Stranger Things (Netflix) [Spoiler Thread]

[Werthead]

On 04/02/2017 at 3:20 AM, A True Kaniggit said:

 I suppose that is true..... but then I'm just going to have to be disappointed in the kids for enjoying an inferior product. 

You sir, are 100% correct. I completely forgot about that. 

I think my objection of it being killed with one fireball still stands though. 

The thessalhydra in 1st Edition only had 72 hit point max though, less if they actually rolled monster hit dice (down to a minimum of 6 hit points, although that'd be equally statistically improbable). A 12th-level wizard could total it, especially if they house-ruled automatic max damage (for quite young kids, that's not an uncommon house rule). So all it would need to do was fail its save (which is what they were actually rolling for, I'm guessing).

Also, they could have previously encountered the thessalhydra and injured it and it'd been chasing them through the dungeon ever since.

[Theda Baratheon]

I can't WAIT for season 2 *love heart eyes* 

[HexMachina]

12 hours ago, Corvinus said:

Stranger Things 2 SuperBowl TV spot

 

Nice! Looks like things will happen on a larger scale in season 2. 

Halloween seems so far away thouhh  

[RhaenysBee]

18 hours ago, Corvinus said:

Stranger Things 2 SuperBowl TV spot

 

It says Ez a videó privát. Is that possible?    Let's try again. Now it tells me to log in to play it. 

One video I was actually interested in and it doesn't work... will google this. 

Yeah, it was cool. Can't wait to see this *.* 

[Corvinus85]

4 minutes ago, RhaenysB said:

It says Ez a videó privát. Is that possible?    Let's try again. Now it tells me to log in to play it. 

One video I was actually interested in and it doesn't work... will google this. 

Signed in on my youtube account I can watch it.

[RhaenysBee]

Just now, Corvinus said:

Signed in on my youtube account I can watch it.

I'm signed in too but it just told me it's private then it told me to sign in. Weird. 

I searched for it and watched it on YouTube so it's fine. 

[Corvinus85]

1 minute ago, RhaenysB said:

I'm signed in too but it just told me it's private then it told me to sign in. Weird. 

I searched for it and watched it on YouTube so it's fine. 

Yeah, nevermind what I just said. It disappeared from my history.

[RhaenysBee]

Just now, Corvinus said:

Yeah, nevermind what I just said. It disappeared from my history.

It wouldn't be a stranger things trailer if it acted normally. 

[Fez]

Halloween is so far away; I didn't realize it'd be that long until Season 2 was available.

Only bad part about the trailer was finding that out.

[DunderMifflin]

So with the busters costumes it's Halloween 1984, roughly one year from the events of season 1? 

I'm looking at movies from 1984 and it was a classic year for sci-fi horror. I'm expecting nods to a few of these

Ghostbusers, 1st Terminator, 1st Gremlins, 1st  Nightmare on Elm St, 1st Karate Kid, 1st Children of the Corn

Conan the Destroyer, Dune, Last Starfighter.

And Sixteen Candles for Nancy. 1st Police Academy, 1st Revenge of the Nerds.

 

[dbunting]

15 hours ago, DunderMifflin said:

So with the busters costumes it's Halloween 1984, roughly one year from the events of season 1? 

I'm looking at movies from 1984 and it was a classic year for sci-fi horror. I'm expecting nods to a few of these

Ghostbusers, 1st Terminator, 1st Gremlins, 1st  Nightmare on Elm St, 1st Karate Kid, 1st Children of the Corn

Conan the Destroyer, Dune, Last Starfighter.

And Sixteen Candles for Nancy. 1st Police Academy, 1st Revenge of the Nerds.

 

Wow, great year! With the exceptions of Dune and Last Star fighter I have seen all those movies multiple times

 

The thing I am happiest about is that it's not a flash forward, from what we see so far. There was speculation early on that it would be like 10-20 years later with all different people.

[Werthead]

1984 was a pretty awesome year. It's the first year I can remember distinct events from: starting primary school, getting my first Transformers and watching Peter Davison turn into Colin Baker on Doctor Who. I *think* I can remember stuff from 1983 (like seeing Return of the Jedi as the very first movie I saw in a cinema at 4 years old) but I'm not 100% on it, since it's all related to films I've seen like 200 times since.

Meanwhile, Stranger Things could last for 4 or 5 seasons, but no more than that. The Brothers want to end the show on their own terms. Plus if it's going to continue being 15-18 months between seasons, the kids will grow up slightly faster than time passes, unless they just introduce bigger time skips.

[Theda Baratheon]

I'm assuming they'll have to end up doing bigger time skips as the kids grow up. 

[Fez]

1 hour ago, Theda Baratheon said:

I'm assuming they'll have to end up doing bigger time skips as the kids grow up. 

The problem with that is they'd pretty quickly end up in the '90s, and its not clear if the Duffers are interested in a '90s nostalgia show.

Another option would be to end the kids' stories, either at the end of this season or the next one, and focus on the adults (and maybe also the teens). Maybe Nancy goes to college somewhere (a city would be best, if they want to change things up from Hawkins), something happens there, and that brings Joyce and Jim (and maybe Charlie and/or Steve) into the story.

[Myrddin]

For people who missed ThinkGeek's yearly April Fools joke of funny fake products, they had a Stranger Things book listed this year.

Where's Barb?

[lokisnow]

I know I'm late to the party but I just watched the series last week (I did about an episode a day, two last night)!

Really, really good, love all the 80s films references and general aesthetic. 

Spoiler

But there is a lot to talk about.

prelude, the demogorgon as possibly being summoned/created/manifested by the boys' D&D game. There's an interesting coincidence here, but I think they have deliberately chosen to avoid Jumanji (with D&D), so I think it was something that has been abandoned, and D&D provides a latticework for the boys' to (probably often wrongly) comprehend what is going on.

First, the connection between Will's disappearance and Elle's appearance. I pondered this centrally while watching only one episode a night. it seems to be something few people talk about (I read the first four or five pages of the thread and saw no mention of it.

But the timeline seems to presume that Elle contacts the monster, the gate opens in the lab, elle escapes the lab into mirkwood, will loses control of his bike (telepathy from Elle wanting to steal it?) in Mirkwood, Will runs from the monster, which telekinetically unlocks his door, follows him back to the shed where will grabs and loads the gun and then they both disappear to the upside. But Will winds up safe now in the upside down, as he seems to have eluded the monster presumably by taking advantage of the upside down representations of his house, shed, and castle byers. With the incantations on castle byers (friends welcome), and the fact that it looks deliberately camoflaged when Elle finds it (which draws the monster to Will) and the flashback of Will saying you have to be beat monsters with smarts as well as with magic, it would seem as though Will gathered camoflage for castle byers and hid there because it effectively hid his scent. and more importantly because I think it was confused by the appearance of the upside down after Will entered it. Additionally, Will is able to learn the rules of how electricity manifests in the upside down, manipulate these rules to communicate with his mother. When Will's brother is searching for Mike's sister, she hears him, but presumably because the portal was still open. Note that _Brenner_ hones in on this ability of Will to communicate from the upside down to the real world and grills Will's mother on just how that was possible, this is the main thing he is interrogating her about. This suggests that Will and _his_ abilities are crucial to understanding the upside down. both in its manifestation as a dark reflection of hawkins and his ability to survive (even though he was slowly starving/dehydrating/hypothermia-ing to death). 

This is all to say that after Elle (and presumably the monster chasing her) escape hawkins laboratory into Mirkwood the first person they encounter is Will--this means that Will could be quite central in shaping how the upside down manifests if it is not actually a permanent manifestation. 

To an extent, this suggests that the demigorgon, when in the upside down, was trapped in a manifestation concocted by will and the other five victims that reflected the reality they knew. The demigorgon was constantly _disoriented_ in the hawkins manifestation of the upside down. 

Which brings us to the other big point. We see two distinct alternate worlds. The first is the black world with the water floor. Elle only accesses this world when she is folding space to find someone via sensory deprivation. To find the russian man draws the attention of the demigorgon and she flees--presumably the demigorgon is also within this world for the purpose of folding space. She's then told to contact it, interrupts it feeding on an egg (interesting use of folding space, egg sucking) and the gate opens. She also later uses this space folding world to find Castle Byers (and in doing so reveals Will's location to the demigorgon, possibly because Elle is sidestepping the hawkins manifestation.).

The gate does not lead to the folded space arena of the water-floor world. The gate leads to the upside down. the dark reflection of our world. 

which suggests that the folded space arena is a sort of foyer between worlds, which is to say that demigorgon home dimension can access the foyer dimension, and our dimension can access the foyer, and that what Elle did is manifest a bridge between the demigorgon dimension and our dimension. This bridge is -the upside down- which is given shape by Will and the demigorgon creating a mutual shared space reflecting both its world and our world.

BUT

that is probably completely wrong because it doesn't account for the major fact that the gates all manifest organicly--they are clearly not cosmic in nature. You could even say that they are organ-esque.

Which makes one wonder, if the space Elle accesses to fold space is actually something quite crucial to understanding the upside down. The foyer space with the water floor. Since her abilities are telepathic and telekinetic, it would makes sense that accessing this foyer space is telepathic in nature as well. 

So the gate is organic, Elle acceses telepathically, that would suggest that the foyer space is perhaps an organic entity. perhaps even the organ of an entity.

Perhaps the BRAIN of some giant entity from another dimension that folds space as a fundamental part of its existence. 

The gate in hawkins lab into the upside down is a gate into the brain of the other creature.

And elle causes that brain to map to a local geography, rather than being dislocated from space.

This might then explain why Will gives form to the upside down, making it a reflection of hawkins. and why the demigorgon gives form to the upside down, making it a reflection of its world, because they're inside the brain of some super-creature and it's brain is making sense of their brains and like a bad dream for this other creature, creating the perceptions of the upside down as the upside down is being experienced--drawing the world like a graphics processor might, for example. neural electricity maps to our electricity, creating a stimulus-response between the two.

And the demigorgon is aware of some of this because it transports Will to a manifestation of knowledge in order to house/breed/implant him with whatever. It takes Will to the Library probably because the Library, with the weight of all that knowledge, maps to the super-creature's brain in a significant way. 

 

 

 

[PetyrPunkinhead]

12 hours ago, Myrddin said:

For people who missed ThinkGeek's yearly April Fools joke of funny fake products, they had a Stranger Things book listed this year.

Where's Barb?

Yaass! "check the library.

Did you see the Armistice snake tatt from WestWorld ? Think Geek is the best.

[Myrddin]

2 hours ago, PetyrPunkinhead said:

Yaass! "check the library.

Did you see the Armistice snake tatt from WestWorld ? Think Geek is the best.

I saw the tat, but haven't seen WestWorld yet. Saving it for summer when I get HBO again. It's definitely on my watch list.

[PetyrPunkinhead]

@Myrddin You'r ein for a treat when you get to WW this summer! Hopefully you've managed to avoid spoilers since it aired. There are a couple of big reveals along the way through the season.

[Myrddin]

14 hours ago, PetyrPunkinhead said:

@Myrddin You'r ein for a treat when you get to WW this summer! Hopefully you've managed to avoid spoilers since it aired. There are a couple of big reveals along the way through the season.

I've avoided everything I can. I haven't read any reviews or anything. Just heard enough recommendations about it.

Hmmm... Maybe I should get HBO before July...