It’s been a long wait since November 26. In that time, HBO managed to squeeze in four whole episodes of It: Welcome To Derry which managed to whet our appetites for kids warring with reality warping boogeymen while the Hawkins gang got their second wind. But regardless on whether you think Netflix’s release plan is flawed, or you got drawn into how ruthless It could get, who have to admit that episode 4 of Stranger Things 5 left us with a helluva cliffhanger that teased and promised of epic battles to come – however, if any of you have been paying attention over the last nine years, we shouldn’t be expecting them right away.
That’s right, in true, Stranger Things fashion we follow up massive twists and revelations with an episode that routinely pumps the brakes in order to process all the new shit the Duffer Brothers dumped on us thirty days ago.
Can the start of the second batch of episodes pump the second half of the season with some electric juice, or will the road to the finale require a bit more wandering than we’d like?
So Will Byers has powers – and I don’t mean that wimpy, hair standing up on the back of the neck shit, either – I mean real powers. Years of abuse and close proximity to the Upside-Down, the Mind Flayer and Vecna means that some of their freaky deaky, hive mind malarkey has rubbed off on his DNA and now the show’s most weakest member can twist Demogorgons into misshapen pretzels with merely a thought. However, this wasn’t enough to stop Vecna from carrying out his plan and kidnapping the remaining children he needs for his apocalyptic plan. But as he plugs them into the vines in the Upside-Down, the kids awake in the shared fantasy land we’ve come to know as Camazotz thinking that Vecna’s human form is some sort of protective Mr. Rogers type.
Realising that they have to act fast to take the advantage of Will’s new sorcerer abilities, multiple plans are proposed to get him back into the hive mind to take the fight to Vecna. Plan A involves superheating a Demogorgon corpse to give him an in, but as he readies himself for round two, the two groups still stuck in the Upside-Down are dealing with their own shit.
After raiding Dr. Kay’s base and discovering Kali (aka. Number Eight) being held prisoner, Eleven and Hopper discover that the not-so-good doctor is planning to kick start Dr. Brenner’s old project and needs Eleven’s blood to perfect it for a whole new generation of superpowered kids. Elsewhere, tensions rise between Steve, Dustin, Nancy and Jonathan rise as they chase some theories of their own, but after the dam breaks between Steve and Dustin and they fight, the angry teen soon discovers that all of his previous hypothesis concerning the Upside-Down have been horribly wrong and it could spell doom for them all.
As I mentioned earlier, anyone who truly knows Stranger Things is already aware that they always follow up a massive status quo change with an episode that has everyone literally explain what just happened as they wander around, getting their steps in and searching for clues about what they’re supposed to be doing next. Thus the fact that Shock Jock does exactly this for over an hour shouldn’t really come as much of a shock, but then I also feel that the month gap between episodes may have gotten people expectations up way too high if they were expecting a massive payoff immediately. Also, it seems that once again, poor old guest director Frank Darabont seems to have been given one of the slower episodes to helm as the second of his two installments is yet another exposition fest that sees all the players in holding patterns until either the Duffer Brothers or Shane Levy can take the helm. Still, there’s still plenty of stuff here to enjoy, it just isn’t the earth-shattering, mind blowing stuff that the adverts were promising. Not yet, anyway.
One such aspect that catches the attention is the rushed attempt to bring Will’s powers back on line that goes full Frankenstein and involves pumping a Demogorgon with more juice than the Las Vegas strip. While it’s a great example of the show throwing in a throwaway subplot that’s cool, but ultimately goes nowhere, it still allows yet more love life advice to pass between Robin and Will; Joyce gives her son her blessing to be a badass; and Mike and Lucas geek out about their buddy leveling up. However, there is a feeling that this episode has to marginalise the other Hawkins dwelling characters in order to fuss over Will more. Similarly, Holly and Max’s adventures in Camazotz land also keeps things moving, but slightly unremarkable as poor Darabont is required to provide explanation and build up that he’ll never get to pay off – although at least Nightmare On Elm Street 3 (which he co-wrote) is playing on a TV.
In the Upside-Down, it’s more of the same, with Linnea Berthelsen’s Kali making up for seven years of silence by becoming a lean, mean exposition machine who adds to her ability to create illusions in the mind by having the super power to fill plot holes in a single paragraph. Still, it’s genuinely good to see her despite how much her introductory episode is still disliked and it also adds more threat to the continuing, Lovecraftian experiments that Linda Hamilton’s Dr. Kay is busying herself with. However, it’s with Steve and Dustin that we finally find some drama that’s able to match Will’s attempt to deliver a remote telekinetic beatdown on Vecna as the building animosity between the too erupt into violence. To be fair, watching Dustin and Steve continuously tear verbal strips off one another has been both amusing (they’ve traded some killer zingers in anger over the last few episodes) and genuinely upsetting as the toll of Eddie Munson’s death has made the young, grieving nerd viciously bitter.
The dam breaks after Steve makes some negative comments about Dustin’s hero and while the older of the two manages to spare himself his typical ass-whupping, it’s shocking to see Dustin in such a dark space. However, while Nancy and Jonathan look for the equivalent of Vecna’s shield generator to shut it down, the always confident Dustin discovers that his theories concerning the Upside-Down have been disastrously wrong. How wrong? Well, Darabont isn’t allowed to tell us that either, but whatever it is, the act of Nancy shooting an anomaly in the sky with her shotgun could prove to kill absolutely everyone, which is quite the impressively tense note to end on.
If we’re judging the kick off of the next three episodes of season 5 purely on jaw dropping happenings and devastating twists, then those more susceptible to the promises in the ad campaign may feel horribly short changed. Of course, this is hardly fair as Shock Jock proves to be something of a solid, if standard transitional episode that always tends to occur at this point in the season anyway. Whether things start to get more unpredictable from here will be discovered by simply letting Netflix play the next episode, but for now, the gang may be bak, but it’s going to take them a little while to warm up first.
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