Stranger Things - 'Chapter Three: Holly, Jolly'

So on top of not knowing what happened to Will, we now don't know what
happened to... Never mind.

Episode... I'm sorry, Chapter three of Stranger Things begins exactly where the last one left off, with Barb being grabbed while her best friend has sex. Oh karma, so close and yet so far from the mark.

Unlike Will, we stick with Barb, as sadly this is her big and her final moment. Trapped in a waterless version of the pool, filled with evil alien root things amid a gentle fall of what might be snow, but is probably ash, she comes face to lack of face with a pale, monstrous humanoid and that's about all she wrote. Roll credits on the coldest of cold openings.

The following 45 minutes is just packed with happenings, and despite a relatively sedate pace, Stranger Things never lacks for occurrences.

Mike leaves El at home while he and the other boys go to school, intending to search for Will with El's help later. Lucas is skeptical, not just of El's claimed knowledge of Will's whereabouts, but of everything about her, while Dustin wants to experiment with the telekinetic powers that make her nose bleed, unconsciously mimicking the scientists who held her and made her crush Coke cans. At school, Lucas mocks Mike's supposed infatuation with El, and they have a run in with the kind of school bullies who mostly only exist in eighties movies. During their absence, El explores and experiences flashbacks, including the brutal murder of two orderlies, which elicited a rare show of kindness from Dr Brenner, her head keeper and surrogate 'Papa'.

Nope! Nopenopenope!

Nora is convinced that Will is trying to contact her through the electricity and buys more and more lights to prove it, despite her family's lack of funds. This set up attracts the attention of Mike's little sister Holly during a goodwill visit from their mother, and nearly lures her into the grasp of Mr Pushes Through the Goddamn Walls. Jonathan is doubtful of her claims, and has other problems, as he is seen developing his pictures and exposed as a stalker, leading to a run in with Steve and his increasingly cool hair in which his camera is smashed. This also leads Nancy, worried about Barb's absence, to realise that he took a picture of her remaining at the poolside after the party.

Sheriff Hopper continues his dogged and rational search for Will at the Hawkins Lab, where he immediately spots a doctored security tape and starts digging, despite the hostility of the librarian, who seems to be one of a number of ladies of a certain age to have been done wrong by Hopper. He find references linking Dr Brenner to CIA-sponsored LSD experiments and specifically MKUltra. What they don't see is the alien root mass in the lab basement, surrounded by drifting ash.

Smart.

Getting what seems a definite response from Will, Nora sets up an alphabet on the wall with lights, because she's actually pretty smart, just knackered and desperate. 'Yes', he tells her, he is alive. 'No', he is not safe. Where is he? 'Right here.' What should Nora do?

'Run.'

As Nora flees from the faceless thing and El also tells the boys that Will is at his house, tragedy strikes. A deputy finds a body in the river, and it is Will.

Stranger Things is a busy show, not just filled with events but with incredible imagery and repeated themes. This week's door count includes Holly following the lights to Will's room, and Nora being guided to sit in a cupboard (just as El is when Mike needs to hide her from his Mom.) The thing's tendency to come through walls is almost a refutation of the concept of doorness, marking doors as both portal and as barrier as a human concern that it can't be doing with.

Human concerns are front and centre in the show, however. Hopper wants to bring his town back from the brink of insanity. Nora wants to find her son, and will believe practically anything that offers a chance. The comparison between the brightly lit, well-to-do space of Mike's family home and the drab, dismal interior of Nora's speak volumes of the social gulf that Mike and Will have bridged without thinking about it, but which Jonathan is all too aware of. Even Nora and Steve gain a bit of dimensionality in her concern for Barb and his increasingly uncertain juggling of apparently genuine affection for her and the need to stay cool and in control to impress his friends.

And then there are the children. Finn Wolfhard - and seriously, even the actors' names sound somehow eighties - conveys Mike's wonder and intelligence, but also a really fierce anger burning underneath it. Millie Bobby Brown's El is a picture of measured performance, brimming with pain and unspoken anger. The two characters seem to click at once, and I wonder if that isn't because they recognise that inner rage in each other somehow.