The small town of Hawkins, Indiana, changes forever on one November evening in 1983. A strange girl appears shortly after a 12-year-old boy goes missing, kicking off an otherworldly adventure from which the sleepy Midwestern burg may never recover.
Stranger Things Season 1 immerses viewers in premium-quality ’80s nostalgia, following bike-riding, Eggo-loving kids so plucky they could give even The Goonies gang a run for their money. The kids and teenagers just want to live their best pre-social media lives, chatting on walkie-talkies and sneaking beers at late-night parties — but not everything is as it seems in the once-idyllic Hawkins.
As the central characters band together to search for their missing friend, they discover their humble home is ground zero for an interdimensional conspiracy. The investigation takes Stranger Things from John Hughes–inspired charm to Freddy Krueger–level creepy, as monsters and villains emerge from Hawkins’s shadows, unveiling the terrifying dimension next door.
Stranger Things kicks off on Nov. 6, 1983, when Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) vanishes and Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) escapes from Hawkins National Laboratory. Over the next week, Will’s mom, Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder), his friends, and Hawkins’s Chief of Police Jim Hopper (David Harbour) search for him, uncover the conspiracies of Hawkins Lab, and banish the season’s primary monster back to the Upside Down. The finale jumps forward to Christmas, teasing loose threads and lingering danger for Season 2.
The Upside Down is what Eleven and her new friends call Hawkins’s shadow dimension. At the beginning of Season 1, the shadow realm known as the Upside Down is contained to Hawkins, allowing us to get to know the central characters before the show expands in later seasons. It’s a carbon copy of the town, but overrun by monsters and covered in shadows and living vines that feed on anyone who gets stuck in the alternate dimension. The Upside Down can be reached through portals, or “gates,” hidden throughout town. In Season 1, the primary gate is located in the basement of Hawkins National Laboratory.
Eleven is a young girl with psychic abilities, raised inside Hawkins National Laboratory, a secret Department of Energy facility. Season 1 reveals that Eleven is the daughter of Terry Ives (Aimee Mullins), who participated in the federal government’s MKUltra experiments, which tested the supposed supernatural effects of certain drugs. Terry didn’t know she was pregnant when she signed up for the study. Her family was told she miscarried in her third trimester, but Terry never believed the doctors. Joyce and Hopper believe Eleven is Terry’s stolen child — taken by Hawkins National Lab for experiments.
Hawkins Lab and the US government exploit Eleven’s powers and probe the monsters of the Upside Down, hoping to weaponize them. She’s named Eleven because she was the 11th child brought to the lab for experiments, though she’s actually 12 years old at the start of the series. She escapes the laboratory in Episode 1 and befriends the boys of Hawkins Middle School’s A.V. Club — Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) — as they search for Will.
The preteens bond with Eleven as they discover a dark new world brought to Hawkins by Eleven’s former keepers. The quest to find Will takes them all over town as they try to prove to the adults in their lives (well, two of the adults and a few teenagers) that monsters are very real.
The drugs Eleven’s mom took when she was pregnant led to a baby who can move objects with her mind and even contact people across the globe and dimensions. Her nose bleeds whenever she uses her powers, and the larger the object she moves — or the farther away the person she tries to reach — the more energy it takes. Those telltale nosebleeds lead Eleven into trouble more than once, even as she uses her powers to help and protect her new friends after escaping the lab.
Eleven is remarkably powerful on her own, but to maximize her psychic tracking, she needs to be in a sensory deprivation chamber — which she calls “the bath” — to focus on whom she’s trying to find. Hawkins National Laboratory used to lock Eleven in their state-of-the-art chamber to force her to locate Russian spies — or monsters from the Upside Down that the government wanted to use as weapons. Though traumatized by her experiences in the bath, Eleven still volunteers to use it when Joyce, Hopper, and the kids make their own improvised version to help her locate Will in the Upside Down. The DIY version of “the bath” uses a kiddie pool and tons of salt, allowing Eleven to contact Will in the penultimate episode of the season.
Will Byers is taken by a creature from the Upside Down inside his family’s shed on the night of Nov. 6, 1983. Riding his bike home after playing a long game of Dungeons & Dragons with his best friends, he spots something stalking him in the woods. He ditches his bike — a clear sign to investigating authorities that he didn’t run away from home — and makes it back to his yard. Unfortunately, the monster follows him to the shed, and Will disappears. The search for Will drives many of the main characters, and leads to the major revelations about the larger Stranger Things mythology.
His mother, Joyce, realizes he’s missing the next morning when she tries to wake him up for school. She reports his disappearance to Hopper, who begins investigating, eventually uncovering Hawkins National Laboratory’s child experiments and the existence of the Upside Down. While Hopper investigates the lab, Joyce is desperate to prove her son isn’t gone. She realizes Will is trying to communicate with her through his radio and the lights in the Byers’s house. She rigs up a system of Christmas lights strung over an alphabet painted on the wall, allowing Will to send her messages from the Upside Down and confirm that he’s technically in the room with her.
After teaming up with the kids, Joyce and Hopper negotiate with the folks at Hawkins National Lab to enter the Upside Down and rescue Will. They find him in the Upside Down version of the Hawkins Public Library’s basement. Will is unconscious and covered in the creepy Upside Down vines. They revive him with CPR and bring him home. Will seems fine at the Byers’s Christmas dinner, but the closing scenes reveal he hasn’t completely escaped the Upside Down’s grip.
The A.V. Club kids name the creature in Season 1 the Demogorgon, after the terrifying monster in Dungeons & Dragons. It’s a faceless bipedal creature with flaps on its head that open to reveal petal-like appendages lined with rows of sharp teeth. The Demogorgon hunts by scenting blood and feeds on both humans and animals. Sometimes it drags its victims whole into the Upside Down; other times it feeds on them in Hawkins — depending on how angry or hungry it is.
While the Demogorgon is the main monster of Season 1, the Hawkins National Laboratory research team is just as terrifying. Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine) leads the team that holds Eleven captive for years and exploits her abilities to further the Department of Energy’s agenda. He’s cold and manipulative, which makes it even more unnerving that Eleven calls him “Papa.” He’s willing to manipulate children for his own sinister goals, and his team kills multiple people in Season 1 while hunting Eleven, desperate to get their asset back under control.
Yes. Barbara (Shannon Purser) — better known as Barb, the best friend of Mike’s older sister Nancy (Natalia Dyer) — is taken by the Demogorgon on Nov. 8, 1983, after being left alone by the pool at Steve Harrington’s (Joe Keery) house. Nancy feels guilty for ditching her, and finding Barb becomes her driving force throughout the season. That guilt leads her to team up with Will’s older brother, Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), and summon the courage to face the Demogorgon head-on in the season finale.
Sadly, unlike Will, Barb doesn’t survive her trip to the Upside Down. Eleven sees her rotting corpse during a psychic search of the shadow dimension, while helping Joyce and the others find the missing people. Dr. Brenner also reveals that five other people have gone missing, with Will the only one to return alive.
“The Flea and the Acrobat” is the name of Episode 5 as well as the analogy that first opens Mike and Dustin’s (and eventually Lucas’s) minds to the idea of alternate dimensions. In Hawkins Middle School’s science class, Mr. Clarke (Randy Havens) compares our world to a tightrope, where humans are acrobats able to move only forward and backward along it. But a flea — representing a being from another dimension — can crawl along, jump on, and even flip below the rope entirely, moving in ways the human eye can’t perceive. The analogy sparks the boys’ imaginations, planting the seed that another reality could exist alongside theirs, and laying the groundwork for their understanding of the Upside Down.
Nancy starts the season dating Hawkins High heartthrob Steve Harrington. However, their relationship goes sour when Barb disappears, and Steve is more worried about his parents finding out he threw a party while they were out of town than helping Nancy find her friend.
Nancy’s search for Barb helps her get her priorities straight. She transitions from a lovesick teenager into a badass ready to avenge the friend she didn’t mean to leave behind. The quest for Barb also leads Nancy to team up with Jonathan, and the two grow close as they hunt the Demogorgon through Hawkins.
Steve notices how close the pair are getting — even catching them cuddling in Nancy’s bedroom after a monster attack — and doesn’t take it well. He lashes out and allows his friend to graffiti the local movie theater marquee with “Nancy The Slut Wheeler.” Then he picks a fight with Jonathan, which gets Jonathan arrested. Eventually, Steve comes to his senses and realizes how much he still cares about Nancy. He shows up just in time to help Nancy and Jonathan trap and fight the Demogorgon.
In the Christmas epilogue, Nancy and Steve stay together — but when she gives Jonathan his Christmas present (a new camera to replace the one Steve destroyed), it’s obvious there are still lingering feelings.
It takes multiple battles to bring Season 1 to a close. On one side of Hawkins’s gate to the Upside Down, Nancy, Jonathan, and Steve lure the Demogorgon to the Byers’s house, buying Joyce and Hopper time to explore the shadow dimension and rescue Will. It’s a redemption arc for all three characters. Steve proves he can think about more than just himself. Jonathan steps up as a hero instead of passively observing the world around him, and Nancy transforms from a studyholic into an action hero. They trap the monster with a bear trap and set it on fire, disabling it enough to stall its chase of Joyce and Hopper.
Across town, Dr. Brenner and his team track Eleven to Hawkins Middle School, where she’s hiding with the A.V. Club boys. She uses her powers to kill at least half a dozen of Dr. Brenner’s agents, creating a pool of blood that lures the Demogorgon straight to the school. The Demogorgon finishes off the rest of the Hawkins Lab team, attacking Dr. Brenner and leaving his fate unknown, before cornering Eleven and her friends in the science classroom. She uses the last remaining dregs of her power to eviscerate the monster — and seemingly crumbles into dust along with it.
One of Hopper’s deputies hints that Hopper and Joyce have hooked up in the past, but it’s never confirmed. The two work together throughout Season 1 to uncover Hawkins National Laboratory’s secrets and find Will. Hopper empathizes deeply with Joyce, having lost his own daughter a few years earlier. By the end of Season 1, they’re allies and friends.
The season’s epilogue skips forward a month to Christmas in Hawkins. Hopper is taken to meet with the Hawkins Lab folks after Will was released from the hospital. We see him again at the police department’s Christmas party, where he makes himself a to-go plate and leaves the station. He takes the to-go plate — and some cling-wrapped Eggos (Eleven’s favorite) — and stashes them in a snow-covered box in the woods, hinting that Eleven has returned from the Upside Down and Hopper is looking out for her. While we don’t see Eleven again after she destroys the Demogorgon, the Eggos confirm that she’s not gone for good.
That would be too easy! Will appears to make a full recovery from his time in the Upside Down, but before Christmas dinner, he throws up a slug — just like the one Eleven sees crawl out of Barb’s rotting body in Episode 7. He also sees a flash of the Upside Down version of the Byers’s bathroom — but he doesn’t tell his family or his friends that he’s still experiencing side effects from his time in the other dimension. He may be physically out of the Upside Down, but he’s still very connected to the shadow dimension heading into Season 2.
Need a refresher before returning to Hawkins one last time? Check out our Season 2, Season 3, and Season 4 recaps.
Stranger Things Seasons 1-4 are now streaming on Netflix. Stranger Things 5 will release this fall: four episodes on Nov. 26, three episodes
on Christmas, and the finale episode
on New Year’s Eve.
