There’s a long-running parental fear that too much television will rot children’s brains, melt their morals, or turn them into goblin-eyed husks muttering in memes. But every now and then, the glowing idiot box does something genuinely useful — like quietly teaching a child how to save a man from drowning.
This is one of those times.
In September 2023, in the sunlit calm of suburban Wellington, Florida, twelve-year-old Austen Macmillan found himself in a situation that most adults would panic their way through badly. The family pool. No parents home. A grown man unconscious at the bottom of the deep end. Time ticking like a bomb.
And somewhere in Austen’s mind — lodged between Demogorgons and synthesiser dread — was a memory from Stranger Things.
The Pool Became the Upside Down
Austen had been swimming with Jason Piquette, his registered behaviour technician, as part of a regular therapy session. At some point, like many people moments before making a terrible decision, they decided to see who could hold their breath the longest.
Timers were involved. Ego was involved. Oxygen, crucially, was not.
When the timer hit five minutes on Piquette’s turn, Austen clocked that something was very wrong. This wasn’t bravado. This was physics.
Security footage shows the boy swimming down, hauling Piquette’s limp body up from the depths and dragging him onto the pool steps. It’s the sort of footage that usually ends with sirens and regret. Instead, it ends with chest compressions.
CPR, Courtesy of Netflix
Austen tried calling for help on Piquette’s phone. The screen was cracked. The touchscreen betrayed him. He ran outside screaming for help — a raw, animal sound that doesn’t feature in any CPR manual — then came back and did the thing that mattered.
He started pumping Piquette’s chest.
Not because he’d taken a course. Not because a laminated poster once told him how. But because he’d seen it on television — specifically, the moment in Stranger Things where Winona Ryder and David Harbour beat life back into a child’s chest with frantic, desperate compressions.
After a few minutes — and one emphatic chest strike straight out of 1980s sci-fi melodrama — Piquette gasped back into the world.
The boy had reversed death with nothing but memory, instinct, and a show his mum had been unsure about letting him watch.
When Fiction Leaks Into Reality
It’s worth noting that the CPR shown in Stranger Things isn’t textbook-perfect. Internet forums have argued about it for years, as the internet must. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: imperfect CPR is infinitely better than none at all.
Piquette spent a night in intensive care and was back at work days later. Alive. Breathing. Making statements that include phrases like “big mistake” and “hyperventilating beforehand” — the adult version of I really shouldn’t have done that.
Austen, meanwhile, went on to get properly certified, proudly holding up his American Heart Association Basic Life Support certificate like a superhero origin story in paper form. His family and friends followed suit, turning one near-tragedy into a ripple of preparedness.
Monsters, Myths, and Modern Parables
There’s something faintly unsettling — and quietly beautiful — about the way this happened. A horror-tinged Netflix series, inspired by Spielberg and Stephen King, bleeds into real life and teaches a child how to defy the most ancient villain of all.
Death didn’t see this one coming. It was outflanked by a twelve-year-old and a memory of a fictional mother pounding her son’s chest in the rain.
Maybe that’s the real lesson lurking beneath the synths and shadows: stories matter. They sink in. They wait. And sometimes, when everything goes wrong, they rise up — hands steady, heart racing — and save a life.
Not bad for telly.