The Upside Down

Is there a dark and decayed parallel world sitting right next to us? What if the boundaries between them started to thin? And if this happened in a small town in Indiana in the 1980s because of a government secret lab experiment gone awry. That’s the premise of the Netflix series Stranger Things, a show that cleverly combines science-fiction, drama, horror, with intriguing connections between Dungeons & Dragons, the real world and the parallel world.

[Warning – Season 1 SPOILERS ahead!]

The setting is the fictional small town of Hawkins, Indiana, that also happens to house a secret government lab. It begins with four middle school nerdy kids in a marathon session of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), the role-playing game popular in the ‘80s. At a crux of their epic quest, a powerful evil creature appears – the Demogorgon. The adventurers can’t make up their minds what do, and whether the wizard in the group should cast a defensive protection spell or an offensive fireball. As the Demogorgon takes advantage of their indecision, the dice are rolled over-enthusiastically and fly off the table. Just at that moment, parents interfere because it’s past bedtime and the merry adventurers have to break up their game. Three kids get on their bikes and cycle home in the night. As one of them, Will Byers, cycles close to the fenced government facility, he hears the chilling sound of an alien presence. He runs for home in an attempt to escape the beast, and then disappears! That’s the setup of the first episode.

Subsequent episodes unveil the stranger things happening in town. Other disappearances follow. A stranger shows up in the form of a hungry young girl with a shaved head. Will’s friends and relatives search for him with the help of the local sheriff who has experienced the tragedy of losing his own daughter to illness some years back. Shadowy government figures begin interfering with the investigation, including killing a local restaurateur who finds and (briefly) shelters the young girl, who turns out to have run away from the government facility. She turns out to possess special powers having been in utero while her mother was undergoing drug-induced experiments to test the limits of the human mind. (Yes, the government did at one point test LSD and other mind-warping drugs to learn if telepathy and telekinesis was possible.)

Eventually we learn that the young girl, named Eleven by the tattoo on her forearm, was used by the government to telepathically listen in on Soviet conversations (this being the cold war) and trained to maim or kill using telekinesis. The telepathy, though, required traversing what seemed at first like a dark dimension which then turned out to be a parallel decaying world containing an alien creature – like the one from Alien, Aliens, and numerous other movies. An encounter between the creature and Eleven opens up a large portal between the parallel worlds within the secure government facility, but also weakens the boundary in the vicinity of rural small-town Hawkins, Indiana.

The alien itself, especially when revealed in full in the final episode is much less interesting – a trope borrowed from Alien and its descendant movies. In earlier episodes in breaks out from its dark world into Hawkins, drawn by the smell of blood, because it needs to feed. The girl Eleven, having escaped from the facility and being sheltered by the other three boys looking for their missing friend, uses their D&D game to explain the situation as best she can. She identifies Will as the wizard, hiding from the alien creature as the Demogorgon, all residing in the Upside Down. The Upside Down is the name given to the parallel dark world because she turns the game-board upside down. It is all black. That’s where the Demogorgon resides and where Will is hiding, so close, yet unable to break back into his own world. The kids recognize it – the Vale of Shadows in their D&D world.

The dark world itself is interesting. There are parallel buildings and structures in the same location. It’s as if this is Hawkins, Indiana, if a pack of dementors have gone through and sucked all its life away. The buildings are decaying, covered with black alien ooze. All is cold and hazy, and the atmosphere is a miasma. With the boundary weakened between the two worlds, the alien creature is able to snatch victims from Hawkins, both human and wildlife. Eventually some of our protagonists enter the dark world through the portal and other cracks in the boundary. Will Byers, the wizard, is close to death in the poisonous haze, but has managed to survive and hide from the creature. Perhaps his spell of protection ‘worked’ where other fellow townspeople were unable to survive, and his experience of being immersed in D&D helped him keep his wits to survive a nasty Boss Creature.

One of the clever parts of this movie is when Will’s mother realizes that he is trying to communicate through electrical lights. In this dark and decaying world, energy signatures of life are uncommon. So as Will moves, in the vicinity near his home, the lamps light up along his path. When the alien creature approaches, it’s energy-presence causes large light-ups and electrical disturbances. Energy in the form of electromagnetic waves (it’s like magic!) seem to be leaking between the cracking boundaries of the two parallel worlds sitting in the same simultaneous space – so close, yet worlds apart.

An ‘80s stereotype in the form of the enthusiastic science teacher who also advises the AV club (of which the four boys are the only enthusiastic members) helps to explain the science of parallel worlds. Hugh Everett’s multi-universe proposal comes up. There’s a neat analogy of exploring different dimensions through the ‘flea and acrobat’ illustration. The AV equipment is utilized to make contact between worlds. The boys use their compasses after learning about magnetic and energy fields from the teacher. And when they want to construct a makeshift sensory-deprivation pool so that Eleven can make contact with Will, the teacher gives them instructions akin to what’s used in Float Therapy. (I had my students work on this in one of my classes!)

Eventually the creature is killed by Eleven; but she disappears in the process. Would rolling an improbably eleven have killed the Demogorgon in D&D? I don’t know but maybe that’s an unexplored connection. We don’t really know what the overly enthusiastic dice-roll was in the first episode even though one of the boy claims it’s a seven – the most common outcome from two six-sided dice. And are the stranger things over? Was the portal closed? We don’t know. The Upside Down world must still be there – cracks and all. And if it’s a world in which the present buildings and structures exist in decay, is it a future world? Is there a traversing through time? I’ll have to wait until Season Two.* Even Stranger Things might be afoot in Hawkins, Indiana.

*You might be wondering why I haven’t already seen Season Two. That’s because I don’t have a Netflix subscription and don’t plan on getting one, so I’m just waiting for my local library to get the DVDs (which was our source for Season One). I did watch Chef’s Table when my sister (who has a subscription) visited in the early summer.