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.