The Science of Stranger Things: Strange things are happening in Hawkins, Indiana. Of these strange things, perhaps the strangest is the metamorphoses occurring in The Upside Down due to governmental lab experiments… Let’s start dissecting!
Summary: “Stranger Things” involves government conspiracies, secret science experiments and spooky supernatural forces packed with 80s nostalgia. The show’s Spielberg-esque plot follows a group of kids who are trying to save the world. I’ve enjoyed all the seasons thus far but season 4 is special because of the elements of full-blown horror inspired by The Exorcist, Saw and A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The Hawkins season 4 crew feels like classic Stranger Things, but with an added level of maturity. The kids are now seasoned pros at combatting the art of supernatural investigating. The way they unravel the mystery of Hawkins’ new threat (Vecna) is enthralling and the character development throughout is unwavering. Part 1 of Stranger Things Season 4 is the most ambitious season yet with some top notch performances – particularly David Harbour, Millie Bobby Brown, and Sadie Sink.
All throughout Season 4, you are reminded of the hallmarks that make this show so awesome. Stranger Things has an incredible ability to blend the fun and nostalgia of the 1980s with more sinister undertones that subtly take over and captivate your full attention.
My favorite episode is probably “Chapter Seven: The Massacre at Hawkins Lab” which is the longest of volume 1, clocking in at an hour and 40 minutes. This monumental episode reveals an in-depth character evolution allowing the audience to understand more about Eleven, the Upside Down and the motives behind the the evil villains throughout the series. The pieces of the puzzle are coming together!
Season 4 was marketed with the tagline “Every ending has a beginning,” and Duffer Brothers announced season 5 would be the last season. I really enjoyed Season 4: volume 1 and I believe it sets the stage for an epic of epic for volume 2 this July!
Onto, the “science” of Stranger Things…
The Upside Down: The show describes it as: “A dimension that is a dark reflection or echo of our world. It is a place of decay and death. A plane out of phase. A place of monsters. It is right next to you, and you don’t even see it.”
In a nutshell, it’s basically a parallel dimension that also can have drastic effects on our environment, causing massive decay as well as being able to form a massive tunnel underground system. The dimension are linked together in a hive mind controlled by the Mind Flayer. The hive mind was a species of humanoid predators, Demogorgons. People can communicate in The Upside Down through Morse code which is a method used in telecommunication to encode text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations, called dots and dashes.
The “Upside Down” biology isn’t the most hospitable place and is a place where time and space function differently. The ecological schema of the Upside Down is characterized by loss of life, loss of habitation, loss of sustenance, loss of hope, terrifying destruction, irreparable horror, and an entrapment filled with terrifying creatures. Maybe the writers want the viewers to think that the creatures came from a wormhole in space from another point in the galaxy? I guess anything is possible in the world of sci-fi TV!
The show delves into the idea of black holes — when you compress mass, you can create a region in spacetime where nothing can get out. Black holes are very dense regions where nothing can escape. However, the scientific concepts presented in “Stranger Things,” including traveling between dimensions, don’t measure up in reality but it certainly makes for good TV! “In order to produce a black hole on Earth, the planet would have to be shrunk to an inch and the amount of energy required to form a black hole isn’t feasible on Earth, and is much more dense and energetic than anything that can travel through a phone line.” (Dr. Pullman, University’s Hearne Chair of Theoretical Physics: Pullin’s research focuses on understanding what happens in the final moments in the life of a black hole).
Through the lens of Stranger Things, we see a ecological cause and effect between the lab and mother nature itself. So what’s the The Upside Down? It’s us. It takes the incessant forms of our memories and reacts to person’s inner energies. It could be described as a mindscape and ruled by evil that exists within all of us. There is a clear link between the Upside Down and the human psyche. As Stranger Things proceeds into its final season, get ready for some ghastly revelations about the true nature of the Upside Down!