The long-awaited conclusion of the hit Netflix series, Stranger Things, finally arrived over the holiday week.
It’s hard to believe that it has been more than nine years since the show became a cultural phenomenon when the first season debuted in the summer of 2016.
The series is set in the 1980s, rekindling fond memories of that era for anyone who was around at that time. There were no cell phones or personal computers and kids gathered in their basements to play Dungeons and Dragons with playing cards, game pieces, and handwritten notebooks.
For those who grew up in that era, the show was a trip down memory lane. Although we were a bit older in the ‘80s than the show’s main characters — who were in middle school when the series began — what resonated for us was the photographer for the high school newspaper who developed his black & white film and printed his own photos in his red-light dark room.
It reminded us of an era of our life, which we largely had forgotten, when we too, were printing our photos for our newspapers in the dark room in the basement of our newspaper office. Today of course, all of our photos are digital and are transmitted via the internet with a few keystrokes on our cell phones and laptops — long gone are the spools of 36-photo rolls of film, chemical solutions, and printing paper, not to mention the hours we spent in the dark room making sure that our photos were shaded just right for the next day’s newspaper.
The show also introduced us to one of our favorite new actresses, Millie Bobby Brown, and resurrected an old favorite, Winona Ryder, who herself was a teen in the 1980s.
On the surface, Stranger Things can be viewed as a straight-up horror movie involving a parallel universe (known as the Upside Down) that is populated by alien demons and oozing black vines, along with the requisite government conspiracy.
Metaphorically, the Upside Down can be viewed in any number of ways, from the spread of cancer in the human body to having been prescient of what has transpired in the world since 2016 — the upside down nature of our political life, the onset of the coronavirus, or perhaps the ubiquity of plastics in everything we eat, drink, and breathe.
But in the last scenes of the series finale, the show reminded us that it was at its best when it focused on the loss of innocence that we all undergo — and endure — when we transition from childhood to adulthood on the journey from middle school through high school.
That is a universal theme that is applicable to every generation — and that was captured so well by Stranger Things.