Stranger Things: In the world of psychic abilities and monsters

Stranger things is an 80s based sci-fi series (2016 – Present). It explores the dynamics of a secret government facility, Hawkins National Laboratory, that experiments on psychic power. It recounts the story of children and young teens, who find themselves in the city next of this facility, where strange things happen. Strange monsters emerge.

Which was your favourite or most scary monster of the series stranger things?

El (Millie Bobby Brown) is a captive when she runs away from this facility. She has psychic powers that are trained and developed and apparently also given to her through this facility.

How did El get her psychic powers?

In the series, Stranger Things, they explain that El’s mother was undergoing psychic experiment with the psychedelic drug LSD while she was pregnant with El. This is how she became with psychic abilities. These abilities are refined at the facility. Her name is El, and stands for the number eleven.

The doctor Martin Brenner (Matthew Modine ) in this facility, who El calls Papa, is the only parent figure she ever knows. He is very focused on pushing El to her limits and making her do things that could endanger her. Like killing a cat, or putting her in isolation on purpose.

She has the special ability, to view remotely other places. This ability grows when she is diving in this chemically adjusted water. In this moment she enters the mind space. Here she spies on the communists for the US government.

While in this mind space she gets in contact with a creature she has never seen and is terrified of it. The creature/monster looks very gruesome. Her papa, wants her to make contact with this scary monster, unknowingly that this will open a portal to another world. Stranger things will continue to happen.

After this happens, there is the mysterious disappearance of sweet little Will (Noah Schnapp) while he is at home, in his house at Hawkins. His best friend with whom he played dungeons that night are really afraid that something happened to him. Mike Wheeler(Finn Wolfhard ), Lucas Sinclair (Caleb McLaughlin ), Dustin Henderson (Gaten Matarazzo ). These are also the main actors of the first season and are great loveable characters.

Who of the original cast is your favourite?

The mother of Will,  Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder ) and the brother of Will Jonathan Byers (Charlie Heaton ) will be engaged in search parties as well as Sheriff Jim Hopper (David Harbour ) who promises to find the kid.

Why is Jim Hopper so hurt?

Jim Hopper has a heart aching back story. His daughter was diagnosed with cancer and died really young. Hopper never really recovered from her death.

Sister of Mike, Nancy Wheeler (Natalia Dyer) will become more involved in searching Will, when the same disappearance happens to her best friend Barbara (Shannon Purser ). Nancy feels deeply guilty, because she left her alone, while making out with her boyfriend Steve Harrington (Joe Keery ).

This deep guilt and terrible anxiety of what is happening in city Hawkins, gives her tremendous strength to endure and find them. Both Nancy and Jonathan are searching for them together.

El appears in Hawkins, as she just escaped the facility during the same time as Wills disappearance. Mike, Lucas and Dustin find her and Mike brings her home. He hides her live in his basement from his parents. He takes care of her. Brings her Eggo’s waffles, El’s favourite.

Why is El so scared?

El is in danger, ruthless people with guns are after her already killing the first man who helped her. She is afraid her Papa will find her.

Moreover, when we first meet El in the first season she is haunted by the things she had to do at the facility, and also searched by the people from the facility who would kill to get her back.

El is scared and shy. She doesn’t know who to trust, she cannot really communicate, with no one, but slowly warms up to Mike. Still she doesn’t reveal everything she knows, only that she is in danger.

Have you seen the series already?

El’s shyness, awkwardness reverberates in every season, right?

El has this way of not being of this world. She has the ability to move things with her mind and to enter a mind pace where she can view anywhere in the world: remote viewing. El closes her eyes, goes into trance, and can see and hear everything. She even has visions.

Are you intrigued or have you seen the series already?

What I also really enjoyed about this series is the setting in the 80s, the music and all the details. Has someone of you lived through the 80s? Did it bring back some nostalgia? Was it accurate for you?

Still during the first season we find out that her name, the number Eleven, a number also tattooed on her arm, like a person from a concentration camp. It is really scary knowing she was captive in this facility, marked and known only as a number. That is why her life is very traumatic, right?

Eleven is not the only one with psychic abilities that has been captive at the facility. In season two, she meets her sister, who is number 8, Kali Prasad (Linnea Berthelsen). Who she sees her in a vision while entering the mindspace of her mother Terry Ives , (Aimee Mullins.) .

Els mother is alive, she is stuck in her mind, mentally incapacitated.

When El was born, they told Terry that El had died. What happened is that the facility stole her daughter at birth. Terry knew what had happened and wants her daughter back. When she tries to get her at the facility, the people at the facility took her and electrocuted her brain.

Isn’t that gruesome? how they steal her daughter and damage a mother permanently to liquidate her claim?

El sees the visions of her mother and finds her sister 8. Her sister can create very vivid visual illusions. That is her strength.

The bonding with her sister does not last long, when El figures out she only wants her to help for criminal purposes. 8, is involved in a criminal activities. El leaves her an heads back to Hawkins.

The side story of every character in the show is very important. The conflict between the friends, all trying to search or the monsters that are on the loose on Hawkins, the Demagorgons.

Every season has it own story and interesting moments throughout the 4 seasons. Which one is your favourite?

The monsters which reach Hawkins from the portal, are different and more advanced every season. While the kids grow, also do the dangers do.

Which is the scariest monster? Which monster did make you shiver?

The greatest danger in the end, is still to discover.

In my opinion the best character introduction is in season 2 when Max Mayfield (Sadie Sink) arrived in the friendship group. But honestly, there are so many loveable characters who get introduced during the seasons.

Who is your favourite newly added character throughout the show?

As I said before, the danger grows. First season the dermadogs are the real danger, they are strong and ruthless. The mind flayer, who controls, kills and incorporates different people and becomes a big giant monster.

Which was your favourite or most scary monster of the series?

During these 4 season of stranger things, many scary moments happen, it is not a children series, it is mainly for adults, or young adults. There are many murders and many monsters emerging from the Upside down world.

All this events connect in the fourth season of stranger things to really reveal who is the culprit in all this events.

The ending of season 4 explained:

The fourth season of stranger things starts with El who has lost her powers while fighting the mind flayer in season 3. Moreover, she moved away from Hawkins with Joyce, who her new guardian after Hopper parishes, and Will and Jonathan. Joyce could not live in Hawkins anymore. She chooses to adopt El after Joyce saw Hopper dying in the blast, that closed one the portals. Everyone in the stranger things thought the portal and Hopper were gone, forever.

Unfortunately, nothing is how it seems and we slowly come to understand that the Upside down is much stronger than we thought and the danger is still growing, as it did throughout the first 3 seasons of stranger things.

After season 3 I was really sad that Hopper was dead. He became such a lovely father to El, throughtout season 2. Gladly he is not dead and cut out of the stranger things. He was actually taken by the Russians after the blast in the lab in US and brought back to Russia. Here he is held as prisoner. The Russians are still experimenting here with the monsters from the upside down world, the demargorons/demadogs.

Hopper is still able to send Joyce a message to US and she will go and retrieve him with Murray Bauman (Brett Gelman). Most of their story in this season in stranger things is breaking Hopper out of Russian prison. They will use the dermadogs to their advantage and nearly perish trying to get back to the US.

Meanwhiles Hawkins is not safe, and another gruesome murder is committed. All believe it is Eddie Munson ( Joesph Quinn ). A search for him and a generally really violent atmosphere is building up in Hawkins. Everyone us afraid of these murders and strange happenings in Hawing the past years. Everyone is arming up and ready to fight anyone who seems suspicious.

Another person that is still alive in season 4 is Dr. Brenner and El is united with her Papa in the lab, because she wants to get her powers back to help her friends. Dr. Brenner promises her that he can help. She does not know how to do it without him, so she says yes to his offer.

He will help her understand where how powers are and make her stronger. While she is finding herself and her powers, old memories of her childhood resurface. These memories make her believe she is a monster, she sees all these dead children and her with blood in her eyes. She does not know what transpired. Dr. Brenner doesn’t tell her the truth, until she doesn’t figure it out on her own.

When she was a child, there were many other children in the facility, some seemed even stronger than her. She had to be taught how to channel her powers.

In the past one of the guards, Henry Creel, (Jamie Campbell Bower) got closer to her and told her she was taken away from her mother and how she could find her. El believed him, only after their escape attempt he told her that he can’t leave because of this chip in his brain. With her telekinetic powers, she pulls the chip out of his neck.

She did not know she has been tricked. His powers were unleashed by her pulling out the chip, enabling him to go on killing all the children and everyone who went against him in the facility.

El doesn’t escape, but goes back inside the facilty and is really shocked and disappointed he killed so many of the children at the facility. She sees all their bodies lying on hte floor. At this point he attemps to kill her too. So she took all her force and fights with him. She is able to push him towards the wall and open a portal to another dimension.

Yes, you guessed right, the Upside down world. So it is El that banishes Henry who is the number 1, the first experiment of the facility, in this alternate dimension after he kills all the others.

No-one has seen this power and opening portals like that before. No one knew what had just happened. So all the happenings later are mainly because of El banishing number 1 in the Upside down world. He is banished and is growing in strength, trying to get back.

We find out how his appearance changed in this new dimensions. How due to his strong psychic powers he is able to mold this world to his will. How he finds the creatures, the derma dogs and the others and is able to navigate them towards the real world and starts to create all the problems in Hawkins. He is behind everything.

Vecna is the name given by the children in Hawkins, since they suspected a higher force manouvering this monsters. What they do not know is that he wants to open more portals to be able to transcend to the real world, the world where humans live.

Number one is the psychopath of stranger things, the real ultimate monster in the story.

El did not have memories of him, they are slowly coming back while she comes back to regain her power in the facility.

Something I did not really understand, how did Papa, Dr. Brenner come back? Where was he? And did he really not know it is Henry who is behind all this?

He helps El regain her psychic powers. By doing so he gives her the chance to fight 1. He does not think she is ready for the challenge though. He knows that the creature from Upside down has been opening portals from that world and has been able to kill many people.

Another point that was not so clear, Vecna, aka 1, is creating this portals by killing victims. He says he needs exactly 4, but hasnt he been killing more?

Who was the victim that frightened or scared you the most?

In the end of the season he is able to complete his quest, even El newly regained powers are not able to halt him. He is ripping the real world up, and connecting it to the Upside down.

What did you like most of the show? Are you looking forward to season 5 of stranger things?

Let me know in the comments.