It’s set in the 80s, and it borrows a lot from the films of that time, like E.T., and

Alien.

The story begins with the disappearance of a boy called Will from the town of Hawkins,

Indiana, and the mystery quickly deepens with the appearance of a girl with psychic powers,

a shadowy government agency, and a monster from another dimension.

By the end of the season Will is found but there are still heaps of unresolved questions

– like what’s up with Hopper and the g-men?

What is the monster, and how does the Upside Down work?

What happened to Eleven?

And why did Nancy hook up with the douchebag Steve instead of the sensitive Jonathan?

Was it the hair?

It was probably the hair.

But still let’s have a look at what happened in Stranger Things Season 1, beginning at

the very beginning.

In the fifties and sixties, the CIA conducted secret experiments in a program called MKUltra,

using drugs like LSD to investigate mind control, brainwashing and interrogation techniques

– which is a real thing that happened, by the way – but in Stranger Things, some of

these experiments take place at the Hawkins National Laboratory, led by a certain Dr.

Brenner.

And one of Brenner’s subjects back in the day was a woman called Terry Ives.

We learn that Terry was pregnant while she was being experimented on with drugs, so naturally,

her child was born with psychic powers – like telekinesis.

Terry named the child Jane, but Jane was taken away from her by Brenner, who covered up the

kidnapping saying Terry actually had a miscarriage.

Terry tried to sue Brenner to get her daughter back, but these attempts failed, and Terry

seems to have declined into a drugged-out stupor.

Meanwhile Jane grew up in the Hawkins lab, where she was tattooed with her new name – Eleven.

Eleven calls Dr Brenner “papa”, which might mean Dr. Brenner lied and told El that

he was her dad, or maybe he really is her dad, maybe he had some relationship with Terry,

we don’t know.

But in any case El is treated cruelly at the Lab.

Brenner subjects her to lots of experiments – making her break things with her mind,

and perceive things from a distance.

Sometimes he put Eleven in a sensory deprivation tank, where Eleven’s able to psychically

project herself into a weird dark void where she can interact with people who are far away

– this is during the Cold War, so Brenner and his CIA buddies use her to spy on Russians.

But also in this darkness Eleven encounters a monster.

The monster presumably isn’t physically in this dark space, but is in its own dimension,

the Upside Down, just as the Russian is in Russia, and Eleven’s in the tank, but by

projecting herself through this dark space, Eleven is able to reach across the dimensions,

and under the orders of Brenner, she makes contact with the monster, somehow causing

“a tear in time and space”, making a gate, a portal into the monster’s dimension, allowing

it to emerge into Hawkins.

In the commotion, Eleven escapes the Lab by crawling through a drain pipe, meanwhile the

monster starts to hunt animals and people in Hawkins – at the start of Episode 1,

it takes Will.

So this kicks off the human drama of the story – we see Will’s mother Joyce frantically

trying to connect with her son, and Will’s older brother Jonathan searching, in his angst

and alienation.

We see the cop Jim Hopper, still haunted by his daughter’s death.

And when Eleven escapes from the Lab she groups up with Will’s friends Mike and Lucas and

Dustin, who teach her loyalty and normalcy and love, there’s also Mike’s sister Nancy,

who’s growing up, trying to work out who she is, discovering sex – like, when we

first see Nancy, Dustin offers her some sausage and pepperoni pizza, which Nancy declines,

and this refusal to ‘take the sausage’ kinda foreshadows her conflict over whether

to sleep with her boyfriend Steve, or to listen to her friend Barb and stay a virgin.

Barb, for her part, dies and no one seems to care, but Steve gets a redemption of sorts,

after being an asshole early on.

In the end, Nancy and Steve are together, but there’s still a bit of a love triangle

with Jonathan.

So yeah, there’s some interesting drama happening, but the really juicy mysteries

surround the Upside Down.

The Upside Down seems to be a sort of “alternate dimension”.

It has the same stuff in in it as the real world – all the buildings and trees and

cars of Hawkins are there – but everything’s dark and dead and decayed, cold and empty.

When stuff moves or changes in the real Hawkins, nothing seems to change or move in the Upside

Down, so it’s almost like this is a snapshot, a frozen moment in time, perhaps of what Hawkins

was like at the moment of contact, when Eleven touched the monster – maybe it was at that

moment that this whole dimension was created.

Or maybe the Upside Down used to be alive and normal like Hawkins, but it was infected

by this weird toxic growth we see in the Upside Down.

There are vines or tentacles on the ground, slime on the walls, particles in the air,

the gate seems to grow, and wherever the monster goes, slime spreads.

Maybe this is like an interdimensional disease, spreading from parallel world to parallel

world, infecting the multiverse.

Or maybe this is a time travel thing.

Maybe the Upside Down is the future of Hawkins, it’s what it’ll become after being infected

– by its own future.

This is all wild speculation, but whatever the Upside Down is, it’s clearly closely

connected to Hawkins – the dimensions affect each other in lots of different ways.

Activity in the Upside Down can cause electrical disturbance in Hawkins, Will and Joyce can

even use lights to communicate, though we don’t how this works on Will’s end – how

can he even see the lights and letters from the Upside Down?

Some people think this means Will has psychic powers like Eleven – which could maybe also

explain this weird gate-like thing Will seems to open – but the evidence still isn’t

strong.

Anyway the Upside Down can also affect Hawkins through magnetism – apparently the gate

has a strong electromagnetic field.

And sound can cross the dimensions – Jonno hears Nancy when she’s in the Upside Down.

The very walls in Hawkins can give way to the Upside Down – which allows the monster

to enter.

The monster, also called the Demogorgon, is a creature that looks kinda like a human,

but with long arms, and five unfolding ‘petals’ of teeth instead of a face.

After Eleven makes the gate, the monster is able to make small portals of its own, crossing

into Hawkins, to drag prey into the Upside Down.

Like a shark, it’s apparently drawn by blood.

The monster hunts for food, but it also uses prey for other purposes – in Episode 8,

we see that Will has been stuck in some gross organic fleshy web, like in Alien, with a

slimy tentacle down his throat like a Facehugger.

Maybe, like in Alien, the creature uses human hosts to reproduce.

Maybe the little slugs that emerge from the bodies of Barb and Will are little baby demogorgons.

Though that doesn’t explain the hatched egg we see earlier on in the Upside Down – maybe

that’s the egg the monster hatched from, but if so, what laid the egg?

It looks too big to come out of a Demogorgon.

Also, the first time we see the monster, it looks like its eating that same egg.

So between the monster, the eggs, the facehugger-tentacles, and the cough-up slugs, there must be some

complex symbiotic life-cycle happening here, there must be more creatures involved – maybe

there are big egg-laying slug queens, or juvenile demogorgons out there.

Maybe this creature is an alien.

Or maybe the monster is something more human.

One popular theory is that the monster somehow represents Eleven’s darker half, like, maybe

the monster is a psychic manifestation of her anger and fear, and her suffering at the

Hawkins Lab, and that in that moment of contact when the gate was made, she brought the monster

out of her subconscious and into the real world – maybe that’s what El means when

she says “I’m the monster”.

This idea could help explain some similarities between El and the monster, like in Episode

1, we see the monster open a lock without touching it, just as Eleven locks a lock – the

monster appears to have telekinetic abilities, just like El.

Also, Eleven seems to recognise a photo of Will without having met him before – maybe

she recognises him because her other half, the monster, has abducted Will.

When El defeats the monster, both she and the monster disappear, as though they kinda

cancelled each other out.

Maybe El and the monster merged back into one, the monster returning to its place in

El’s consciousness – maybe changing her for the worse.

All that said, if El is the monster, how do we explain the complex biology of the Upside

Down?

Could that have possibly come from El’s mind?

Finally, it’s very interesting that when El uses her powers, we see the same weird

electrical effects that are associated with the Upside Down, so there’s gotta be some

link here.

It’s all very uncertain, but there are clearly strong connections between Eleven and the

monster and the Upside Down.

At the end of Season 1, El and the monster disappear, Will comes home, and we get a ‘one

month later’, where everything seems calm and normal.

The Byers have Christmas dinner, the boys play D and D. Steve and Nancy get Jon a camera

to replace the one Steve broke.

All seems well.

But we see some newspaper clippings that show there’s still a lot going on.

Joyce has told the media about Brenner’s experiments at the Lab, leading to a “massive

investigation”.

The coroner who was involved in Will’s fake body has been caught, and there’s a shake-up

among the State Troopers, who worked with Brenner’s people to cover stuff up.

It seems that the secrets of the Hawkins Lab are being revealed to the world – but it

may be that nothing comes of this, because MKUltra was supposedly exposed before.

But there are more cool details.

The article quotes someone called Ives expressing disgust about the Lab, which is weird cause

Becky Ives doesn’t seem to believe any of this conspiracy stuff, and Terry Ives doesn’t

seem to speakj – so what’s going on?

Is Terry talking again?

Could she maybe have a reunion with her daughter, Eleven?

Finally, the article mentions Brenner.

Last we saw him, he was attacked by the monster – but this suggests he survives, and comments

from Brenner’s actor and the Duffer Brothers have all but confirmed that we will be seeing

him again.

Which brings us to Season 2.

Season 2 of Stranger Things is set for release in 2017, and there’s already a lot of info

out about it.

The show’s creators, the Duffer Brothers, have said the season will be like a “sequel”

to the first.

Apparently it’ll explore the repercussions of everything that happened last season, while

also introducing “new problems and questions”.