One of the most significant by-products of the Netflix era is this: the urge to historicise American television has never been stronger. And why not? For the first time, audiences in over a 100 countries can watch current fare like Daredevil , The Blacklist or Better Call Saul alongside golden oldies like That ’70s Show : the past and present of TV have now been pinned to one board. In the second season of BoJack Horseman , one of Netflix’s most acclaimed shows, this process of contextualisation was one of the key storylines. The vintage cotton candy comedies of the ’60s were alluded to, Aaron Sorkin’s ‘pre-game pep talk’ and ‘walk-and-talk’ tropes were visually referenced, and the vagaries of network television were the real villain of the second half of the season.

Stranger Things , the newest jewel in the Netflix crown, is another subtle, atmospheric distillation of the dominant horror/science fiction tropes in TV and cinema in the ’80s (particularly the works of Steven Spielberg and Stephen King). Set in Hawkins, Indiana, circa 1983, the show (created by the Duffer Brothers) follows Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder), a single mother trying to track down her missing 12-year-old son, Will, with the help of the town’s deadbeat but still resourceful sheriff Jim Hopper (David Harbour). Joyce’s troubled older son, Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), has launched his own investigation of the matter, with a little help from his friend Nancy Wheeler (Natalia Dyer). Wheeler’s brother Mike and his friends, Dustin and Lucas, meanwhile, are hiding a psychokinetic young girl named Eleven (she doesn’t have a name, just a tattoo on her arm that says ‘011’), who holds the key to defeating a vicious monster at the heart of the tale: the Demogorgon, a typically CIA-experiment-gone-wrong.

Before a here’s-how-it-happened scene in the sixth episode, a minor character asks Joyce and Hopper: “You guys read any Stephen King?” It is, therefore, expected that a lot of horror scenes take their cues from the King playbook. However, the King homage felt most strongly here isn’t from gore-fests like Carrie , Cujo or Christine . Instead, in the Mike-Dustin-Lucas nerd power trinity, and how their characters evolve across the season, there are strong whiffs of Stand By Me , the 1986 Rob Reiner classic starring River Phoenix , based on a King novella called The Body .

Hawkins is a one-horse town until things go wrong at a military-cum-CIA research complex, unleashing the horrors of the Demogorgon and the Upside Down, an alternative dimension that the creature moves in and out of, where Will is trapped. This, too, echoes the spooky towns of King’s novels, where a mysterious stranger ( Needful Things ), a once-evil old man ( Apt Pupil ) or a haunted toy/car/dog ( The Monkey/Christine/Cujo ) begins to tear apart the natural cohesiveness of a boring, polite, tightly-knit community.

It is difficult to pinpoint one aspect of the show as the stand-out. Ryder delivers a renaissance performance as the twitchy, chain-smoking, occasionally hysteric but ultimately formidable Joyce. The Duffer Brothers’s plotting is immaculate and the cinematography, particularly in the scenes involving the Demogorgon, hits it out of the ballpark. But for me, the show’s strongest suit is its tackling of the science-vs-magic question. The Mike-Dustin-Lucas trinity represents the scientific response to a world where the Demogorgon lives (and feeds at will). Joyce represents the polar opposite: she truly believes that her son is communicating with her using electric lights. Jonathan, Wheeler and Hopper are detectives; they believe in science but do not necessarily disbelieve the supernatural. (The tightrope walk that the Duffer Brothers have pulled off is to make Stranger Things feel like three genre shows, and to pull them all together by the end of the finale.)

The scene where Mike and Dustin explain the science behind dimension-travelling to Joyce and Hopper is a wonderfully plotted amalgam of all these worldviews. Eleven, with her abilities and her horrific past, is another major convergence point for science and magic/the supernatural: the scientists are trying to ‘solve’ her while the children are continually struggling to hold on to her, to make her trust them.

Fittingly, there are more than a few unanswered questions at the end of the season, which augurs well for the follow-up. Where did Eleven come from? Will Jonathan and Wheeler kick some more ass, tag-team-style? My personal fan request is to give Stephen King a two-minute appearance (not as himself). After all, any toxic dystopia called the Upside Down owes a debt to the grandmaster of horror, and you don’t need name-dropping dialogues to realise that.

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