Eggo Waffles
S1 E2: The Weirdo on Maple Street
Stranger Things, 2016.
Ah, suburban Indiana in the 1980s, when men were men, phones fried themselves, and government agents roamed the countryside in unmarked vans like it was the world's most paranoid ice cream route.
We begin where all trustworthy stories begin: with three middle school boys hiding a mute telekinetic girl with a buzzcut in the basement. Naturally. Lucas suggests asylum escapee. Dustin suggests... snacks. Mike, bless his naive cinnamon roll heart, decides this is the start of a beautiful friendship. He hands her a change of clothes and she begins undressing in front of all of them, prompting panic and a flurry of childhood modesty, because even interdimensional horror must make room for pre-teen squeamishness.
Mike sets her up in a pillow fort (a primitive but acceptable safe house), and thus begins the origin story of Eleven: part girl, part science experiment, all appetite. When she reveals the barcode tattoo "011" on her arm, Mike, being both sensitive and practical, renames her "El," thereby reducing her government-assigned identity to something you could yell from the kitchen while holding a toaster waffle.
Meanwhile, Joyce Byers is fraying like the hem of a Dollar Store bathrobe. Her phone, smoking, sparking, clearly possessed by either her missing son or Comcast, does not inspire confidence in Chief Hopper, whose investigative style can best be described as "Sheriff with a Hangover." Joyce is not deterred. She buys a new phone, she gets an advance on her paycheck, she listens to static like it's Morse code from her son. This woman is the most determined mother on television since Sarah Connor, and she doesn’t even own a shotgun. Yet.
Back at the Wheeler house, Mike prepares the breakfast of champions — Eggo waffles, golden and glistening in their freezer-burned simplicity. He hands one to Eleven like it’s a communion wafer and, reader, she receives. This is not mere sustenance; it is a revelation. It is 160 calories of emotional imprint. Thus begins a lifelong bond between girl and waffle, forged not in syrup but in trauma.
Elsewhere, Hopper investigates Benny Hammond’s untimely suicide, which, to the viewer and to basic forensic logic, looks more like a "please ignore the bullet trajectory and just accept this staged narrative" kind of deal. Hawkins, a town untouched by tragedy for decades, is now hosting weekly trauma with RSVP-only access.
Steve Harrington, human hairspray bottle and self-appointed Cool Teen, throws a pool party with all the subtlety of a high school kegger on a soap opera. Nancy Wheeler, Mike’s sister and recent buyer of her first push-up bra, is torn between being a Good Friend to Barb and a Willing Participant in a Teenage Sitcom Plotline. She chooses Steve. Barb, left alone and bleeding poolside, contemplates her life choices just long enough to be devoured by a creature from the moistest bowels of hell.
Jonathan Byers, a moody boy armed with a camera and years of unresolved paternal issues, accidentally becomes a peeping Tom while searching for his brother. He captures Barb's last known moments and also several angles of Nancy and Steve playing Spin the Hormones upstairs. He is, unfortunately, very artistic about it.
Meanwhile, back in the safest place in Hawkins (a basement filled with fragile boys and military secrets), Eleven uses Mike’s Dungeons & Dragons board to recreate an elaborate metaphor about Will’s location. She flips the board, puts the figurine of Will upside down, and names his attacker: the Demogorgon. The boys are amazed. This girl doesn’t just have psychic powers, she has narrative structure.
At the Byers house, Joyce is assaulted by glowing lightbulbs and wallpaper that bubbles ominously, proving once again that the real horror is homeownership. She flees, then re-enters the house because this is still the pilot phase of the series and no one is allowed to escape trauma yet.
And so ends another perfectly normal day in Hawkins, Indiana. A girl disappears, another appears, a monster takes a blood offering by the pool, and someone discovers processed breakfast food. Also, closets are terrifying now.