Family Video shows up in Stranger Things as something of a downgrade — a real 1980s video rental chain that Steve Harrington and Robin Buckley end up working at only after Starcourt Mall, and their beloved Scoops Ahoy jobs along with it, gets destroyed in the season 3 finale. What starts as a consolation prize
Holly Wheeler spends the first four seasons of Stranger Things exactly where the show wants her: on the sidelines, blissfully unaware of the Demogorgons and Mind Flayers her older siblings keep encountering. Season 5 changes that overnight, pulling the youngest Wheeler directly into Vecna’s endgame and making her, improbably, the character the entire final season’s
Holly Wheeler Spent Four Seasons in the Background, Then Became Vecna’s Whole Endgame Read More »
Ted Wheeler spends nearly the entirety of Stranger Things asleep, oblivious, or buried in the local newspaper while interdimensional monsters tear through his hometown. For most of the show’s run, that’s the entire joke. Then season 5 finally gives him something to actually do — and the show’s own characters barely seem to notice. Table
Lonnie Byers shows up in Stranger Things exactly four times, spread thin across the show’s first season, and then vanishes from the series entirely. Inside the story, that disappearance makes a kind of sense — the Byers family cut him off, and nobody particularly missed him. Outside the story, the real explanation has more to
Starcourt Mall opens in Stranger Things season 3 as exactly the kind of gleaming, air-conditioned wonder small-town Indiana teenagers in 1985 would have killed to hang out in — and by the season’s end, it’s been reduced to rubble by an actual Soviet military operation hidden beneath its food court. Few locations in the show
Starcourt Mall Was Hawkins’ Pride and Joy, Then a Secret Russian Base Blew It Apart Read More »
Running Up That Hill spends most of its existence as a respected but largely forgotten deep cut — a 1985 Kate Bush single that peaked modestly on the charts before fading into music-history footnote status. Then Stranger Things made it the literal difference between life and death for one of its central characters, and the
Every Stranger Things season has earned a “certified fresh” score on Rotten Tomatoes, which sounds like remarkable consistency until you actually line the numbers up side by side. Ranking every Stranger Things season by critical reception tells a fairly clear story about a show that started nearly perfect and gradually gave critics slightly more to
Every Stranger Things Season Ranked From Best to Worst, According to Critics Read More »
The Creel House sits on the edge of Hawkins for most of Stranger Things as little more than local legend — a decaying Victorian mansion locals whisper about but mostly avoid. By the time season 4 finishes with it, the Creel House has become the single most important location in the show’s entire mythology, tying
The Creel House Was a Real Crime Scene Decades Before Vecna Ever Moved In Read More »
The Nina Project sounds, for most of Stranger Things season 4, like it could be a person — a name whispered by a dying government agent, chased across state lines by a group of increasingly desperate teenagers. It isn’t a person at all. It’s a machine, buried in the Nevada desert, built to do something
The Nina Project Forced Eleven Back Into Her Own Worst Memories to Save Hawkins Read More »
Vickie Dunne spends most of her time on Stranger Things as someone else’s love interest, oblivious to the fact that a fellow marching band member has been quietly falling for her since the moment they met. By the time the series ends, that oversight gets corrected, and Vickie Dunne becomes the answer to one of
