Netflix's Stranger Things Review: 8 Ups And 3 Downs

2. A Captivating Mystery

The series opens in a lab, with an assistant being grabbed by some unseen creature, and then immediately cuts to the kids - Will, Mike, Dustin, and Lucas - playing a game of Dungeons and Dragons. It's not long after that they're on their way home, and Will is being chased by some unseen force. He flees his house into the shed, and then... disappears.

From there we're diving head first into his mysterious vanishing act, which, of course, the adults (most of them, anyway) see as, at best, a child running away, at worst a child murder, so naturally it's left to the kids to do the real investigating. While the adults search fruitlessly, the children find Eleven, a girl with special powers who holds the key to not just finding Will, but the wider goings-on behind his disappearance.

It's a mystery that keeps expanding, maintaining a focus on finding Will but branching out to tie-in Eleven's past and the experiments being carried out by the government, an ever-spinning web that remains compelling all the way through to the very end.