Stranger Things: The First Shadow

Back to working from home. First up is our sprint planning session. It is always a lot shorter than timetabled because, in most sprints, we have refined all the work, and we're just agreeing on capacity and sequencing. The sight of the session on my calendar always alarms me, but then I sit through the meeting and remember this is one of the more straightforward events of the week. After we have completed the planning, the team moves to the retrospective, which I don't join. I sometimes think I should, but it always seems like a good opportunity for my engineering colleagues to go in-depth about chosen approaches, and I have nothing to add to those conversations. 

Perhaps because I spent the weekend eating lunch outdoors and because the weather was decent, I took my salad outside. I decided against removing the table cover—it's too much hassle for 15 minutes—but sitting on the bench was a lovely way to pass the break.

After work, I headed out to the Phoenix Theatre. We saw "Stranger Things: The First Shadow," based on the Netflix series. I've never watched the TV version (PY is a fan), so I went with zero expectations. All I knew was that the TV show was set in the 1980s. This is not. We see the TV characters as teenage incarnations of themselves, and, as it's a prequel, a working knowledge of the Netflix version is unnecessary. I am assured there are plenty of moments that fans will understand as signalling some future event; they went over my head and were not integral to the theatre plot. The staging is epic, especially at the beginning when a US Navy warship appears on stage. Something about a cloaking device; I didn't really follow, but I think you only need to take that it's all experimental science, and soon, we're exposed to the consequences (aside from the paranormal impact on the humans, people's pets start dying, and that's where alarm bells start).

You do not need to be a fan of the streaming juggernaut to watch it, but you do need to be prepared to sit in a theatre for almost three hours of performance.