1 in the research program that later produced Eleven.) When Eleven discovers what Creel has done, she’s so filled with rage and disgust that she unthinkingly opens the first crack between the dimensions and shoves him through it. (After murdering his own family with telekinetic powers, he became Subject No. Henry Creel, the villain, has arrived there after killing everyone in the psychic-experimentation lab beneath Hawkins. It’s not a nice place-a small, homuncular version of the show’s tulip-headed monster roams the rocks-but it’s also oddly pristine, as Earth might have looked during some previous evolutionary era.
#New season of stranger things series
In the finale, a flashback to 1979 shows us a surprising, primordial Upside Down-a version that existed before the series began. The Upside Down is a rotten world, and our horror of it flows from the realization that its decay is predatory, hunting us down even if we’re innocent. Science tells us that insects are beautiful and that mold is magnificent, but venture into a rotted-out basement or turn over a moist log and you might disagree. In the show’s first three seasons, the evil in the Upside Down tended to be icky, slithery, and otherworldly it was Lovecraftian, in that it emanated from a twisted, morbid, and hidden part of nature. To an extent, all scary entertainments ask a serious question: what is evil? “Stranger Things” has always been a mashup of movies and books from the past-Season 4 combines elements from “It,” “The Matrix,” “Aliens,” “Pitch Black,” “Carrie,” “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” “Poltergeist II,” “Terminator 2,” and more-but the show has also pursued this question of evil in a straightforward, uncluttered way. It’s a frightening image of permanent environmental degradation-an adult problem, much scarier than bogeymen from another dimension. She steps across to pick a withered flower. In one of the best shots of the series, Eleven walks through a field of vibrant wildflowers, then encounters a border beyond which the plants are newly dead and gray. (Stop reading if you want to avoid spoilers.) In the concluding episode, a giant portal to the Upside Down opens beneath Hawkins, Indiana, and the poisonous atmosphere of that nether realm flows upward into the ordinary world. But the over-all effect is to raise the stakes of the show so that, by the end of the season, it’s a team of grownups that’s confronting possible doom. It’s a labor-intensive process, which seems to require almost every character to have an extended heart-to-heart conversation (“I see you,” “I’m here for you,” “I believe in you,” etc.). The new season is long-eight episodes of more than an hour each, capped by a two-and-a-half-hour finale-in part because it has to pull the preteen version of the show into a more adult frame. Everyone is just waiting-waiting for it all to be over, all while performing in a silly, terrible play, day after day.” Adulthood, it appears, could be the real Upside Down. Wake up, eat, work, sleep, reproduce, and die. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades-each life a faded, lesser copy of the one before. When the final season’s villain eventually explains his desire to destroy the world, he argues that human society is cruel and oppressive-a “deeply unnatural structure” that’s “dictated by made-up rules. What really freaks them out is stuff like applying to college or saying “I love you” to a girlfriend. Now in high school, they can look back wistfully on the scary movies that they watched in middle school having become experienced monster hunters, they can face the creatures that stalk them with workaday aplomb. The new season takes place in 1986, and “The NeverEnding Story” came out in 1984.
“ ‘The NeverEnding Story’-that scared the shit out of me!” one of them recalls. They’re old enough to remember their younger, more impressionable selves. Watching their eyes widen, your eyes widen, too.įour seasons in, the protagonists of “Stranger Things” are hardly jaded-they’re still surprised and appalled by what they see-but there’s a sense in which they’ve exited their wonder years.
And the kids, who are around twelve years old, are at the perfect age for accepting such an idea. There’s joy in the simplicity of the idea of the Upside Down, and in the directness with which it’s expressed. A little boy has gone missing, and searchers have found nothing Eleven says that he is “hiding” in an evil alternate dimension that the show’s characters come to call the Upside Down. Early in the first season of “ Stranger Things,” the psychically gifted girl Eleven spells out the show’s central premise by flipping over a Dungeons & Dragons game board and revealing its dark underside.
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