“They’re growing, spreading, killing...”
Joyce arrives with the boys- and they find Will catatonic, in a very bad way, but mercifully alive although the Shadow Monster has well and truly got him. It’s all a moment of high drama- but one from which Max is completely excluded as she has not a clue what is going on, a running sore.
Meanwhile, Eleven arrives home to Hopper and an almighty row, one that gets completely out of hand with Hopper going way too far into authoritarian mode. Yes, as a dad, I can see how it can happen, especially when you’re having a bad day, but this is taking a bit further than that- it’s quite a brave decision to allow a character we like to behave so unlikeable.
Of course, making Eleven angry can be a dangerous thing. She can seriously hurt you. Things don’t go quite as far as the breaking of bones we’ve seen before, but there’s a wider issue here- how can someone with such abilities, and a traumatic childhood to boot, be happily integrated into society? One can even see Eleven’s powers as a metaphor for borderline personality disorder in this context; she’s had an abusive past, has a troubled sense of self and a fear of abandonment, and lashes out in disruptive ways when she’s upset. And here she is finding that Hopper has kept records of her past, and reading them...
(Incidentally, as well as a box called “Hawkins Lab” in Hopper’s basement, there are many other boxes, including one marked “Vietnam”. Is Hopper a veteran?)
Morning, and Dustin finds Dart has grown larger. And Will is losing temperature because “he likes it cold”. Brr. Yet again the serial format and the fact we know the characters well by now allows Stranger Things to be bloody scary in a way few modern horror films are. But creepier than anything is Nancy and Jonathan waiting by the playground (Isn’t that playground a bit too 2010’s to convince? I say that with the authority of someone who was eight years old in 1985.) with everything shot to look sinister as they are surrounded by people from the lab. Ultimately they are captured but allowed to go after a bit of a chat about why the rift must remain secret lest the Reds find out... but Nancy recorded the whole thing. It’s a sequence that reminds us how superb the direction is.
And then we have Will struggling to explain to Joyce and Hopper these new “now memories” in his head, which seem not to be human ones. He communicates, ultimately, by pictures instead of words- loads of sheets of A4 which, we finally realise, connect into what looks like a maze- and Hopper makes the connection; these are vines, and may explain what’s happening to all the pumpkins.
Inevitably, Max lashes out at the boys, understandably upset at being obviously excluded from so much; it would have been unrealistic for this not to happen. But we also see her wanker brother(?) Billy tell her to stay away from Lucas in what looks awfully like racism.
So many dramatic things happen in this episode, but there are more; Eleven goes into the darkness to speak to her mother, and seems to be recognised before her mother vanished in a powerful scene. And Dustin wakes to find Dart having escaped from his cage- and finds him eating the cat, a little Demogorgon. And, if this wasn’t cliffhanger enough, Hopper goes digging under the pumpkin fields, and finds a tunnel where it’s the Upside Down...
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