The production has the same sense of sprawling mystery, beginning with the disappearance of a wartime naval ship and a laboratory experiment that explains the birth of the Upside Down. There is no Eleven yet but Henry Creel (Louis McCartney), the new kid in town, brings dark powers. He has an oddball romance with Patty (Ella Karuna Williams) and a sinister relationship with Dr Brenner (Patrick Vaill).
With an original story by the Duffer Brothers, Jack Thorne and Kate Trefry, we are still in Hawkins, Indiana, where pets are mysteriously dying, but it kicks off exactly four decades before the 1983 start of the first series.
The show has fine, fleet acting too. Joyce Maldonado (Isabella Pappas) has not yet made her mistakes with Lonnie (Chase Brown) and is full of fire. The swaggering James Hopper Jr (Oscar Lloyd), who will later become the town’s police chief like his father, gets embroiled in the central investigation with Joyce and Bob Newby (Christopher Buckley).
“It’s the beginning of the end, but first we must understand how it all started”
