Stranger Things: Season 1, Episode 5 – “The Flea and the Acrobat”
Stranger Things pivots toward its eventual conclusion, as each character responds to the "primal frequency" undergirding the narrative action.
Garret Castleberry
Garret L. Castleberry (Ph.D., The University of Oklahoma) is Program Director and Associate Professor of Communication, Media, and Ethics at Mid-America Christian University. Garret has an interdisciplinary background in Communication Studies, Rhetoric, Performance Studies, Mass & Political Communication, with specialty areas in Genre, Film and Television Studies. His work has appeared in the scholarly journals Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies and the International Review for Qualitative Research. Contributions to edited anthologies on popular culture include chapters in "Television, Social Media, and Fan Culture" (Lexington Books, 2015), "Communication Theory & Millennial Popular Culture" (Peter Lang, 2015) and "The ESPN Effect" (Peter Lang, 2015). Projects on the horizon include analyses of True Detective, The Walking Dead, and Mel Brooks' sci-fi satire Spaceballs among others. Garret writes for the scholarly website and online journal In Media Res and Flow, as well as the upcoming contributions to the cultural encyclopedia "Hooray for Hollywood" (ABC Clio, 2016). He is currently co-editing the book, "Competition, Community, and Educational Growth: Contemporary Perspectives on Competitive Speech & Debate."
Stranger Things: Season 1, Episode 4 – “The Body”
The meta-textual impulse in Stranger Things is one of the ways in which it could serve as the televisual successor to Mad Men.
Stranger Things: Season 1, Episode 3 – “Holly, Jolly”
Stranger Things continues to recreate unique film genre fixtures of a bygone decade in a fascinating ongoing televisual experiment.
Stranger Things: Season 1, Episode 2 – “The Weirdo on Maple Street”
Stranger Things continues to offer escapism and cultural touchstones to a bygone era for the audience to decode.
Stranger Things: Season 1, Episode 1 – “The Vanishing of Will Byers”
Stranger Things captures fear and the '80s so brilliantly, you'd think Netflix injected it with some mad scientist-created serum to ensure maximum binge-worthiness.