The new season of Stranger Things is an experience I find difficult to describe. I’ll try to lay it out as clearly as I can.
From its start, Stranger Things purports itself to be a depiction of contemporary life in small-town Indiana in the year 1984. This threw me for a bit of a loop at first, because the footage seemed much sharper and more colorful than any footage I’ve seen from that time period. I did some research on this, and I found that the show was actually filmed in the present day, but everyone on the show was actually pretending to be living in 1984. Fancy that! And the pretending doesn’t stop there – none of the people on camera actually live in this town, or work the jobs that we see them work at, either.
With me so far? Good. Here’s where it gets bizarre. Now, as I’m sure you know, 1984 was a while ago (so long ago, in fact, that I’m told the producers of Stranger Things had to hire people to find cars and clothes that look like the ones that people wore and drove back then, to make the illusion more believable). The obvious question is: how did these people on camera make sure that they were re-enacting these events accurately? Well, that wasn’t so much an issue, because as it turns out, none of the events depicted in Stranger Things actually happened! It’s a total fabrication, from beginning to end. Some of the people on Stranger Things weren’t even born yet in 1984, if you can believe that!
The revelation that everything was fake did clear a few things up for me. There was a lot of unusual stuff on Stranger Things that I feel like I would’ve heard of had it actually occurred. For instance, at several points in Stranger Things, people went through a hole in the wall and entered a different world that looked like ours but colder and dirtier and full of frightening animals. There was a boy who got attacked by a giant octopus made of smoke. And there was a girl who could break large objects without even touching them. I was a little weirded out by these happenstances, which seemed to violate the laws of nature as I understood them, but I’ve since been assured that not only were these things not real, they cannot and will never be real. Phew! Really had me going there, Stranger Things!
I know what you’re thinking: “I wasn’t born yesterday – if these things don’t exist, how did Stranger Things get them on camera?” Well, they accomplish this impossible-sounding feat with something called “special effects.” Basically, there were various tricks they used every time they needed “footage” of something that is not found in nature. These tricks include contraptions made of metal and plastic, weird makeup, special lighting and camera techniques, and even pictures made by computers! Is there anything computers can’t do these days?
The format is interesting too. The story is spaced out into nine hour-long chunks. It actually covers quite a bit more than nine hours’ worth of time, but they take a lot of it out, like the people having to sleep and go to work and use the restroom and boring things like that. You’re meant to start from the beginning and watch these “episodes” one after another, in order for the story to make chronological sense. No matter if you don’t have nine hours to spare, though – you can watch any number of them at a time, whenever you want.
If, for whatever reason, you want to skip from one episode to another, or watch an episode you already watched, you can. You can even press a special button in the middle of the show and it will stop for you! Seriously! You just hit this button and, say, get up to make yourself a nice plate of nachos, and when you sit back down with your nachos, it will be as if no time had passed! If you forgot to do that, it’s okay – you can press another button and make it run backwards until you get to the point you left off! What an age we live in.
So if you’re ready to experience the future of television, watch the latest season of Stranger Things on Netflix! Skip Episode 7, though; it sucks.
