154 Thanksgiving for Stranger Things

This week the ladies of the Mosaic Ark are back after a four-week break just in time to obsess over the first installment of the final season of Stranger Things. Along with other obsessive fans in the world, we’ve been engaging in conjectures about the direction of the story and how it will end. But as writers, we also found ourselves obsessing over the depth of the story’s structure and the many clues to Henry’s backstory. We loved the inclusion of a model of the Tesseract from Madeleine L’Engle’s classic children’s book, A Wrinkle in Time, as a plot vehicle. We also loved that there was more D&D lore. We talked about the Duffers’ strange habit of always including close-ups of the characters’ shoes when they come on stage for the first time. What kind of trope is this, and why do the Duffers use it? And what does it tell us about their skill as storytellers that we get so caught up in such details? —Streamed November 28, 2025