3.giphy.com/media/LnftOVI9nd2zm/giphy.gif

It's what's being "referenced" that seems to be the sticking point xxp