Stranger Things – Chapter One

By starrymag | July 23, 2016

By: Kathryn Trammell

 

If Stephen King and Michael Crichton ever co-authored an introduction to an episode of the X-Files and gave it to Stephen Spielberg to then direct, it would be everything leading up to the opening credits to Chapter One of “Stranger Things.” The scene opens with a boom, a literal boom, that made me jump and then turn down the base on my subwoofer. A man wearing a lab coat comes flying out from around a corner running down a hallway that is lighted by flickering fluorescent lights. He runs into an elevator and waits impatiently for the doors to close all the while looking down the hall as if whatever he’s running from might appear at any moment. But he’s too late. What I can only assume to be a velociraptor is already inside the elevator with him and reaches down to snatch him up and out of our sight, his imminent demise unknown at least for now.

 

In contrast to the suspense of the last scene, we are next introduced to a group of four boys played by four actors who, in all honesty, could out-act most actors twice their age. The series is a little bit “Freaks and Geeks” and a little bit Goonies as Mike, Dustin, Lucas and Will banter into their tenth hour of a Dungeons and Dragons “campaign” until Mike is called to dinner by his mom. She shoos the other boys to their own houses and they all say goodbye outside, but not before the porch lights flicker above their heads foreshadowing what we now have to assume will be a recurrent theme indicating the proximity of the velociraptor to our characters.

 

On the way home, one of the boys, Will Byers, passes a gate where two signs have been posted. One sign reads “Hawkins National Laboratory: U.S. Department of Energy” and the other indicates that he has just entered a restricted government property. Only a few yards into this restricted zone, the light on Will’s bike flickers and draws his attention away from the road long enough for the monster – which isn’t a velociraptor at all but some strange Lovecraftian golem – to position himself in Will’s path causing Will to swerve into a ditch.

 

Will (Noah Schnapp) runs home and tries to call the police, but the call is blocked by a screeching static that prevents him from getting in touch with anyone. With the phone pressed to his ear, he watches from his kitchen as the chain lock on the front door slides out of place. The phone drops from his hands and Will peels out the back door and into the shed in his backyard filling a rifle with ammunition and aiming it at the door. We know given what happened to the lab technician that Will isn’t safe – that not a gun, a door or even the walls of the shed can keep the monster out. When Will turns around, he realizes this too. The lights flash, then a flicker and then Will is gone. The shed is empty.

 

We are introduced to a few new players, the first of whom is Jim Hopper (David Harbour). Hopper is the kind of guy who prefers sleeping on a couch to sleeping in a bed, who brushes his teeth before smoking his morning cigarette and downs his morning pills with a stale unfinished beer. He doesn’t take his job as the Chief of Police seriously until a woman like Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) is sitting in his office asking for his help to find her missing son.

 

There is something about Joyce that gives Hopper cause to actually care about his job, which is significant given Hopper’s mornings are usually reserved for “coffee and contemplation.” Hopper tries to ease her mind suggesting Will is playing hooky, but she insists her son would never do such a thing. “He’s not like you . . . he’s not like me,” she says. Hopper assumes Will’s father to be a primary suspect because that assumption is statistically sound, but Joyce isn’t so sure. Before leaving his office she tells him one last time, “Find my son.”

 

By now, news of Will’s disappearance has spread to his three friends who walk quickly towards their school hoping to find him inside. It’s not unusual for Will to go into school early, possibly to avoid the kinds of bullies that stop Will’s friends from making it inside. Using names like Midnight (Lucas, who is black), Frogface (Mike) and Toothless (Dustin, who has cleidocranial dysplasia) the two bullies make literal and figurative jabs at each boy until Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) puts on the “freakshow” they’ve come to see by cracking his arms – an ability his friends have labeled a “superpower” to which Dustin reminds, “except I can’t fight evil with it.”

 

Back at the Hawkins lab where the creature we all assumed was a velociraptor attacked the technician, a man named Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine) leads a team of more men down a hall explaining that the lab is being evacuated due to quarantine protocol. To the tune of a synthesized keyboard masterpiece, the team gets dressed in biohazard suits and go down the elevator where the lab tech disappeared. They lock and load their guns and the music stops replaced only by the sound of the men breathing inside their suits.

 

They shine their flashlights down the pitch-black hall highlighting flecks of floating dusts as prominent as snow. Their lights also reveal a series of marks on the wall that at first look like bullet holes, but as the camera gets closer to them look more like organic alien growths. Like breadcrumbs, the growths lead to a room where the mother of all growths covers a wall like a parasite – a very slimy, veiny, primordial parasite. The wall growth pulses and growls inspiring the following conversation from the men in suits:

 

Man 1: This where it came from?

Man 2: Yes.

Man 1: And the girl?

Man 2: She can’t have gone far.

 

I assume the “it” they speak of is the golem that chased Will, but the “girl” is more of a mystery until the next scene when she comes walking out of the forest to stare at a man who is throwing out garbage behind a diner. She sneaks through the back door behind him and begins stuffing her face full of french-fries, but the man eventually sees her through the pickup window. He runs to catch her as she tries to flee, (tray of fries in hand) but her lack of lack of speech, shaved head and tattered hospital gown confuses him to the point of holding back any disciplinary action.

 

Back at school, Hopper has stuck to his promise to find Joyce’s son by first questioning Will’s friends about his last known whereabouts. They begrudgingly leave the ham radio kit their Science teacher is showing them and go to the principal’s office where they tell Hopper about a shortcut Will uses to get home. They offer to show Hopper where the road is located, but he tells them he doesn’t need their help.

 

Using her own avenues to find her son, Joyce goes straight to Will’s makeshift hideout in the woods with the kind of hope that causes her mind to flashback to a scene she hopes will be repeated the moment she looks inside. But it isn’t repeated because Will is nowhere inside his hideout. She turns and screams his name into the woods, her oldest son Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) shouting alongside her.

 

In the diner, the man who stopped the french-fry thief is now making her a hamburger. She eats the burger two bites at a time and when she ignores his attempts to learn her name he takes the burger away from her. His name is Benny (Chris Sullivan) he tells her as he reaches across the table to shale her hand. It is then that he notices a tattoo on her wrist that reads “011.” When she again doesn’t explain what the tattoo means he gets up from the table, taking her burger with him. She stops him, points at herself and says “Eleven.” This is her name.

 

Benny goes into the kitchen to call Social Services for advice, while Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) gorges on her burger and fries. With Benny out of the room, Eleven allows herself to exercise her true nature, which in this case is a response to an outside stimulus that doesn’t agree with her senses – fan blades that screech metal-on-metal as they spin. In a stare as iconic as Jack looking at Rose over his sketch pad in Titanic, but far more dangerous Eleven stops the fans from spinning with the power of her mind revealing to us the same telekinetic power that the monster used to unlock the door chain at Will Byer’s house last night. It begs the question, is she as powerful as the monster?

 

Back at Joyce’s house, Hopper pulls into the driveway to return the bike he found in the woods to Will’s mom. It was just lying there he tells her, insisting no blood or anything else unusual was found with it. Her house shows signs of an unusual occurrence and Hopper follows his instincts to the shed out back where we know Will disappeared. Inside he finds a box of opened shotgun ammunition and squats down to look under the bench at something indistinct. Maybe he sees something suspicious, maybe he hears something suspicious, maybe its just his intuition, but Hopper leaves the shed asking his deputies to gather a search party. Most of the neighborhood comes out to help find Will, including Will’s friends who create their own search party after sneaking out of their homes. It is during the search that we learn Hopper’s daughter has passed away some indeterminate amount of years ago. We don’t learn much else about her death, but it does give us further insight into who Hopper is and why he might be so willing to help a woman who’s son might be dead too.

 

At the diner, Benny washes dishes while Eleven eats again. He tries to make her smile and I want to believe this scene is as sweet as the ice cream covering Eleven’s mouth, but anytime I hear “White Rabbit” playing in the background of any scene I always expect action to crescendo alongside Alice Slick’s voice. And crescendo it does. Because the Social Service workers who show up to retrieve Eleven aren’t there to protect her well-being at all. They are men in suits sent to collect an asset killing Benny in the process simply because he is in their way. Eleven sees this and runs out the back door, but not before dispatching two of the men who clearly underestimated the potential of the power we’ve only glimpsed from her.

 

After the search for Will is called off for the night due to rain, Joyce goes back to her house with her son Jonathan. He admits to Joyce that he feels responsible for Will’s disappearance given he wasn’t home when he should have been. Joyce tells him that it wasn’t his fault, but the moment is interrupted by a phone call – the sound coming from the line eerily similar to the same screeching static Will heard right before he went missing. Joyce screams into the phone demanding to know what the static on the other end has done to her boy, but a bolt of electricity shoots out of the mouthpiece shocking Joyce in the hand and mouth. She drops the phone and collapses into Jonathan’s arms, crying. She tells him she heard Will breathing on the other end of the line, that she knows the static was her son. I’m not so sure she’s right.

 

In the woods, Dustin, Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), and Mike (Finn Wolfhard) all continue their search for Will through the forest alone despite the pouring rain and echoing thunder. They never do find Will. But they do find Eleven, and I can’t wait to see how they integrate her into their team.