The Vanishing of Will Byers, Act 1. ST: 1

Synopsis

An opening billboard places the setting:  November 6th, 1983,  Hawkins, Indiana

The story opens at Hawkins National Lab where something has obviously gone wrong. Long metal hallways, heavy steel pressure doors,  the lights flicker continuously: Suddenly, the door bursts open, alarms are sounding, and a man in a lab coat is running at top speed down a long hallway toward an elevator, obviously terrified and constantly looking over his shoulder. He is grabbed and carried offscreen by something we cannot see.

In this pilot episode we find a group of four boys playing Dungeons and Dragons.  These four friends, Will, Dustin, Lucas, and Mike, will form the core group that the story follows.
"Something is coming... something hungry for blood."  Mike is the game master and his speech here is prescient of all that will take place.  "That didn't come from the troglodytes.  No, that came from something else....   BOOM! The Demogorgon!" We have already seen evidence of the Demogorgon at Hawkins Lab.

"Will, your action!"  This chapter is all about Will.  The party begins to argue about whether to cast fire ball or a protection spell. (Reflecting the conflict later that will tear the boys apart.)  In the growing chaos, Will (apparently a magic user) shouts "Fireball!" and impulsively hurls the dice which tumble onto the floor.

"Where did it go? "  "I don't know"  "Where is it?"  "I don't know!"  Although the characters are searching for the dice, the writers are prefiguring the search for the lost Will.  This mad scramble in Mike's basement is the same feeling that the writers are trying to create among the searchers for Will Byers. 

At this moment Mike's mom appears at the top of the stairs and tells them it's time to quit.  In this brief exchange, we see that the mother runs the family and the father is mostly disengaged, messing with the television.  This gives us a glimpse of something that Jonathan and Nancy will talk about in the woods much later, the familial dysfunctionality of the Wheeler household.

"Oh, I got it!  Does a seven count?"
"Did Mike see it?"  Will shakes his head no.
"Then it doesn't count."

Before the boys break up for the night, we have a brief scene to introduce Nancy Wheeler, a high school student on the phone with her best friend Barb.  She has begun seeing a rich and popular boy, Steve, and is taking a few dangerous steps into the world of dating.  She closes the door in Dustin's face when he offers her the last slice of pizza.  To the core group, Nancy is an outsider, not one of them.

In fact, by taking this step, Nancy is closing the door to many things: predominantly her childhood, her family, her innocence - a time in her life when an extra slice of pizza was all she had to worry about.  I think it is also interesting that it is Dustin, who has a developmental issue with his teeth, that is the object of symbolic rejection.  Dustin occupies the same emotional space for her that Jonathan does, an outsider, not one of the beautiful, social people that she aspires to associate with.

As Will is leaving, he confesses to Mike:
"It was a seven.  The roll... it was a seven.  The demogorgon, it got me."  And we are about to see in the next scene exactly what it means when Will rolls a seven against a Demogorgon.  But at the same time we see the power of friendship.  As Mike will tell Eleven later, "Friends don't lie."  Will considers Mike to be a true friend and accepts the consequences of the truth.  The lights flicker as Will rides away.

Stranger Things

The fascination inherent in the phenomenon of Stranger Things is in the things that we Don't know as much as the things that we Do Know.  The mastery in this storytelling is in explaining only what is necessary and leaving out what doesn't need to be explained.

The fascinating thing about this storytelling style is that every element is consciously constructed.  We can readily see that in the meticulous re-creation of the 1980's environment.  And that same care and attention is brought to the events and dialogue as well. Each scene has something to say, not only about what's happening at the moment, but also about the larger story.

The implication, then, is this:  Everything matters:

1. Parallels matter.  It is no accident when things follows similar patterns and structures.  Strong parallels are not coincidences. 
2. Dialogue matters.  If it seems as though something is being referred to, it probably is.  If you're listening to the characters talking about something in front of them and you suddenly realize that they really could be talking about something else entirely, the writers probably are.
3. Symbols matter. How something looks, what it represents, is often just as important as what it physically is.

I also think that there is a danger of carrying analysis too far;  attempting to make things too weird so that they lose their grounding in the carefully constructed '80s reality.  There are plenty of hidden meanings in the work itself without straying too far into pure speculation.  The value of a idea is in how closely it is grounded in the source work.  So we have things that are clearly stated, things that are implied that lead us to speculation, and things that are only hinted at that lead us to wild speculation.

If I lack even the barest hint, but are relying on statements like, "The story doesn't rule it out,"  that is when I know I am straying too far.   I'm writing the story as I would like it to be, rather than what was actually written.  Which in the case of some stories can be a valuable thing, too.

So what is it that we Do Know?

• Hawkins is a small town in Indiana with a government research facility somewhere on its outskirts.  That facility, Hawkins National Laboratory, is where Dr. Brenner has been experimenting on Eleven.  This is a fully staffed facility, with surveillance, security, and army trucks full of personnel, who also use repair vans (we saw as many as 6 of these, and possibly more) to avoid being conspicuous while observing the town of Hawkins.  These agents and soldiers are authorized to use deadly force, as we saw when the female agent killed Benny the diner owner who was giving Eleven shelter after her escape.
• Eleven is a young girl (probably 11-12 years old) who has been raised at the Hawkins Laboratory by Dr. Brenner, who she calls Papa.  She has the number 011 tattooed on her arm. She has mental powers that allow her to move things with her mind.  We saw her crush a soda can, levitate cars, and snap the necks of people chasing her.  She also has the ability to mentally cross over to the Upside-Down and observe things there, including the monster.  At some point, she escaped from the government lab and does not want to go back.
• Hawkins Laboratory has an open gate to the Upside-Down.  This is another dimension that parallels the Real World, but is cast in shadows with perpetually falling snow/floating dust.  The monster lives there, along with potentially other things.  No one that the lab has sent to investigate the Upside-Down has returned alive, until they allowed Hopper to retrieve Will.
• The gate in Hawkins Lab is not the only portal to the Upside-Down.  Nancy Byers was able to access it through a hole she found among the roots of a tree.  In addition, the monster was able to break into the Real World through the walls of the Byer's house.
• Hopper and Joyce went to visit Terry Ives.  Terry voluntarily joined a government program with Dr Brenner called MKUltra.  The government was researching the effects of LSD and other drugs on humans.  During this experimentation with drugs, Terry discovered that she was pregnant. Later in the pregnancy, Terry miscarried and the baby, whom she named Jane, died.  She, however, claimed that the government and Dr. Brennan stole her baby, and she unsuccessfully sued them to get the child back.  She was declared insane and eventually lapsed into a non-responsive state. 
• Speculation: There is a strong suggestion that Eleven is Terry's daughter.  We are fairly sure that the experiments performed on Terry weren't limited to LSD.  It is also likely that part of the experiment was for the purpose of creating a "gifted" child like Eleven.  In other words, Eleven's special powers are the result of this government experimentation.  It is even possible that this was the purpose of the experiment all along.
• Eleven's tattoo suggests that she has been numbered by the government in a way to depersonalize and keep track of her.  This suggests that there were ten other children who were also part of this government program.  The location of these other children is also a mystery.  They could simply be dead, previous failures of the experiment.  They could be alive at other MKUltra laboratories like the one at Hawkins. 
• Wild Speculation:  It is even possible that they exist outside the lab system and are being observed in their native environment.  For example, Will could be another product of Brenner's MK Ultra program.  He is about the same age, and his mother Joyce has a life history that parallels Terry's; with a history of mental health issues for which she has received therapy.  She is currently displaying the kinds of distress and apparent paranoia that seemed to trouble Terry when she was trying to recover her child.  In Joyce's case, we know that everything that she said, no matter how wild-sounding, was absolutely true.
• So if Will is a possibility, what about Dustin and Lucas?
• We also know that Chief Hopper had a daughter about the same time as both Joyce and Terry.  Like Terry's daughter, Hopper's daughter Sarah apparently died, an event that left an indelible psychological mark on Hopper.  Now we also know that the government is relatively skilled at faking someone's death and were willing to use that to try to fake the death of Will, manufacturing a false body for the funeral.  It is entirely possible that Sarah's death was faked as well and that she was brought into the program.
• Hopper is presented as a Big City detective who needed a change of environment after the traumatic death of his daughter Sarah, and so he moved to the small peaceful town of Hawkins to escape the chaos of city life.But Hopper on several occasions has demonstrated greater than normal physical ability and understanding, easily taking out a sucurity guard at the front gate and the chief of security inside the building with only his bare hands.  In addition he has been especially glib in his ability to talk his way around officials and government channels.  This suggests to me that he is possibly something more than a City cop, and his life before Hawkins was more involved than we have learned so far.  I'm thinking something along the lines of Special Forces.  
• Special Forces volunteers were involved in the early experimentation with amphetamines to try to improve their performance in combat, so he could have been an unwitting participant in the CIA drug experiments as well.