Why Stranger Things' First Episode Can Be Kind of Confusing

 

Pilotology: Why Stranger Things' First Episode Can Be Kind of Confusing

If you just clicked on this post to read about Stranger Things, then you can scroll down a bit, but because this is my first post on here, I want to do a little introduction. 

My name's Sam, I'm good at writing, and I'm bad at making up fun facts about myself for icebreakers. I created this blog for three main reasons:

1) Because I like talking about stories, in any form – books, TV shows, games – both in a "that character's really cool, I love him" way, but also in a more analytical way. As a writer, I look to these things to see what they do well, so I can improve my own stories.

There are a lot of blogs and YouTube channels out there analyzing TV shows. But not a lot of them are geared towards writing. I often found myself watching some really insightful analyses, and learning a lot about what certain shows did right and wrong. But then when I sat down in front of the keyboard myself, I didn't know how to apply those lessons.

This blog is meant to help bridge that gap. I want to look into the deliberate decisions that go into making stories, and give people concrete steps they can take to utilize those stories' techniques.

2) I tend to avoid talking about myself or my opinions for fear that it might make people like me less. Turns out, that's a bad strategy, for a number of reasons. This blog is an attempt to "put myself out there", as the people say.

3) That sweet, sweet ad revenue.

Now that that's out of the way, let's get down to the analysis. Basically, I suck at writing beginnings, so I want to look at how my favorite shows do beginnings to see what we can learn from them. This is part of a series of posts I'm calling Pilotology (because TV shows' first episodes are called "pilots"). Since Stranger Things is one of my favorite shows, I think it's fitting to talk about it for the first post of Pilotology and this blog in general.

For those of you who scrolled past all that junk at the beginning, the recipe analysis starts here:

The very first scene of Stranger Things shows us a scientist running down a hallway under rapidly-blinking lights. The show chooses to start off with something intense and action-packed. The scene feels designed to catch our attention. It also tells us very little. We don’t see the monster the scientist runs from. We don’t see the Upside-Down, or Eleven, or any mention of psychic powers.

We’ll learn more about those as the season goes on, keeping us hooked as it gradually reveals the details behind what’s happening. But the opening scene just tells us this: there’s a laboratory, and something bad is going on. The scientist guy hardly even counts as a character. By choosing not to spend its first moments with Hopper, or Eleven, or Will, Stranger Things’ opening doesn’t give the best idea of what the show’s actually about.

Source: syfy.com

    But immediately after that we have the iconic D&D scene. Unlike the scene before it, this is all character-based, not sci-fi. The combination of these two elements makes Stranger Things so successful. Yes, the show has supernatural horror, 80’s nostalgia, and some vague underlying message about the dangers of science, but just as important are the character moments. A group of friends has banter, brothers bond over music, a father struggles to get over the death of his daughter, all in a suburban setting drenched with Americana. Neither of these sides to Stranger Things would be as potent without the other. Stranger Things smartly hooks viewers with action, then switches to a character-driven scene to give us things to relate to and get invested in over the long run.

    What makes this episode so confusing on first watch is that its two sides haven’t been melded together yet. We see this lab undergoing some emergency, but we don’t know why we should care about it yet. We see these kids hanging out and having a good time, but we don't know that they have any significance beyond being ordinary kids until Will heads home, and gets stalked by the Demogorgon.

Source: fancaps.net

    Will’s disappearance serves as the inciting incident that gets the season’s plot rolling. It also provides a structure that all the other events of the season can hang on. When the boys go looking for him in the woods, they find Eleven. When Jonathon searches the woods for evidence, he comes across Steve’s house. Hopper and Joyce’s search leads them to learning about Hawkins Labs’ experiments and Eleven’s mother. Will acts as a kind of “win condition”. The protagonists’ goal in this season is to find Will. When Hopper and Joyce achieve that goal in Chapter 8, the ending feels satisfying. It’s a natural stopping point.

Source: recapguide.com

But even then, these connections aren’t clear in the first episode. Take Steve’s introduction scene. He walks up to Nancy and starts kissing her like crazy. It says a lot about them as characters. Nancy is a good, mild girl who hasn’t been in a relationship with a bad boy like Steve before. She cares a lot more about school than he does. But at this point, we don’t know why Steve matters to the season’s overarching plot. Nancy has a tangential connection to the mystery, as the sister of Will's friend Mike, but when Steve appears, it begs the question as to why we should care about these seemingly-ordinary kids when more interesting, supernatural things are happening.

Source: ilovesteno.com

The other seemingly-unconnected plotline is Eleven's. Her subplot (the episode’s C or D plot?) shows her encountering the outside world for the first time, having recently escaped from Hawkins Lab. At this point in the story, we don’t know Eleven’s connection to the initial laboratory scene, or the monster we see stalking Will. It would have been possible to have Eleven first show up in the episode’s final scene, where she meets the boys, but her subplot in the first episode does serve a purpose. 

The lengths the Hawkins Lab agents go to to find Eleven, like killing the diner owner Benny, establishes them as formidable villains. Killing off expendable characters and leaving the main characters alive can be a cheap trick (aka plot armor), but it works here because we don't know who's expendable or not, this early in the game. 

When the boys find her, we know it's important because we already know some things about her. We know they're going to be in danger.

By separating Eleven and the boys, Stranger Things also shows what Eleven was like before she met them (and vice-versa). The way Eleven changes while getting to know Mike, Lucas, and Dustin (again, and vice-versa) is the driving force behind their storyline this season. It helps that this first episode establishes what they were like before they met. 

  Between Will, Eleven, Hopper, the kids, the Byers, and Nancy, the audience has a lot of storylines to keep track of in this first episode. That’s a tough ask. It pays off in the end, though. The fact that the storylines all converge, and the characters piece together what’s going in, makes Chapter 7 arguably the show’s greatest episode.

 I started analyzing Chapter 1 because I wanted to understand why I didn’t get it at first. But maybe Stranger Things did the right thing, by taking the risk of having a confusing first episode. If viewers stick with it (and, in an eight-episode show on a platform conducive to binge watching, they most likely will), it’ll feel like magic when they start to understand all the connections.

Source: robscene.com

How to Do What Stranger Things Does:

- Come up with an inciting incident, a common thread, a win condition. The three of these should be intertwined.

A common thread links your story together so that every scene and character has a purpose. Try to make each character’s relationship to the thread evident as soon as possible, or else you’ll run into the same problem Stranger Things has with that first Nancy/Steve scene.

The inciting incident causes the main conflicts in the story (or sets off existing tensions, as in Ned Stark's death in A Song of Ice and Fire). The inciting incident in Stranger Things is when Eleven creates the portal that lets the Demogorgon into our world, and leads to Will’s disappearance. It’s no coincidence that this creates the common thread: each group of protagonists is working to find Will. In this case, the portal and the Demogorgon can’t be the common thread because only some of the characters know about them, even though they are part of the inciting incident.

The win condition coincides with the resolution of the inciting incident’s conflicts. Will can only be rescued after 1) Joyce and Hopper strike a deal with the lab, 2) Jonathon, Nancy, and Steve lure the monster out of the Upside-Down, and 3) Eleven finishes the Demogorgon off. Stranger Things’ story has a lot going on, but having Will back serves a signal that the main conflict is over.

It’s worth mentioning that the resolution of these material conflicts also resolve the character’s arcs. Rescuing Will helps Hopper grapple with his own daughter’s death, Eleven stands up for her friends and against the lab workers, and fighting the monster at the Byers’ house helps Steve understand what Jonathon is really going through.

The result is a really compelling structure: The common thread links the characters together as they all try to fulfill the win condition, in the process learning more about the inciting incident and grappling with the obstacles it created.  

This is the same structure murder mysteries have. The murder starts the story, serves as a common thread that relates in some way to all the characters and events of the rest of the story. I want to do a post on Riverdale that goes into how that show uses this. It’s a big reason why Season 1 was so successful and the later seasons fall short.

- Characters. This is all I have to say on this point. No matter how brilliant your plot is, or how much cool sci-fi stuff you have, or how accurate you get the scientific details, it doesn’t matter if the audience can’t engage with the characters.

Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for the next post!