The bullying of the different becomes the key theme of the show, reaching its climax in the fourth season.
A little time has passed since the final episode of the last season of "Stranger Things" aired, and the streaming platform Netflix has crashed again. Fans found it so hard to come to terms with the end of the show that they believed the rumor circulating online about a secret ninth episode of the series. The farewell was so painful that on Wednesday, when the new episode was supposedly supposed to appear, Netflix crashed for the third time in two months.
"It’s been a few days since the show ended, and I can’t get over it. I cry all day long – on my way to work, at work, at home. What’s wrong with me?" – there are hundreds of posts with similar content. In the comments, other users admit that they are painfully nostalgic. But the most interesting aspect is not this cancellation effect, which surely accompanied many fans of various cult shows, but what made "Stranger Things" something more than just another sci-fi horror with elements of drama.
If one were to summarize the plot for those who haven’t watched the series, it wouldn’t sound very engaging or even original. The premise of the show resembles many films and series: in a small American town where nothing ever happens, a 12-year-old boy goes missing. The police, softened by years of idleness, are not particularly alarmed and are even ready to accept both his disappearance and the body found in the lake. Unlike his mother Joyce (Winona Ryder), who desperately fights for her faith in her son and, in this desperation, is ready to believe that her son communicates with her through flashing lights, and a terrifying faceless monster jumps out at her from the wall of their home.
Gradually, Will's friends Mike, Dustin, and Lucas join the search, and while looking for him in the woods, they find a strange bald girl with the number 11 on her wrist and the ability to move objects with her mind (for greater effectiveness, she sometimes has to stretch her hand forward). They will call her Eleven or El for short, hiding her in Mike's basement from the "bad people." In return, she helps them find Will, saves them from bullying by high schoolers more than once, and for five long seasons becomes the most vulnerable member of their team and their strongest weapon in the fight against another Hawkins, the Upside Down, from where monsters of various kinds break into their unremarkable little town.
The Duffer brothers set the show in the 80s for a reason – it’s not such a distant era that viewers would feel alienated, but also not very close, a completely different life when computer technology hadn’t yet taught children to stop making friends and using their imagination, and finding solutions required more than just sending a request to AI. A blissful, charming period when the world was not experiencing global upheavals, the Duffer brothers themselves (like most fans of the show) were the same age as their characters, and Steven Spielberg, David Lynch, and Robert Zemeckis were making their iconic films of mystification.
However, the fans' love for "Stranger Things" cannot be explained solely by nostalgia for childhood. Many of today’s fans of the show, which first hit screens in 2016, are either contemporaries or slightly older. They don’t pick up on the Easter eggs generously scattered by the Duffer brothers, but that doesn’t stop them from succumbing to the magic of the project.
It’s hard to explain the reason for the incredible popularity of "Stranger Things" and its mystical component. For a sci-fi project, the series has very rudimentary sets and special effects, which rather imitate the cinema of the 80s than attempt to impress the imagination of viewers in the first quarter of the 21st century. Pulsating flesh, long-armed demogorgons tearing people apart with numerous teeth on their eyeless five-leaf heads, tentacles sucking the will and life out of a person, and even a giant spider – all of this existed back then, in the horrors of the 80s that Hollywood studios used to scare and amaze us.
The dark, semi-destroyed, deserted Hawkins in the Upside Down, black smoke as a spirit possessing people – it seems that this series has quite simply gathered all the achievements of the rich imagination of the Duffer brothers' cinematic predecessors. And the very idea of the multiverse, that is, the existence of parallel worlds, described by ancient Greek philosophy, and a favorite metaphor of science fiction, which Stanislaw Lem dismissively called "first-level fantasy."
Thus, it is difficult to find the true reason for the emotional tension that the Duffer brothers managed to maintain in viewers throughout 10 years. And the main evidence of this is the fans' experiences and unfulfilled hopes for a secret episode that would rectify the bitter ending. The intense action surrounding the fight against the monsters from the Upside Down and the main villain of the show, Vecna, turned out to be on the periphery of the viewers' turbulent reactions. The final battle, which everyone had been waiting for 10 years, was quickly forgotten along with the complaints that it was not epic enough. And here, viewers do not demand any continuation. The point is set, the villain is defeated, the military has closed their base where they conducted experiments on children, and the town is once again living its banal everyday life. The Duffer brothers and all the actors of the series have been saying in interviews for ten days that the story is over. And fans continue to sign petitions to Netflix, demanding that the creators comfort, heal, and correct the painful fate with which they left us.
In fact, the mystical plot in "Stranger Things" serves as a driving hook, a context through which the authors of the series, like Vecna, capture the minds and hearts of viewers, putting them in a trance, creating an illusion. Critics caught on the hook categorize the show as either mystical, sci-fi, or horror. And for ten years, the Duffers continue to shoot a complex drama about the confrontation not with the monsters that crawl out of the Upside Down. It is no coincidence that in the battle for Hawkins, the children enter alone, without support or even minimal care from adults. Except for the broken-hearted Joyce and the police officer Hopper, who is tormented by his own childhood traumas, the adults in the series are passively indifferent to the fates of the children: the parents of the main characters appear on screen rarely and know little about what their offspring are living through, while the authorities, obsessed with the confrontation with the Russians (during the Cold War), brutally persecute the schoolchildren.
The older ones who take responsibility for the fates of the children also turn out to be children. The mission of saving the world, which is being systematically destroyed by adults, falls on their shoulders. And how can one not recall the child faces of fallen IDF soldiers who shielded the gaping abyss that opened on October 7 due to the criminal inaction of the elders? The orphan in this story is not only El, who is tormented by solid uncles and aunts who deprived her of her mother and childhood. Big and small children fight one-on-one, pressed back to back. Not only against the monsters from the mythical Upside Down but also against the monsters in reality. No matter how naive the exoticism of scenes in a Soviet concentration camp in Kamchatka may seem, this storyline only enhances the feeling: real monsters are much scarier than fantastic ones.
And so "Stranger Things" is much more than mysticism, horror, and science fiction. It is a terrifying drama of personal growth in a ruthless world of the system. The charming quartet of main characters has been marked from the very beginning with the label of "outcast." The boys enthusiastically play Dungeons & Dragons in the basement, hiding from the world in the evenings, while during the day they spend time with their physics teacher in the radio club at school. Their love for science, developed imagination, childlike ability to trust the incredible, and ability to think outside the box will give them an advantage in the fight against the upside-down evil, while making them outcasts in the school hierarchy. Bullying becomes a constant backdrop of the series – while virtuously defeating fantastic monsters, the heroes cannot cope with the bullying from their classmates and the adults obsessed with the ideology of war. It is no coincidence that each season of the show begins with a new clash at school, with humiliation, with offense, with a desire to fit in, but an inability to do so. And no matter how brave the heroes are in the battle against the upside-down monsters, they still fail to defeat the monsters living alongside them.
All the main characters of the series (and the Duffer brothers skillfully distribute the adoration and concern of viewers across a whole ensemble of characters, constantly, literally until the last minute of the show, expanding this pool) are outcasts, strangers, others, and thus, enemies. The bullying of the different becomes the key theme of the show, reaching its climax in the fourth season when Hawkins declares a hunt for the entire team, accusing them of the terrible murders happening in the town. It is no coincidence that the most emotional death in the series will be the death of Eddie, a second-year student – a geek and rebel stuck in school like in the Upside Down, despising the system and being pursued by it. And the social climax is Dustin's speech, the most charming smart guy, at the school graduation, where he finally directly challenges the hypocritical school prison, a mini-model of the hypocrisy and cruelty of society.
This war has been lost by the heroes. In the confrontation with people, they will have to retreat – El will forever remain a persecuted outcast and forever doomed. Even if the final point of the series becomes a dream, an illusion, an unyielding belief of the grown boys in the magic and justice of magic. Because it is almost impossible to come to terms with the real ending. And that is why fans believed so much in a secret episode that would heal their wound. And that is why it is so tempting to say along with them: "I believe."
