Stranger Things Netflix series catch-all

Season two next year.

@StrangerThings wrote:

The adventure continues. Stranger Things 2 is coming 2017.

(Click through for video clip with proposed episode titles.)

Spoiler:

Madmax
The Boy Who Came Back to Life
The Pumpkin Patch
The Palace
The Storm
The Pollywog
The Secret Cabin
The Brain
The Lost Brother

In the fall of 1984.... the adventure continues.

Also, there's a spotify playlist for the score (this is not the 80s songs soundtrack; this is the background music) for series 1.

Ooh.. Millie Bobby Brown and David Harbour (11 and the Sheriff) are going to be doing signings at NYCC in October.

Meant to just watch the first episode and then play a game tonight. Now I'm almost done with episode 4. Definitely picked up the Watchers vibe (read that 6 times in high school).

Hawkins is also pretty close to Pawnee.

Isn't it amazing that at this time two months ago few of us knew this series was about to launch and now we all can't imagine our lives without having seen it?

Kids were on Jimmy Fallon last night and Winona was on tonight. Check out the replays. Fun stuff.

OG_slinger wrote:

Yes I'm happy you made an episode about Barb. I will now STFU.

Stele wrote:

Kids were on Jimmy Fallon last night and Winona was on tonight. Check out the replays. Fun stuff.

Rat Boy wrote:

Isn't it amazing that at this time two months ago few of us knew this series was about to launch and now we all can't imagine our lives without having seen it?

Well, I mean, I could imagine my life without it, but it was certainly a good time.

ccesarano wrote:
Rat Boy wrote:

Isn't it amazing that at this time two months ago few of us knew this series was about to launch and now we all can't imagine our lives without having seen it?

Well, I mean, I could imagine my life without it, but it was certainly a good time.

Yeah I can definitely imagine it. I'd be hearing a lot fewer white 30-somethings creaming themselves every time they said "nostalgia!"

So my parents are visiting for the weekend and they watched the whole show today.

I think mom really enjoyed it, dad seemed so-so. But horror isn't really his thing, at all.

I don't know about nostalgia, since I wasn't that present for the '80s and I certainly didn't watch most of the '80s movies until the 21st century. Though the wood paneling certainly took me back.

(There's also way less big hair than I've seen in photos, but I might be mixing it up with the late '80s?)

muraii wrote:

Let's all just get on-board with the hope that Githyanki show up in S02.

Fun fact: The Githyanki were invented by science fiction writer Charlie Stross (with borrowings from GRRM). The Laundry Files novels would fit right into the Stranger Things world.

As for the monster:

Spoiler:

The first thing that struck me was that the place Eleven accessed via sensory deprivation seemed suggestive of Jungian collective unconsciousness. The shared unconscious being an accessible physical/psychic linking space is, of course, a common trope.

Now, my initial reading was that the psychic space was shared across dimensions. She contacts a mind in another dimension, accidentally showing it that her dimension exists. A permanent portal opens. The creature starts opening more portals and hunting through them. The creature and the main portal don't seem to have a direct relationship, exactly. It can tear open its own portals to hunt things. Unless it's a mobile part of the life cycle of those creepy vine things. Or some kind of symbiotic pollinator.

It's interesting that the Upside Down corresponds so closely to the normal world, down to where cars are parked. If it is an alternate branching timeline, it branched very recently. Which is plausible: a very nearby branching makes sense to come into accidental contact, so the Upside Down is the victim of a recent invasion works. And areas that most closely correspond between the dimensions--blank walls, mostly--seem to be the easiest places to tear a hole, lending support to the idea that the creature hunts in nearby dimensions.

But that doesn't explain any later changes that reflect the normal world...which are rather cleverly vague, given our brief glimpses. Does the Upside Down reflect changes in the normal world? Will can figure out which lights to manipulate, at the very least. I'd have to re-watch the scene where Hopper and Joyce go through the house to see how much gets reflected. Does the damage to the front wall come through? The fort is presumably still intact in the normal world even though it's been torn down in the Upside Down.

So, another possibility is that the Upside Down is the collective unconscious itself. This seems to be the assumption that a lot of articles I've run across go with: that the black void is the same thing as the Upside Down, and that the monster is a native inhabitant. I don't think the evidence supports this, unless Russia is also another dimension, but it's possible.

Another theory is that the Upside Down and the monster come from Eleven's id or personal unconscious. They do seem linked in some ways.

The version of the D&D rules that they're playing with seems to be the Mentzer version. They'd likely be using the version of Demogorgon from the original Monster Manual, though Mike seems like the kind of DM who elaborates and house rules a lot of stuff. I don't know if that has any implications about the monster's nature.

Lastly, I suspect that it's likely that Dr. Brenner was Eleven's actual father. It's never stated how Terry Ives became pregnant, only that she wasn't aware of it in time. (Although, now that I think of it, there's only circumstantial evidence that Terry Ives is Eleven's mother. I'd be surprised if she wasn't, due to the way the show is set up, but "Eleven" implies that there were at least ten others.

The other detail about the monster is that they had an actual physical suit built to do most of the effects. Which probably helped a lot with some of the kids' reaction shots: they were acting against the live prop.

I do think that the acting was really the thing that pulled the show together. There's a lot of moments that are okay in the writing but clearly transformed by how it evolved after it left the page. The weak bits feel like the bits that had the least revision (i.e. Barb, entering the tree, and some similar parts) and the strong bits where where they let the production and revision deepen the layers (the kids' performances, Steve, etc).

Gremlin wrote:

I don't know about nostalgia, since I wasn't that present for the '80s and I certainly didn't watch most of the '80s movies until the 21st century. Though the wood paneling certainly took me back.

(There's also way less big hair than I've seen in photos, but I might be mixing it up with the late '80s?)

Big hair was a later 80's thing. Same with the neon everything I think? I grew up in the late 80's (born in '83) in a rural working class town and this show pretty much hits all the right notes about what I remember people wearing when I was in grade school.

Awesome!

What, no whale song?

Again, isn't amazing that a scant few months ago we had no idea any of this existed, let alone would become this huge?

That was great! And they just had to throw a little dab in there at the end, didn't they...

Love this!

It's not actually a bad teaser, but interestingly, I don't like how they put the 2 in there on the opening logo. It feels really tacked on and something about it bothers me because that whole opening logo thing was so utterly perfect. That said, the HALLOWEEN thing that comes after is pure gold and redeems it.

At any rate, I don't expect the second season to be as good as the first, but I'm sure it'll be great.

I'll fanboy allow it.

Who ya gonna call?

It's like if there was an 80s scented air freshener, it would be Stranger Things.

Hobear wrote:

It's like if there was an 80s scented air freshener, it would be Stranger Things.

The Stranger Things air freshener: Eggo, Mrs. Butterworth (please tell me that isn't sold anymore), and a dash of ectoplasm.

Man that drawing and shot of whatever that monster is sure reminds me of Amygdala from Bloodborne

IMAGE(https://i.ytimg.com/vi/oU4AAs_mSvc/maxresdefault.jpg)

I suspect that the influence that From Software is having on popular culture is underestimated.