Stranger things and the strangest thing of all the strange things in this strange thing

A couple of days back, I saw the pilot episode of Stranger Things on Couchtuner. (Do be careful when opening this site. It contains a lot of links that could lead to some nasty sites. Exit the false links first by clicking on the "x's" before clicking play) I was not hooked by the first two episodes because my impression was that it's going to be a stretched version of Spielbergs' Super 8 or  ET or something like that. 

I had this idea that the series is going to be about an alien that escaped a government facility and will end up being befriended and protected by a group of kids, and so on and so forth, and in the end the alien is reunited with its family back on its own planet somewhere out there in space. 

How do you stretch a story like that when the theme has been explored and has been expended by tons of movies and series about it. I guess, in the long run the series would fizzle out then be cancelled.

Last night, thanks to the abnormally fast internet speed, I was able to watch the whole of season 1 and I was hooked. 



I guess interstellar aliens and interstellar travels are becoming passe and more films are exploring the idea of inter-dimensional travel. The problem with interstellar travel is the vast distance between galaxies hence a conventional faster-than-light travel still poses a seemingly unsolvable problem since speed is subject to time, and even at FTL a star or a system billion of light years away would still take a very long time to reach their destination. 

 So a new method of interstellar travel had been proposed, and that is through wormholes. And wormholes, since the idea is to bend time and space, could result to inter-dimensional travel so that instead of travelling distances, what could happen is that the traveler could end up in the opposite plane, that is if time-space is a fabric, or to another parallel or opposite dimension as expressed in the multi-world interpretation of quantum theory. (This wayward travel from inter-stellar to inter-dimensional travel is explored in the movie Event Horizon.)

Stranger Things explores the idea of inter-dimensional travel. The mysterious character "11" possesses psychokinetic abilities which allows her to move things using her mind but her most interesting power is her ability to travel outside her body which gave her the ability to listen to other people's conversation making her a human "bug". But in her out of body forays, she comes in contact with an alien that inhabits the dimension.  

The government scientists studying and manipulating her abilities encourages her to make contact but in the process she accidentally opened an inter-dimensional portal that allowed the aliens to enter our dimension.

In the small town of Hawkins, strange things starts to happen. People disappears and the police are surprised when the disappearances are solved by state troopers. But when Will Byers disappears, his mother, brother and friends searched for him. The Hawkins police chief becomes suspicious and investigated Byers cadaver which lead to the discovery of his fake body and the government conspiracy to cover up the disappearances.

"Eleven" escaped the government research center where she ends up in the small town of Hawkins and befriended three kids who helped her. She reveals who she is and that it was she who opened the portal. The season ended with Bill Myers being rescued from the alternate dimension called " the upside down" and with Eleven closing the portal. A month later, Myers, in the bathroom, coughs out a slug and then experiences flashes of the upside down.

Some stuff...

Okay, so Eleven or El is able to travel between dimensions but how does she do it? Theoretically a lot of energy, some theoretical physicist even say it requires the power of  a star, is needed in order to create a worm hole. First, time and space must be warped and then a controllable black hole must be created in order to create a worm hole between the warped space-time fabric. 

In the traditional space-tech sci-fi this is usually solved by warp-engines but in Stranger Things, inter-dimensional travel is achieved by a different means, though the power of the mind. The background story is that in 50's a lot of experiment  was done by the US Government using people with ESP or with potential ESP with the help hallucinogens like LSD and sensory-deprivation-tanks in order to expand the abilities of the mind. And it is this scenario that Eleven's ability is introduced, she is the daughter of one of the subjects of the experiment and she is abducted or adopted by the laboratory to be its subject.

I guess it difficult to overcome the idea of thre separation of the body and the mind.

Anyway...

The concept is interesting, though this is not the first time this idea is explored because most horror movies i.e. if you removed the religious references, is really all about inter-dimensional crossings. 

Is it possible then that the story is a sort of a brain-in-the jar experiment and the whole reality or universe is just a virtual reality created by an organic computer, Eleven's brain. This is one explanation that I guess would satisfy the physics because if one mind could affect reality in such a way that it could open portals, think of the implications of having two or three etc. minds with the same abilities and the chaos it could create.  

Of course, this is sci-fi and I don't expect any real-life rules to work in it but it's supposed to make one to sit down and think about the unexplored part of our existence whether it be dark or upside down because there so much more to this life we live in than what we experience.