Based on a tip I got from Gamerstable, Jessa and I decided to watch Stranger Things over our evening meal.  Like Boogiepop Phantom, I was looking for something with a bit of mystery but also elements of the fantastical, so as to turn that mystery into horror.

For me, I think Stranger Things misses horror, but really nails dark fantasy.  This may seem like an odd quibble, but for me horror is about struggling against evil…  …and failing or living with the despair that you will fail.  Stranger Things is about horrible things…  …and the heroes that rise and overcome them.  This is not a criticism of the show, I actually find that I enjoy dark fantasy a bit more than horror most of the time, as it is typically better done.

That being said, I find that I quite enjoyed Stranger Things.  It had echoes of The Goonies (a close knit team of kids, riding their bikes, solving mysteries), The X-Files (government conspiracy, psychics, monsters), and The Twilight Zone/The Outer Limits (aspects of the universe truly beyond human comprehension).  The setting also felt like a reasonable facsimile of a small town in the 80 – while I can’t claim to be an expert on the matter (I was only seven at the close of the 80s, and Clifton wasn’t that small), there were only a few anachronisms that really pulled me out.

Stranger Things had the plot elements in place for the kinds of stories I like, and it also managed to tell a good story.  There were certainly scenes that felt totally extraneous to me (I highly value a concise story), however, many of these folded in details that the characters could then act upon, which made them more credible in the end.  This is important because while there were some pretty one-dimensional characters, there were others that had some surprising depth to them – I particularly liked that Steve grew as a character before the show ended.

Overall, I think Stranger Things is one of the better TV series I’ve seen in the last few years.  It also sated my desire for a dark mystery; this sort of thing is not something that I often have access to, so Stranger Things was both rare and good.