Favorite Moments: Stranger Things first season

Ahead of the new season of Stranger Things, I have begun to rewatch the series, finishing the first season the other night. It’s solid through and through, but there are some moments in particular that are so beautiful and true, that it got me thinking about the beauty of storytelling and how something dreamy and nostalgic can ringer truer than reality. 

Here are five of those moments for season 1. 

5. Hopper beats the shit out of the State Trooper. 

I remember a line from Firefly, something like, “They say to never strike someone with a closed fist, but sometimes it is so funny.” Watching Hopper beat up another cop, and a corrupt one at that, was just hilarious. You can see the moment in his eyes where he goes from his meager attempt at subterfuge to get the information, to the hell with it, I’m just going to beat this guy up. In that moment I felt like there was some more of the RPG influence on the writers, because Hopper acted a lot like an RPG character right then and there. This is exactly how a player character reacts once sufficiently frustrated. This is also the exact moment where I knew I was going to like Hopper. 

4. Eleven makes the bully piss himself. 

There are many reasons why I think many of us older nerds love this show. As heartbreaking as it can be to see what appears to be versions of ourselves as children, there are a lot of sentimental feelings to what is a show steeped in nostalgia, it’s not set in the 80s so much as it is set in a dream about the best of 80s movies. But one of the chords struck that seemed to be for the nerds who grew up in that period was watching a bully get humiliated in front of the school. Before geek chic, it was not cool to be a nerd, and most of us spent some time being bullied, and I think all of us appreciated this bit of wish fulfillment fantasy.   

3. Steve Harrington wanders into the Third Act of a Horror movie he didn’t realize he was in.

This is a great moment. I think every character that makes it into the Byers’ home has the moment of realization that things are way past where they thought they were, but Steve coming into the home after Jonathan and Nancy have baited the monster to come was extra special. Much as JJ Gittes in Chinatown has made the mistake of thinking he’s in a hardboiled detective story when in reality it’s a noir story, Steve carries himself as though he’s in a teen movie when it’s actually a scifi horror story. When he shows up and forces his way into the Byers’ house, there’s this brilliant moment where he realizes he doesn’t know what’s going on, everything is way more dangerous than he thought, and everything is way weirder than he could’ve imagined. 

2. Mr. Clarke gets a late phone call. 

I think Mr. Clarke is my second favorite character of all time, only behind the legendary Walter Bishop from Fringe. 

In this scene Mr. Clarke is watching The Thing (one of several references to what is arguably the best scifi horror film of all time) with a lady friend. Dustin calls him asking how to set up a sensory deprivation tank. Mr. Clarke, likely wanting to get back to his lady friend, complains that it’s late on a Saturday and wanting to talk about it on Monday, because to Mr. Clarke, super heroic science teacher, it’s the hour that’s the weird part of that request. Also because he is a super heroic teacher, it takes very little goading from Dustin before Mr. Clarke is rattling off the requested ratios of salt and water for the tank the children will construct. 

1. Mr. Clarke explains other dimensions to the boys. 

This might be my favorite scene of anything, film, book, TV show, comics page… anything. The boys want to know how to get to another dimension, so they do what anyone would do, they ask a middle school science teacher. In reality this would likely result in some horrible nonsense: them sent for counseling, or the teacher not understanding at all, or the teacher just saying it’s impossible. But this is Stranger Things, and the middle school science teacher is super heroic in his own right. Mr. Clarke reasonably thinks the boys are upset about their friend’s death and asks if they’re thinking about multiverse theory because there would be many versions of the universe where Will didn’t die. But here’s the thing, even that he doesn’t dumb down. He even mentions Hugh Everett by name. And when the boys say that’s not what they meant, and switch gears to the the Vale of Shadows, a D&D module or fictional D&D module for the Stranger Things universe, Mr. Clarke knows the material well enough that he’s right there with them and can rattle off the exact terminology with them. Then he goes on to explain the theory of how one can move between said dimensions, providing the boys with a necessary clue on the magnetic field. I’m almost surprised he didn’t add in a line about Flatland or Calabi-Yau Manifolds.