Fighting monsters, kidnapped children, and kids with superpowers…what more can you ask for to get your blood pumping? With Halloween just around the corner, the perfect thing you need on a night when the trees are swaying in the window and your candle is illuminating in the dark is a sci-fi thriller, Stranger Things.

If you don’t like sci-fi, don’t be intimidated just yet. This new Netflix original series, broken up into eight episodes called “chapters,” is nothing like Star Wars or Star Trek. This show has something for everyone and won’t disappoint.

Stranger Things is a story about a small town where “stranger things” start happening when a boy goes missing and no one even knows if he’s in this dimension. Before you know it, there are secret government experiments, a trail of investigations, and clues that lead to the darker world where he is supposedly located. His three best friends, family, and whole town begin looking for him, and everything leads them to discover that there is more in the town to uncover than just their missing friend.

The setting of the show is actually set back in the 80’s, which introduces a major throwback for the older generation but also may be a drawback for people who are into shows with a more modern plot. What I found most interesting and at times, frustrating, about the show was all of the mysteries behind the plot.

First, this strange girl who has a scarred past shows up running from the “bad guys.” She doesn’t speak and is frighteningly young for a girl so traumatized. As the show progresses, we start seeing flashbacks from her time being used as a test subject in government experiments. Eleven, which she recalls as her name and number tagged on her arm, is definitely the heart of the show, for no matter how scared she was in the real world, she helped find the missing boy and uses her superpowers to do it.

What I like about the structure in character choice was the relatability to it and them. When there are too many unrealistic things happening in a plot, attention can be deferred, but the characters and the town felt like real people who developed in real ways, and we got to develop with them.

For example, it wasn’t just about a bunch of people trying to find a boy who got abducted by an unrealistic monster; There was also the determination of a mother who desperately wants to find her son, the bond of best friends, and even some high school romance.

There is also a mystery behind the monster in this show that captures its prey when it smells blood. Somehow, the characters can trace its whereabouts by regular light bulbs flashing on in this dimension.

I found that throughout the show, as the characters kept finding more and more about the monster and its responsibility for every threat, relationships and encounters became more complex. Yet what I disliked was the confusion the show left us with after all the complexities calmed by the end.

Since the show has become an international fan favorite, there will be a season 2 coming in the future. Yet ultimately, by the end of the show, I still had so many questions that dwelled over me as I was trying to actually enjoy the plot.

Some clarifications in the first season like what the government experiment was about, where the monster came from, and how exactly a transition between dimensions happened would have made it more enjoyable.

Overall, I would recommend this show to anyone. I’ve heard a lot of instances where someone may watch the first episode or a couple minutes of it and lose interest, but if you pull through to the end, there’s a lot to get attached too. Like Lauren Murphy (11) said, “You never know what’s going to happen next, and I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. 10/10 would recommend!!”