The surprising success of Stranger Things

Obviously the Duffer Brothers were not going to tie up all the loose ends and the conclusion of season 1 of Stranger Things, but it's a pretty solid ending to this surprisingly good 8-part series. I kept wondering why I was so interested in this story, as it is on one level just a pastiche of about a hundred sci-fi, fantasy, monster, government conspiracy movies and you can't really buy into the facts of the story - a secret government agency has been kidnapping children and using them as subjects for mind-control experiments but something went wrong and they ended up creating a carnivorous, grotesque monster that is haunting this small Indiana town, whew - but what you can buy into is the relationships among the kids: the 3 pre-teen boys who set out to find their friend who disappeared and step into the middle of this government conspiracy, the high-school kids who take on the monster and who grow and mature over the course of the series, most of all the young girl who was the mind-control subject who escapes from the Energy Dept facility and who yearns for a normal life. The D Brothers to a fine job re-creating the look and mood of the 1980s; one of the sad things about the series, for me, is to watch the boys play gathered in the basement for hours and days playing their fantasy game (seems to be Dungeons and Dragons, or something like it) and to think that, today, they would each be at home online playing the game alone or perhaps in consort with other players around the world. That human bonding of kids at play seems something we may be losing or have lost.