When “Stranger Things” debuted on Netflix in the summer of 2016, it arrived without much advance hype, at a time when Netflix had introduced only a handful of original series.
Created by the twin brothers Matt and Ross Duffer — virtual unknowns before “Stranger Things” — the show struck a chord with subscribers, who spread the word about its clever 1980s nostalgia, its likable young cast and its fusion of Stephen King-style horror with Steven Spielberg-like fantasy adventure. It quickly became Netflix’s first truly global sensation, a pop culture touchstone of the streaming age.
Now, after nearly a decade, “Stranger Things” is ending, with the first four episodes of the show’s fifth and final season arriving on Wednesday night. (Three more arrive on Christmas Day, the finale on New Year’s Eve.)
“Stranger Things” began as a relatively focused horror-fantasy series — with a side of government conspiracy thriller — about a group of small-town American adolescents who are drawn into a battle with extra-dimensional evil. Season by season, however, this fight against the forces of darkness has gotten more intense, as the show itself has gotten bigger and more elaborate, the in-universe lore more complex. Given that Season 4 aired back in 2022, even devotees may need a reminder of where things left off. Here is a quick refresher.
Welcome back to Hawkins, Ind.
Across its first four seasons, most of the “Stranger Things” story has been set in Hawkins, Ind. Hawkins comes across as a typical 1980s American heartland community, with a mix of working-class, middle-class and farming families, united by a passion for high school sports and a strong streak of Reagan-era patriotism. Because one of the major local employers is a U.S. Department of Energy research facility, the town also has an uncommonly high population of scientists and academics.
Season 1 was set in 1983; the final season will be set in 1987. During those five years, Hawkins has experienced the arrival — and the destruction — of its first big indoor shopping mall, along with the mysterious deaths of several teenagers. As Season 5 begins, the town is still recovering from what most of the residents believed to be an earthquake. The show’s main protagonists know that it was a rupture — possibly a permanent one — between Hawkins and a forbidding alternate dimension known as the Upside Down.
One other important thing to remember about Hawkins is that, similar to Stephen King’s fictional city Derry, this is the kind of town where the residents seem all too willing either to ignore horrific, violent, inexplicable incidents or to blame them on local misfits.
Ah, but underneath!
Most of Season 1 was about the disappearance of a 12-year-old named Will Byers (Noah Schnapp), who was abducted by an enormous mystical beast called the Demogorgon — a name borrowed by Will’s friends from their favorite fantasy role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons. This creature emerged from the Upside Down, a realm being studied by the scientists at the Hawkins National Laboratory. That team has at times carelessly probed the dimension, primarily in the name of research but also in search of any advantage it might provide in the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
Each “Stranger Things” season has explored more of the Upside Down, which resembles Hawkins’s dark shadow, featuring some of the same landmarks and locations but in a more distorted and demonic form. Sometimes people from our world can reach into that netherworld with their minds.
Even though this realm has existed in some form for thousands of years, it has been implied that the Hawkins version was accidentally created in Hawkins Lab one day in 1983, the result of an experiment on the powerful young girl Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), one of many children with psychokinetic abilities who spent their childhoods imprisoned there. (The lab replaced the children’s names with numbers.)
Eleven has often been the nexus point for the central paradox in this story. The fight against evil often requires Eleven and her friends to reach into the Upside Down. But those breaches make it easier for the denizens of that dimension to cross over.
The kids are (mostly) all right
When Will disappeared in Season 1, his Dungeons & Dragons buddies — Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard), Dustin Henderson (Gaten Matarazzo) and Lucas Sinclair (Caleb McLaughlin) — started conducting their own search for him, and in the process became some of the first people outside the Hawkins Lab to become aware of the existence of the Upside Down. Even after they helped rescue Will from that dimension, these friends have continued to stand against the increasingly common invasions. Starting in Season 2, they were joined by Max Mayfield (Sadie Sink), a tomboy whose bullying older stepbrother, Billy Hargrove (Dacre Montgomery), fell under the Upside Down’s corrupting influence before he sacrificed himself in Season 3 to save Hawkins.
Several siblings and local older high schoolers have had the kids’ backs over the years, including Will’s brother, Jonathan (Charlie Heaton); Mike’s older sister, Nancy (Natalia Dyer); and Nancy’s ex-boyfriend Steve (Joe Keery), who was a bit of creep when the series started but has matured into a genuine hero. In Season 3, Steve made a new friend, Robin (Maya Hawke), a hip lesbian who has become a vital part of the evil-fighting crew.
Season 4 introduced Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn), a D&D-loving metal head who died fighting the Upside Down and in the process became the town’s scapegoat for its recent preponderance of dead bodies.
Young love
The group’s romantic entanglements have been as much a part of the story as the encroaching Upside Down. Lucas pines for Max. Jonathan and Steve are both nutty for Nancy; Steve seems to have lost the competition for her affections for now.
And Mike has eyes only for Eleven.
There is no more important character in “Stranger Things” than Eleven. The character has been easy for many viewers to connect to, in part because of the way she grew up, isolated from an outside world she still finds wondrous. Her extraordinary powers also make her exciting to watch.
The show’s power tends to flag whenever Eleven struggles with hers. In Season 4, after a long stretch of feeling weak and lost, Eleven finally returned to full strength — just in time for the grand finale.
The adults in the room
Many of the adults in “Stranger Things” are baddies, when they aren’t merely getting in the way or becoming collateral damage. But a few are as squarely at the heart of the show as the kids. Winona Ryder plays Joyce, the divorced mother of Will and Jonathan, who was overwhelmed by the mystery of her missing son in Season 1 but has since become heavily involved with the battle against the Upside Down. Joyce often finds herself working alongside and occasionally flirting with Hawkins’s top law officer, the police chief Jim Hopper (David Harbour), who is now Eleven’s guardian. (He renamed her “Jane,” but most of her friends still call her “El.”)
Both Joyce and Jim at various times have also — reluctantly — teamed up with the local kook Murray Bauman (Brett Gelman), an avid conspiracy theorist who has been preparing for most of his adult life for a threat like the Upside Down, even though he tends to be primarily focused on the government’s cover-up of what has been going on in Hawkins.
Science friction
Murray is not entirely off-base with his Cold War paranoia. While the U.S. government has been researching what the Upside Down has to offer, the Soviet Union — thanks to some effective espionage — has been making its own forays into this netherworld. In Season 3, Hawkins’s heroes learned about a secret Soviet facility under the new Starcourt shopping mall, designed to allow the Russians their own access to the other dimension. Hopper helped thwart the foreign agents, and for his troubles ended up having to fight his way out of a Soviet gulag — with its very own Demogorgon — in Season 4.
The primary antagonists in “Stranger Things” are the Upside Down’s bizarre and malevolent monsters, but the show has also featured a lot of bad guys in lab coats, who look less intimidating but who are just as responsible for the mess Hawkins is in.
The biggest bad
The roster of villains in Season 1 was fairly small. The heroes squared off against a Demogorgon and also learned from Eleven about the ruthless scientist, Martin Brenner (Matthew Modine), who kept her and a handful of other gifted children captive at the Hawkins Lab. Season 2 introduced another Upside Down villain, the Mind Flayer, capable of controlling some Hawkins residents. The season also featured another morally squishy government lackey, Sam Owens (Paul Reiser), who has feigned concern for the terrible goings-on in Hawkins while making sure all the secret research at the lab continues.
But the series’ main villain didn’t come into focus until Season 4, when an Upside Down demon whom the kids named Vecna (another D&D reference) started more openly terrorizing Hawkins. Bit by bit, viewers learned Vecna’s origin story. He used to be a boy named Henry Creel, who was Brenner’s first test subject — named “One” — before becoming an orderly at the lab. One (played as an adult by Jamie Campbell Bower) befriended Eleven, but when she realized the extent of his misanthropy, she used her powers to send him to the Upside Down, where he refashioned himself into an evil king, bent on revenge.
Vecna, it turned out, had been controlling the Upside Down’s sinister beasts. He has also maintained a connection to Will, who remains shaken — and weakened — by what he went through when Vecna had him abducted in Season 1.
At the end of Season 4, Eleven seemingly thwarted Vecna’s plans once and for all, dealing him what she thought was a fatal blow. But the steps she had to take to save all of her friends — especially Max, who briefly died during the heroes’ big battle with Vecna — also widened the portals between the worlds, giving her nemesis and his plans new life.
The post What to Remember From ‘Stranger Things’ Before the Final Season Premieres appeared first on New York Times.
