Stranger Things - The Disappearnce of Will Byers

So as I put together my write-up for the first episode of Stranger Things, I have Dixon and Stein’s soundtrack going close to the max. Why am I just getting to Stranger Things? The guy who was the age of the missing Will (Winona Ryder is the kid’s mom, Joyce, with Charlie Heaton as her son, Jonathan, Will’s brother, a single parent family trying to make ends meet) in the 80s and totally understand why mom would ask the kid if he was sure he wanted to go see Poltergeist (1984)? I was the kid, as my mother so joyfully likes to bring out of her nostalgic bag to torment me from time to time, who couldn’t watch much of Poltergeist because I was oooooo sooooo scarrrrrreddddd. Yeah, that was me. Timing is everything, I guess, and starting up the show now seems ideal considering I’m behind the hype. Granted I will be binging the second season when it drops, for sure. Something gets loose in this mysterious science facility and Matthew Modine’s white-coifed head of that place, accompanied by his gunmen on the go if weapons need to be drawn and fired, is out to find a certain girl who escaped also. She has a number on her arm (11) when she finds a diner, chomping on some fries when the cook/proprietor catches her. He’s a nice guy who feeds her a burger and tries to solicit info from her so he can find her folks or call help. What does he get for his patronage…a bullet by one of Modine’s on-call assassins (posing as social services). The girl in a gown (and bald) flees…she can also command with her mind whatever she so chooses it seems. Like she can halt the movement of a raggedy metal fan or collapse two of Modine’s guys trying to stop her. She soon encounters, in the woods, three kids, friends of the missing Will: Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin).

Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and Will are the kids in school that the bullies love to target because they are smaller, smarter, and easy to victimize. I can relate because I was exactly the same as them. When I see this, it is quite alive to me. Not a good feeling, either. At all. I often mention that these fuckers often wind up addicts or in juvie when asked where the bullies are that picked on me. All that said, detouring to that negative experience just for a moment, Dustin has a lisp and can bend his arms in ways that make the bullies both repulsed and intrigued. They love Lord of the Rings and play a board game similar to Dungeons and Dragons in the basement at Mike’s home. In the first episode, Sheriff Jim Hopper (David Harbour) tells the kids not to go looking for Will, in quite the stern and authoritatively intimidating tone. Later they pack up their walkie-talkies, hop on their bikes, and drive to the location where their friend went missing.

Will’s mom, Joyce, is harried, stressed, and busily on the go because she has no choice. It seems clear that her ex, Lonnie, isn’t exactly a fixture in the lives of her boys. So Joyce works, depends on her older son, Jonathan, to be an adult even though he’s still an older teenager. Jonathan is refreshingly responsible, level-headed, and dependable. Joyce is fortunate to have such a son while Will appears to be a good kid who loves his mom. A flashback to Joyce finding Will’s clubhouse, getting the password to enter right after a bit of a struggle, and surprising her son with tickets to the aforementioned Poltergeist. He isn’t there when the search is on to find him. Hopper and his deputies answer the call to find him after wondering if he was just goofing off somewhere. Getting in touch with Lonnie appears to be impossible as his much younger girlfriend won’t answer the phone for Joyce and his office voicemail cuts her off. Joyce and her son do some sobbing, worrying, scurrying, and searching: the show really pointedly establishes the sheer anxiety and terror of losing a child. A phone call with this odd white noise, electrical current, and slight voice of what she believes is her son on the other end.

Will is heading home from Mike’s when he encounters something ahead. It is a rather alien-looking figure. Clearly, I think, it seems to call to mind a type of EBE, but when Modine and some fellow scientists under his command, in quarantine suits, return to the location of the “escapees” this pulsating, icky life form growth, attached to the wall. That is quite the enigmatic lure for the series going forward. How does this tie to the girl numbered eleven, the being that kidnapped Will, and what has Modine been up to in the facility?

I was told that this had a mix of 80s favorites. Like ET, Stand by Me, The Goonies, and Poltergeist: their influence, including some obvious John Carpenter (nice poster of The Thing (1982) for a little love) is all over this pilot episode. The bike rides and hangouts, talking all at once and just communicating via walkie-talkies: the “plucked from the 80s retro love” is certainly a dynamic the show has made the most of.

Natalia Dyer’s Nancy, the teenage sister of Mike, is being courted by Casanova, Steve Harrington (Joe Keery). Steve clearly wants to take her virginity, using smooth moves in his attempts. So far, Natalia will let him kiss and close in but puts the kibosh on anything “clothes off”. Instead he helps her study for a big upcoming test. Natalia and Mike are part of that typical suburban 80s yuppie family, while the Byers are of the exhausted family stressed to the nth degree.

Hopper is quite a labored mess when we see him. Clearly something is on his mind. We don’t learn until much later, during a conversation with the science teacher, that he lost his daughter. So the beers and joyless visage, the weighted walk and lumbering countenance come from a trial he continues to bear. His eyes heavy, attitude growly, and demeanor encumbered by loss, Hopper doesn’t seem all too eager to enter the office and encounter the case of a missing child. And Joyce is not in the mood for his non-committal nature. She has a son missing. He needs to get it together. He does. What does this investigation and search eventually find? That is the carrot dangled.