On this episode of teenVoice, El Heraldo Editor Barbie Ortiz Robles and Staff Writer Kaisha Diaz talk all about the newest and last season of the hit streaming show “Stranger Things”. Opinions and theories abound both before and after watching the final season and recapping the previous seasons with Columbia Heights High School (CHHS) students Lakiah Kimp (12), Zoe Zuehlke (12) and Noemi Ochoa Rios (12). Listen to hear about our best theories!

Here’s a partial transcript (edited for clarity) of the episode to preview before you decide to press play and time-travel to the 1980s with Barbie and Kaisha:

Good morning Hylanders. This is the Heights Herald’s teenVoice podcast with Kicking Kaisha and Bright Barbie. And we’re here to discuss the final season of “Stranger Things”. Ten years ago, this show came on when we were both in elementary school, and now this is our final year in high school. Let’s talk about the party’s final adventures in the Upside Down one last time, but before we start, we do want to say that we’re going to talk about the whole show, and especially, we’re going to focus on season five. So if you haven’t watched it yet, this is your spoiler warning right now. Before we get into it, you have been warned.

Let’s just start off with the basics. The first season dropped in 2016, and this show started off small. I guess it got to where it is now because it’s such, like, a specific show, and it’s so different from anything else. So I feel like it was so new at first. Obviously, it was influenced by 80s movies, but in the 2010s, that was, like, really new. It was niche. It was tiny. It was like it was designed for a small group of people, and it just blew up. I think the teen shows that we have now is about being in high school today, and those relationships, but season one went back to the 80s, which is not new for older audiences, but to this generation, like Gen Z, it felt fresh and new, and then suddenly it was big.

I can’t really remember a lot about when it first came out because I got into the show during season two and three, but even from what I saw during that time in 2016, like, seriously, it was like a fresh breath of air in a way. So, season one, it’s set in 1983 with the four core four boys: Dustin, Will, Mike and Lucas, which we all knew as the relatable friend group. And when they hung out and played Dungeons & Dragons, we got to know them a little bit, like about Mike’s sister and all of their personalities. But then it all quickly goes downhill when we see, like, the most iconic part of the whole story is Will getting kidnapped. He goes missing. He rides back home and he gets taken.

It was a very effective way to begin. It started off happy with these innocent kids, and from there on, it only got worse. The friends go out in the woods to look for him, but that’s when they come across this girl who escaped. And her name is Eleven. And by the end of this season, she sort of joins this party to help because they all want to find Will. But none of the police know, and neither do the teachers or the parents. They kind of just think he ran away…