THE SERIES
Stranger Things. Created by Matt and Ross Duffer. Five seasons, forty-two episodes, Netflix, 15 July 2016 to 31 December 2025. Final season directed by the Duffer Brothers, Frank Darabont and Shawn Levy; written by the Duffer Brothers, Caitlin Schneiderhan, Paul Dichter, Curtis Gwinn and Kate Trefry; music by Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein. 21 Laps Entertainment, with Monkey Massacre Productions on seasons one to four and Upside Down Pictures on the fifth. United States.
Spoiler warning: this review discusses the whole series, including the final season and the ending.
Hawkins spends the entire last season under military quarantine. The town has been told that the four gates which tore open in March 1986 were a natural event, an earthquake, and that the compulsory medical checks are about exposure to falling ash. Eighteen months after the finale, in the spring of 1989, the soldiers pack up and drive out, the rebuilding starts, and the story holds. There is no press conference, no hearing, no Nancy Wheeler exposé, no admission of any kind. Nobody in government answers for the children, and the head scientist who ran the occupation is simply never seen again. That absence is the most accurate thing in forty-two episodes of television, and it is the reason I think this show belongs on a site like this one.
Because Stranger Things is not a UFO story, and pretending otherwise is the fastest way to get it wrong. Nothing flies that anyone would call a craft. There is no occupant, no sighting, no radar return, nothing in the sky at all. What there is instead is the other half of the file: a named government programme, a laboratory in a small town, children referred to by number, an isolation tank, a psychic asset, and blood. That half of the record is real and documented, and it is almost never filmed. The Duffers filmed it for nine years, and most of the audience took it for eighties pastiche with a monster in it.
The premise is not invented, it is borrowed, and the borrowing is more precise than the show ever stops to explain. Project MKUltra was approved by Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles on 13 April 1953, on a proposal from Richard Helms, and run out of the Technical Services Staff by Sidney Gottlieb. Its documented methods included high-dose LSD given without consent, hypnosis and electroshock, and it paid for sensory-isolation work at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. In January 1973 the files were destroyed at the instruction of the outgoing Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, under Gottlieb’s supervision, which is why what we know comes in fragments: the Rockefeller Commission of 6 June 1975, the Church Committee’s report the following April, and then a joint Senate hearing on 3 August 1977 held only because roughly eight thousand pages of finance records covering 149 subprojects turned up at a records centre in response to a Freedom of Information request. The show puts Terry Ives into that programme as a student volunteer in 1969, has her drugged and submerged while unknowingly pregnant, has her daughter taken at birth in 1971 and recorded as a miscarriage, and has her lawsuit dismissed for want of evidence before she is electroshocked into permanent catatonia. Notice how little of that needed inventing. The lawsuit dismissed for want of evidence is the part I find hardest to watch, because the real programme’s records were destroyed in January 1973, and the show never tells us when Terry’s case was thrown out.
The tank is where the show is most quietly faithful. In the seventh episode of the first season the children build a sensory deprivation tank in the middle school out of a paddling pool and, on Mr Clarke’s telephoned instructions, fifteen hundred pounds of salt, and Joyce ties a blindfold on and talks Eleven down into it. Two episodes earlier we had already learned what the tank was originally for: Eleven remembers being put in it and made to listen, telepathically, to a man speaking Russian, and it was on that errand that she first brushed against something else. Strip the fiction off and what is left is a real institutional history. The CIA began funding psychic research at Stanford Research Institute in 1972, with Ingo Swann and, from the following year, Pat Price. The Army’s own effort began as Gondola Wish in 1977, was formalised at Fort Meade as Grill Flame in 1978, ran as the INSCOM Center Lane Project from 1983, became Sun Streak at the Defense Intelligence Agency when Army funding ended in 1985, was renamed Star Gate in 1991, and was cancelled by the CIA in 1995 on the strength of an American Institutes for Research evaluation. Do the arithmetic against the show’s calendar. Season one is November 1983; the finale is November 1987. Across exactly those years the real programme changed both its name and its owner, from an Army project to a Defense Intelligence Agency one, and nobody outside it would have known that either thing had happened.
That coincidence is where Jason Reza Jorjani’s Closer Encounters becomes useful, and it is the one place in this review where I want to bring the book in directly. Jorjani’s central methodological move is to refuse the separation between the UFO record and the parapsychology record: the craft, the abductions, the remote viewers, the poltergeists and the Skinwalker menagerie are treated as one phenomenon with one secrecy apparatus around it. I said in my review of that book that its strongest chapter is the political one, where he follows Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall’s “Sovereignty and the UFO” and pushes it through Carl Schmitt to argue that the taboo is not embarrassment but function, that modern rule is anthropocentric and cannot survive conceding a superior other, so the UFO can be known only by not asking what it is. Season five is that argument dramatised for eight episodes, and I doubt anyone involved intended it. A confirmed hole in the world opens in an American town. The state’s response is not knowledge and not disclosure. It is a cordon, a cover story about seismic activity, a checkpoint, a compulsory medical register, and a laboratory on the far side of the gate.
Dr Kay is that argument in a lab coat, and she is the best new character the show made. She is not a soldier borrowing a scientist; Netflix’s own material describes her as the head scientist in charge of the military occupation, with Lieutenant Colonel Sullivan’s unit working under her, and Linda Hamilton plays her with no interest in anything except acquiring Eleven. Her actual project is the thing to sit with. She wants to restart Brenner’s programme. She has kept Kali alive in a sealed vault, head shaved, wired into machinery, drawing her blood continuously and transfusing it into captive pregnant women, trying to reproduce whatever produced Henry and Eleven, and the women and their unborn children are dying of it because Kali’s blood is not potent enough. She needs Eleven because Eleven is the only viable substitute. This is a programme that was exposed, disgraced, shut down and abandoned, restarted inside the same government by a new administrator with a new letterhead, and the reason it lands is that the documentary version of that sentence is the codename list above. Nothing was concluded in 1995 either. It was defunded, declassified, and its personnel dispersed. The claim that a programme can be walled off from oversight for decades is now on the congressional record, made under oath by David Grusch to the House Oversight subcommittee on 26 July 2023, and it is worth being straight about the status of it: those are his claims, he said he was speaking to facts as he had been told them, and the Pentagon’s own historical review in March 2024 reported finding no verifiable evidence for them. The one datum running the other way is that the intelligence community’s inspector general found his complaint credible and urgent in July 2022, though that finding was narrowly about whether information had been improperly withheld from Congress and took no position on what the withheld information said. What the show offers is not proof of any of that. It is a clean demonstration of why the shape of the story is so intuitive to so many people.
Then there is the invented detail I keep returning to, because it is the sharpest thing in the season and I have not seen anyone say so. The military’s counter-measure is not aimed at the monsters. It is aimed at the psychic child. The Wolfpack drives satellite emitters around on trucks and mounts one on a helicopter, broadcasting a frequency ordinary people cannot hear which puts Eleven on the ground with a nosebleed, and the same technology is installed in the Upside Down laboratory to keep Kali suppressed. The monsters, meanwhile, get tracker rounds, fire, and a bomb on a timer, improvised by teenagers. The one bespoke weapons system the season invents, the only thing in it that looks like procurement rather than desperation, is built to disable an anomalous human being. If you have spent any time in the experiencer literature, in John Mack’s clinical work or in the long complaint that people who report these things get studied rather than helped, that detail will land somewhere uncomfortable. The institution’s reflex is not to defend itself against the anomaly. It is to defend itself against the person who is a channel for it.
The finale then supplies an origin story that reads like a crash-retrieval file. Vecna is not born a monster and is not from anywhere else. As a boy of about eight, in a cave in Nevada, Henry Creel meets a wounded man carrying a briefcase, kills him, and opens the case. Inside is a pulsing stone, a fragment of the Abyss carrying the Mind Flayer itself, and it enters him through an open wound and remakes him. Recovered anomalous material, a courier, a desert, a death, and biological effects on the person who handled it: that is the legacy-programme myth in a single scene, arriving in the last hour of a series that had spent nine years being about a laboratory. It is also, deliberately, unexplained. The man is never named, how the rock reached that briefcase is left blank, and Matt Duffer has said the spin-off will handle it while warning that it is a different mythology. That refusal is the most Fortean gesture the show makes, and Jorjani’s chapters on Charles Fort are exactly about why: the datum that will not fit the file gets left out of the file.
The naming has one more coincidence in it, and this one is genuinely strange. The children take their monsters out of a Dungeons and Dragons manual. In that manual the mind flayer has an octopus head. Later lore added the elder brain, a single intelligence grown from the harvested brains of a colony’s own dead, and in Lords of Madness, published in 2005, Wizards of the Coast made the illithids’ secret history explicit: they were a star-faring people at the end of time who, facing annihilation, fled backwards and arrived some two thousand years before the present of any campaign. Ancient by the setting’s clock, and borrowed from its future. In Closer Encounters, Jorjani’s most speculative chapter proposes a precognitive, shape-shifting Trickster intelligence that entered our world from Earth’s far-future oceans, with the octopus as its avatar, borrowed from the future. The two sentences are nearly the same sentence. Be careful with it: both the elder brain and that origin postdate the manual the boys are reading in 1983, the origin by two decades, so this is a rhyme with Jorjani rather than an intention of the Duffers. It is still the single oddest thing I turned up while writing this, and I would rather flag it and let you weigh it than leave it out.
What Vecna does, though, is Trickster behaviour in the plainest sense. He does not arrive as a threat. He arrives as Mr Whatsit, a kind man in a good suit and neat glasses who warns children about the monsters in Hawkins, and Holly Wheeler names him herself after the guardian in the Madeleine L’Engle novel she happens to be reading. The costume design fuses Brenner’s warm brown suits with a children’s-television cardigan, which is a very precise piece of cruelty. George Hansen’s The Trickster and the Paranormal, published through an author-pays imprint in 2001 and often discounted for it, argues that these phenomena are intrinsically boundary-dissolving, that they do not survive inside stable institutions, and that anything which does get institutionalised around them ends up accused of fraud. Season five stages both halves of that: an entity whose method is deception and false comfort, and a state apparatus that can only respond by building a bigger institution around it.
L’Engle turns out to be load-bearing, and I would push the sixth episode’s title further than the show does. On Camazotz the horror is not monstrousness, it is sameness, houses all exactly alike and children bouncing balls in unison, enforced by IT, a disembodied brain. Henry’s mindscape is Camazotz, Vecna is IT, and the way out in both texts is an emotional anchor rather than force: Meg saves Charles Wallace with love, and Max teaches Holly to find something that connects her to the real world. Nell Fisher laid that mapping out plainly in a Netflix interview, so it is intended, though as far as I can find no Duffer quote confirms it. Set it beside Jorjani’s structure and it lines up neatly, because his Breakaway Civilization is a sealed and crackless order and his Trickster is the thing that dissolves every fixed structure it touches. The show puts both on the same body. The Pain Tree in the Abyss, which turns out to be the Mind Flayer itself, is a hive that converts children into components, and Vecna is its vessel who insists on his own complicity: he says he could have resisted and chose to join. The show closes the redemption door on purpose, and it is right to.
Will Byers is where the two threads knot. The last season opens on a flashback to 1983, in which the boy in the Upside Down is told that the plan can finally begin, and we learn that Will was the first successful vessel and the proof that the method works. His powers are not innate. He is plugged into the hive and channels what is already there, at the cost of white eyes and a nosebleed, the exact currency the show spent four seasons establishing for Eleven. The Skinwalker literature has a name for the marked person: the hitchhiker effect, set out in Skinwalkers at the Pentagon in 2021 by James Lacatski, Colm Kelleher and George Knapp, the claim that the phenomenon attaches itself to investigators and follows them home from a ranch Robert Bigelow had owned and been studying privately since 1996, and which the Defense Intelligence Agency later paid his firm Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies to investigate under a contract let in September 2008. Whatever you make of that claim, the show’s version of it is unusually honest about the human consequence: the child who was touched is not treated as a patient, he is treated as an asset, and the last season’s soldiers round up the town’s children as bait on exactly that logic. It is also worth saying that the show resolves Will’s arc on its own terms rather than the record’s. What unlocks his power is self-acceptance, he comes out to his friends in the seventh episode, and Henry’s real leverage over him had been that secret. That is the Duffers’ subject, not mine, and it is the better ending.
Two smaller things I did not expect to admire. The physics is real vocabulary rather than decoration: the Upside Down is revealed not as a mirror world but as a wormhole held open by exotic matter, and “exotic” is the actual term of art, coined by Michael Morris and Kip Thorne in the American Journal of Physics in 1988 for material whose radial tension exceeds its mass-energy density, which is what a traversable throat would require. And the way they close it is a record player. Hopper and Murray wire the bomb to a Prince album, “When Doves Cry” plays over the collapse of the bridge, and the Duffers have said openly that the model was The Bridge on the River Kwai. A show that spent nine years borrowing its monsters from a children’s game ends by borrowing its climax from a 1957 war film, and it works.
Then there is the year. The final season is set in November 1987, and it is worth knowing what that autumn actually was in America. Whitley Strieber’s Communion had been published in February by Beech Tree Books, entered the New York Times non-fiction list on 1 March, reached number one for the week of 10 May and made its thirtieth and last appearance on 20 September, and Ted Seth Jacobs’s cover painting had put the face that most people now picture on every bookshop table in the country. In May, the Majestic 12 papers had gone public, a purported briefing document for President-elect Eisenhower about a secret committee, printed by Timothy Good in Above Top Secret ahead of an agreed joint release, and the following year the FBI’s file on them would conclude that the document was completely bogus. And on 21 September, the day after Communion’s final week on the list, Ronald Reagan told the forty-second session of the UN General Assembly, “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world,” before turning the figure straight around: “And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien to the universal aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war?” The line travelled anyway, stripped of its second half, and it has been read as foreknowledge ever since. Six weeks later, in the show’s calendar, Hawkins is sealed off and told about the ash. The monsters inside the cordon are shaped like a Dungeons and Dragons manual. Outside it, the country was busy being shaped by a paperback cover.
None of which makes any of this evidence. It has to be said plainly: Stranger Things proves nothing about any real case, the correspondence is a rhyme and not a citation, and the Duffers were making a Spielberg-and-King homage about childhood, not an argument about secrecy. The lab is a horror device. MKUltra is set dressing they happened to choose well. Read it as confirmation of anything and you have made the same category error that has damaged this subject for seventy years.
But rhymes are worth listening to, and this one arrives at a conclusion the genre almost never allows. The children win. The bridge is destroyed, the hive is killed, Joyce takes Vecna’s head off with an axe, and Eleven stays behind to make certain the thing cannot be opened again and to make certain, specifically, that no one can manufacture another child like her. She is gone, and whether she is dead is deliberately left open. And then nothing is disclosed. There is no reckoning, no accountability, no acknowledgement; the town gets its earthquake, Dr Kay walks off the board, and the last scene is a group of kids in a basement passing the game down to the next lot of kids in the same basement. The story stays where it started, at the absolute periphery, in the hands of the people it happened to. That is the part I would ask you to notice. The state in this show never has to lie forever. It only has to outlast the news cycle, and it does.
References and further reading
- Stranger Things, created by Matt and Ross Duffer, Netflix, five seasons, 2016-2025; season five released in three parts, 26 November, 25 December and 31 December 2025
- Jason Reza Jorjani, Closer Encounters, London, 2021, and the signed review of it on this site
- Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, “Sovereignty and the UFO”, Political Theory vol. 36 no. 4, 2008, pp. 607-33
- US Senate, Project MKULTRA, The CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification, joint hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, 3 August 1977
- Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (Rockefeller Commission), report of 6 June 1975
- American Institutes for Research, An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications, 29 September 1995, the review on which the Star Gate programme was cancelled
- Defense Intelligence Agency, Star Gate Project: An Overview, 30 April 1993, and Annual Report, Project Sun Streak, January 1986, both in the CIA CREST release
- David Grusch, testimony to the Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, 26 July 2023
- All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, Volume I, 8 March 2024
- George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal, 2001
- James T. Lacatski, Colm A. Kelleher and George Knapp, Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, 2021, for the hitchhiker effect
- Michael S. Morris and Kip S. Thorne, “Wormholes in spacetime and their use for interstellar travel”, American Journal of Physics vol. 56 no. 5, 1988, pp. 395-412
- Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time, Ariel Books, 1962
- Richard Baker, James Jacobs and Steve Winter, Lords of Madness: The Book of Aberrations, Wizards of the Coast, 2005, for the illithid far-future origin
- Whitley Strieber, Communion: A True Story, Beech Tree Books, 1987
- Timothy Good, Above Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Cover-up, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1987, where the Majestic 12 briefing document was first printed
- Ronald Reagan, address to the 42nd session of the United Nations General Assembly, 21 September 1987