Stranger Things Season 1, Episode 1 Review – “Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers”

Stranger Things Season 1, Episode 1 “Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers”
Written by The Duffer Brothers
Directed by The Duffer Brothers
Premiered July 15, 2016 on Netflix

Drenched in ominous synthesizers and foreboding shadows, the first hour of Stranger Things is a much smaller, quieter entry than many of its episodes to follow, 49 minutes of preamble tethered together by an central mystery and a lot of 80s nostalgia. An effective hour with a few too many things on its checklist to introduce, “Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers” is an enticing entry into The Duffer Brothers nostalgia-soaked world, a pilot episode driven by a powerful lead performance and a lot of unsettlingly effective table-setting, that’s only slightly held back by a few formulaic dramatic elements and its incredibly large scope.

Stranger Things begins its story on November 6, 1983, at the Hawkins National Lab in Hawkins, Indiana, opening on what appears to be a scientist, running down a hallway of flashing lights until something unseen and terrible pulls him up through an elevator shaft. From there, we cut to the basement of the Wheeler home, where Mike and his friends Lucas, Dustin, and Will are in the middle of a long session of Dungeons & Dragons. As one might expect from a series wearing its 80s nostalgia firmly on its sleeve, their adventure in the game is an ominous tease of what’s to come in Hawkins; Mike, the dungeon master, teases them that “something is coming, something hungry for blood” – which turns out to be the Demogorgon, a massive monster putting young Will and his fictional character into peril.

There’s a lot of foundation carefully laid in this scene, which is perhaps the only time Stranger Things feels like a traditional television pilot; their D&D game not only contains a lot of narrative foreshadowing, it does a lot of legwork in establishing the dynamics between the group (Dustin wanting Will to cast Protection, Lucas telling him to cast Fireball, while Will freezes, unable to decide until blurting out “fireball!” and throwing the dice off the table) and introduces us to Karen and Nancy Wheeler, Mike’s sister who has a new boyfriend and once upon a time, used to play with Mike and his friends.

This is all established in the first four minutes, before the kids go their separate ways and we follow Will on his fateful ride through what the kids call ‘Mickwood’ and back to the Byers home, as he hurriedly tries to run away from a shadowy, looming figure he faintly sees trailing him home. After a tense sequence of Will running through the house and into the shed, we hear a screech, a zoom into a white light – and then the camera pans out, revealing an empty shed before cutting to the now-iconic Stranger Things title sequence.

From there, “The Vanishing of Will Byers” immediately widens its scope, interweaving a wide cast of characters, adults and children alike, as Hawkins wakes up on November 7th and begins to realize something strange is going on. We meet cigarette-chomping, depression-coded Hawkins police chief Jim Hopper, the rest of the Byers family (single mom Joyce and her older son Jonathan), and Nancy’s new boyfriend Steve Harrington, a polo-shirt wearing playboy – it’s an effective collection of genre archetypes, which allows the pilot episode a bit of leeway when it comes to the speed with which these characters and stories are introduced.

The highlights, of course, are anxious single mother Joyce and the alcoholic Hopper, two characters who bring completely different energies to the forming central mystery around Joyce’s son – who, at one point, thinks is on the other end of a mysterious phone call she receives at home (before the phone strangely shocks her, one of many examples of electromagnetic events occurring in “The Vanishing of Will Byers”). Joyce’s manic energy and Hopper’s indignant, general disinterest in life don’t share a lot of screen time in the first episode, but they provide “The Vanishing of Will Byers” with two independent paths to begin building out its world – which also includes another, seemingly related story about a strange young girl with a buzzcut, and a white-haired man looking for her.

By design, the Eleven material feels isolated from everything happening in “The Vanishing of Will Byers”; everything is designed as a collision course, explicitly for her and Will’s three friends to meet at the very end of the pilot episode. As a byproduct of this, though, what is happening with the strange girl and the people following her (who murder a diner owner kind enough to take her in and feed her) feels incredibly vague, stretching the pilot a bit beyond what it can handle in its 49 minute running time; though it is certainly an intriguing introduction to Eleven’s story and powers (we see her focus her attention on a fan running in the diner, which suddenly stops moving), “The Vanishing of Will Byers” doesn’t do anything to establish why this story is important or essential to what’s happening in Hawkins; it just doesn’t have enough time (which is weird to say about a Netflix series, especially one with an entire season of episodes over 60 minutes long) to connect these stories together in any explicit way, the one place where this pilot feels like a bit of an incomplete thought.

It’s a minor quibble, however; “The Vanishing of Will Byers” does an incredible job of establishing its tone and voice, even as it vacillates between its smaller, localized stories (like Nancy and her new handsy, slightly dumb boyfriend) and the larger, more frightening dangers being teased at the edge of its story. Those can be a hard thing to balance, but “The Vanishing” makes smart choices, framing most of the episode around Joyce’s increasingly unhinged anxiety around Will’s disappearance, which allows the episode to slowly build tension as it introduces us to the various internal and external conflicts that make Hawkins a living, breathing (if completely fictional) entity in the Duffer’s vision of the early 1980s.

What’s remarkable about “The Vanishing of Will Byers” is how grounded it all is; as we’ll see over the next 34 episodes (42 including this winter’s final season), Stranger Things would grow and mutate into something much louder, larger, and brasher over its lifetime; in its first episode, it is very much a story about a few dorky kids and the adults around them struggling to keep themselves together, subtly revealing the depth of pain behind Hopper and Joyce as the episode builds out their characters. While it makes for a bit of a bifurcated narrative – the mystery surrounding the children, and the personal conflicts of the adults surrounding them – it all works in building out a world with dimensionality, as effectively as any ambitious drama can be in its first episode.

And it ends in a compelling spot; as the three boys run into the strange, pensive Eleven walking through the woods around Hawkins, Stranger Things clearly announces its intentions to marry all of these disparate story elements and 80s homages together into one streamlined narrative of government conspiracies, burgeoning hormones, and period-specific references and needle drops. Though it leaves a bit to be desired in how it teases some of those elements (the amount of cutaways is almost obnoxious), “The Vanishing of Will Byers” is a pretty potent first hour, a well-crafted, foreboding introduction to the human (and inhuman) terrors quickly descending down on the unknowing population of Hawkins.

Grade: B+

Other thoughts/observations:

• Welcome to Stranger Things reviews! Reviews will be publishing weekly (and sometimes bi-weekly) throughout the summer and fall, as we all prepare to say farewell to the show when season five premieres in November.
  
• the emphasis on analogue communication – the boys using long-distance walkie-talkies, their excitement at AV club over a CB radio – is a great touch.
  
• At one point, we see Brenner put on a hazmat suit, and look at a pulsating, very wet-sounding gash on the ground of Hawkins National Laboratory.
  
• Will tells Mike that the Demogorgon would’ve gotten him, based on the dice roll he found on the floor before he left.
  
• It’s always interesting to see how Stranger Things treats Will, because it’s incredibly odd – here, we learn his biological father called him a ‘fag’, and everyone thinks he’s “different”. This would, of course, become one of the most eye-rolling elements of season four.
  
• There’s a strange moment where Joyce remembers meeting Will inside his little makeshift cabin, a brightly shot scene that cuts immediately to the present, where she sees the cold, empty inside where they once were.
  
• We also see a room full of people wiretapping phones, and taking particular interested in hearing what people in Hawkins are talking about.
  
• Hopper: “I always had a distaste for science.”
  
• I laugh every time at Karen’s “I hope you’re enjoying your chicken, Ted” line.
  
• Teens making out to Toto’s “Africa” is a weird choice.
  
• Nancy reminds Steve she’s not a slut like Laurie, Amy, or Becky. Judgy judgy!
  
• Speaking of Nancy, perhaps the best shot in the entire pilot is when the camera focuses on her, watching her observe Steve from over his shoulder. It’s a perfect “girl realizes her crush on the boy” moment, captured quietly by the camera and incandescently in Natalia Dyer’s performance.
  
• The boys anxiously arguing while Hopper questions them is great.
  
• Joyce: “What happens the one time out of a hundred?”
  
• we are reminded that D&D kids were not considered cool in the 80s, when two random kids bump into them and call them Midnight, Frog, and Toothless (“it’s cleidocranial dysplasia!” Dustin screams back at them).
  
• The strange girl has “011” written on her arm. What could it mean?