He got a seven.) “He put himself in danger to help the party,” Mike concludes. It’s called cleidocranial dysplasia.”) If they didn’t already feel duty bound to search for their friend, Mike’s touching D&D anecdote seals it: Facing the demogorgon, Will had a choice to cast a protection spell, but instead he risked his character’s life by rolling for a fireball. (“I told you a million times! My teeth are coming in. Getting bullied in school has become such a ritual for these boys that Dustin is exasperated by having to explain, once again, why he doesn’t have any teeth. The Goonies stand-ins in this scenario are Will’s three buddies, Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Dustin (Gatin Matarazzo), and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), whose excitement over demogorgons and protection spells is not, unsurprisingly, shared by their fellow students. It’s not her fault that Will is gone, but she feels acute guilt. Though she may be a caring parent, Joyce cannot keep an eye on her youngest son at all times. Will is maybe a year or two older than Henry Thomas’s Elliott in E.T., but both are part of families where the mother is in charge. It’s probably not the first time work has kept them away from Will, who seems like the classic latchkey kid - more responsible and trustworthy than other middle-schoolers his age and not someone a parent would feel nervous about leaving home alone. One of them is supposed to be home with him, but Jonathan took a shift because they needed the money they’re stuck living modestly without Joyce’s deadbeat ex-husband in the picture, so every bit counts. They regret not being there in Will’s time of need. Joyce and Jonathan are suitably frantic about the situation, as anyone would be over a missing child. Whether he’s dead or alive - to say nothing of the monster’s origins and motives - is a question reserved for later. Will does his best to improvise an escape, getting so far as to load the family rifle in the shed, but the monster gets him. He manages to dash away on his bike and get back home, but neither his mother, Joyce (Winona Ryder), nor his older brother, Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), are home to save him. Heading home on his bike after a ten-hour Dungeons & Dragons campaign with his buddies - D&D isn’t mentioned explicitly, but the 20-sided die implies it - Will is chased by whatever monster snatched a scientist at the Hawkins National Laboratory in the premiere’s opening sequence. Families that are chaotic or incomplete close-knit communities hiding a big secret grade-school outcasts who form strong bonds in face of peer rejection.Ĭonsider the titular vanishing of Will Byers (Noah Schnapp), for one. With this assured first episode, “The Vanishing of Will Byers,” the Duffers seems to have just as strong a sense of the emotional dynamics of the movies they love. But if the show were merely an assemblage of riffs on 30-year-old movies, it would ultimately feel inauthentic and tacky, an empty exercise in nostalgia. If you want to play a game of “Spot the Reference” with Stranger Things, the shots are there for you, from three boys pedaling through the burbs on their bikes (á la E.T.) to a nod to Near Dark’s signature shot of backlit silhouettes at the top of a hill. Even the opening credit font is determinedly retro.
For the show’s first hour, at least, it’s fascinating to see how much their vision of small-town Indiana plucks from the suburban sci-fi of Steven Spielberg’s E.T., the nerd-kid adventure of The Goonies, and moody, synth-heavy texture of vintage John Carpenter movies. This is not criticism so much as context, because like the mermaid in Splash, they’re both precocious students and highly entertaining company. To apply this analogy to Netflix’s Stranger Things, showrunners Matt and Ross Duffer are the mermaid and everything they appear to have learned comes from popular movies of the ‘80s. Madison (in game-show announcer voice): Six fun-filled days! It leads to exchanges like this one with Allen, the New Yorker who takes her in:Īllen: So, uh, how long are you going to be in town? In the 1984 comedy Splash, there’s a running joke where Madison, a mermaid spending her first days on dry land, parrots the words she learned from a bank of televisions at a department store. Finn Wolfhard as Mike, Gaten Matarazzo as Dustin, Caleb McLaughlin as Lucas.
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