Doubters may suggest that Stranger Things is something of two-trick pony (80s worship, gradually expanding mystery), but even if that was true, you have to argue that it does those two things extraordinarily well and as we hurtle toward the climax, the powers that be have ramped things up yet another notch while still keeping things still quite quiet and under the radar. With yet more drip feeding information of how a slimey gateway to another dimension could possibly open up in the middle of a sleepy American burg, we finally get to see the true extent of Eleven’s involvement with the discovery of the Upside Down.
Origins follow yet more revelations and the tangled thread of everything that’s occured is on the verge of being pull straight as the multi-pronged probe into the work of Dr. Brenner reaches its conclusion. However, before we can think about closing the gate to the Upside Down, there’s another rift that needs to healed first…
The fellowship has broken. After Lucas’ jealousy concerning Mike’s fascination with Eleven finally boiled over and the two fought, matters were made even worse when the telekinetic girl tried to intercede and ended up flinging Lucas through the air with her freaky mind powers. While Lucas was knocked unconscious, he was basically unharmed everywhere but in his pride and he stormed off, breaking up the tight knit gang before their hunt for Will could properly start.
The next day, cooler heads (and an insistent Dustin) prevail, but even though Mike tries to apologise, Lucas is still angered by his insistence to first locate the missing Eleven, but while she’s doing fairly well on her own, using her telekinetic powers to steal Eggos from a supermarket, Hopper and Joyce have realised that all their clues up until now haven’t actually been leading them to Will.
Changing their tactics instead to locating this mysterious, shaven-headed girl, Hopper and Joyce manage to track down Terry Ives, a catatonic woman who was given mind expanding drugs while pregnant as part of Project MKUltra and whole claimed that her subsequent miscarriage was faked. Could Eleven (potentially aka. Jane) actually be Terry’s stolen child?
There’s no time to mull over this right now as I almost forgot to bring us up to date with Nancy and Jonathan as the last time we saw the latter, she was trapped in the Upside Down with the Demogorgon. After barely escaping, they decide to regroup and stock pile weapons to hunt the trans-dimensional creeper only for their time together be misread by Steve that his girlfriend is sleeping around.
However, while Nancy has to deal with this hostility, Mike and Dustin have to deal with some of their own as some extremely vengeful bullies catch up with them. But even though a returning Eleven shows up and saves the day, can the shocking revelation that it was she who first created to the portal to the Upside Down sour her heroic actions?
This may sound like a cruel thing to say, but the splitting up of Mike, Lucas, Dustin and Eleven is actually the best thing that could have happened to Stanger Things. Yes, I realise that the squabbling, bickering gang of Spielbergian prepubescents may be the lynchpin behind the entire series, but up until now, they’ve kind of been a multi-headed collective rather than a quartet of separate characters, but The Monster finally gives the show and the actors some breathing room to rectify this. While their established personalities are still the same, we now actually get a chance to see their attributes and how they’re only a shadow of themselves without the others to help prop them up. Mike has clear leadership qualities, but he’s often blinded by his heart; Lucas is brave, but incredibly headstrong and Dustin proves to be something of a child wise beyond his years as his level headed nature abd loyalty seems to be the glue that binds them and while this always seemed to be the case, it’s nice to see them separate so we can get to know them separately for a bit. Also, their constant fracturing isn’t because of Eleven joining like Lucys suggests, it’s because the true fourth member of their group, Will, is absent. Of course, blame seems to be relative when it comes to Eleven and the bulk of the episode is mainly taken up with the effect she’s had on literally everything around her.
Flashbacks reveal that after accidently discovering an alien form of life while training for her telepathic spy stuff, Brenner pushed her to try and make contact with it (aka. the Demogorgon) and the resulting trauma cause a terrified Eleven’s power to magnify significantly to open a rift between dimensions. It’s guilt like this that’s caused the girl to spend most of her time behaving as a timid, doe-eyed victim who nevertheless has the power to snap necks with her grey matter, however, we’re now starting to see her progress into someone a lot more cocksure and confident, especially when she breezes in and out of a supermarket with armfuls of Eggos like they owe her money. Between the present and flashbacks, we now have a clear idea of where Eleven’s been and where she’s going as a character, but as we segue into the Hopper and Joyce thread, we get a glimpse of how tragic her origin really is and with baby snatching added to Brenner’s expanding list of interdimenisonal human rights violations, Matthew Modine gets creepier with every appearance.
Later, as we swerve back into Stephen King territory with knife welding bullies who seem to have genuinely lost their marbles due to being humiliated, Eleven gets her hero moment after levitating Mike put of a nasty fall and snapping the odd arm or two. But after finally getting a taste of real life (and Eggos) he emotional dam breaks and she spills all to Mike about how she believes everything is her fault. It essentially means that the emotional back of the story has now been broken and because the riddle of Eleven has mostly been solved (ish), we’re free to bring the central mystery home.
But while the kids are fixated on Will and Hopper and Joyce are now locked onto Brenner, it’s left to Nancy and Jonathan to focus of the Demogorgon (remember, no one else knows that the other groups are buried within their own connected investigations), but after narrowly escaping death and amassing a personal armory that would make Wes Craven proud, their monster hunting momentum is halted by that other bane of teenage girls: toxic boyfriends. With Steve showing his spiteful true colours after witnessing Nancy and Jonathan comforting each other after their goopy run in with death, he launches a smear campaign across town announcing that his girlfriend is a slut. But while Jonathan defends her honor by roughing up those good looks (unsurprisingly, the hair remained undamaged), it also means that their mission to take down the Demogorgon is put on hold as Jonathan is arrested.
While the lion’s share of the episode is dedicated to exploring Eleven during all the periods of her miserable life, Stranger Things still manages to flex those impressive balancing muscles to ensure that the ensemble don’t get overwhelmed. Still, with two episodes left to go, and no word from Will in a while, the separate groups of mystery hunters needs to meet and start comparing notes soon.
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Grande Movie!
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