Stranger Things - 'Chapter 6: The Monster', 'Chapter 7: The Bathtub' and 'Chapter 8: The Upside Down'

The Monster

Okay; it's time to wrap up another one, as I address the last three episodes of the astonishingly eighties Stranger Things. I'm going to try to be brief.

In 'The Monster' Nancy escapes from the tree with Jonathan's help. They have a plan to go a-hunting for the monster, but Steve sees them together and his friends paint the town with graffiti accusing her of being a slut and him of being a perv, which precipitates a fist fight and arrest. Steve goes on to come good, realising that his buddies are colossal dicks, but this delays the monster hunt until Hop and Joyce get back from visiting a woman who claimed that her daughter went missing instead of miscarrying, and believed - before she became catatonic - that her daughter had powers. Hop links this to reports of a girl with short hair telekinetically wrecking our favourite knife wielding junior high bullies. It is during this confrontation that Elle admits to having opened the gate that let the monster through, and states that she is a monster.

This is the end...

This brings all of our heroes together for 'The Bathtub', with Nancy radioing Mike to arrange a meetup and Hop rescuing the kids from Hawkins' goons, because it turns out he is some kind of ludicrous badass. They put together an impromptu iso-tank to float Elle in, so that she can focus enough to locate Will and Barb. She finds the former in the Upside-Down version of Castle Byers, but the confirms that the latter is 'gone', actually seeing her dead with things crawling out of mouth, which is pretty yick; like... Exorcist level ick.

Either at the end of this one or the beginning of 'The Upside Down', Hop and Joyce head to Hawkins to storm the gate, while Nancy and Jonathan go monster hunting at last. With help from Steve, Nancy and Jonathan bludgeon, trap and burn the monster, but it vanishes back into the Upside Down. Hop and Joyce are caught, but Hop trades Elle's location and their silence on Hawkins' involvement, in exchange for being allowed in to find Will and a promise to leave the boys out of it.

"Your soul is mine!"

Goons descend on the school and Elle kills a shitload of them - seriously, like... 90% of the casualties in this series are Elle-inflicted - and the blood attracts the monster, which kills the rest of the goons before going after the kids. The boys make a ludicrous stand with a catapult, but Elle steps in and makes it explode. However, this costs her all of her energy and she vanishes along with the monster, leaving Mike devastated, if marginally less confused.

Joyce and Hop rescue Will and bring him home, but a mystery car picks up Hop, implying that there was more to his deal than he let on. Nancy is happy for Will, but sad for Barb.

Oh.

Some months later, at Christmas, the boys reach the end of another campaign, in a scene which suggests that they are expecting more than just monster killing now. Jonathan comes to collect Will and receives a new camera from Nancy (and, unspoken, from Steve, who is dating Nancy,) and all seems happy. Except that Hop is leaving food for someone or something in the woods, and before Christmas dinner, Will coughs up a slug and flashes momentarily into the Upside Down.

To be continued...

Stranger Things is a glorious love letter to eighties scifi horror, and - coming back to something I mentioned talking about The Exorcist - it is much more horror than a lot of more conventionally horror-themed series which focus on pretty vampires making out. Although initially the female characters occupy the conventional roles of the 1980s, they grow through the series into strong and dynamic roles, and while it's a small thing, the fact that Nancy continues her relationship with the chastened Steve - and the fact that Steve is complex enough to be chastened - is important.

Overall, the series walks the line between loving the eighties and being the eighties very well, although the boys seem a little too okay with Elle melting people's eyeballs. I especially felt that Mike's confusion over his relationship with Elle and the conflicting desires to bring her into his family and take her to the Snow Ball was very well played. This is perhaps unsurprising, as Finn Wolfhard and Millie Bobby Brown are the stand outs of this series, bringing a real intensity to Mike and Elle and their relationship.

Stranger Things - 'Chapter 5: The Flea and the Acrobat'

I love these guys.

And we're back to Stranger Things, thanks to a quiet evening in which to focus on some quality TV instead of half-watching trash.

The good news is that Hop isn't dead. Despite penetrating to the heart of Hawkins Power and Light, he is neither eaten by a monster nor disappeared by security, presumably because a police chief is a bugger to disappear. Instead they drug him and dump him back in his trailer, where he goes a bit crazy looking for - and finding - bugs. Then he gets news that a couple of hunters have gone missing, and it's kind of wonderful that when told where he refers to it as 'Mirkwood', just like the kids do. Ultimately he decides to talk to Joyce about it (see above) and props to both actors for a masterclass in confused paranoid jabbering.

Well, I say paranoid, but the conspiracy continues as a Hawkins tech comes to look at the fried ham radio. The principal explains that it's used by the AV club, and is popular among the 'non-athletic' kids.

Jonathan and Nancy set out to look for the monster, Nancy bringing a softball bat and Jonathan his dad's gun - Papa Byers briefly appearing with the intention of exploiting Will's disappearance for financial gain. They bond briefly, then fall out because each looks down on the other for being a snob of one kind or another, but stick it out to find Barb. In all honesty, Nancy is getting pretty badass by this point, and we can only hope she won't spoil it by doing something stupid like plunging headlong and solo into a mysterious and fleshy rift in a tree trunk.

The boys consider where Will could be and El tells them 'upside-down'. By reference to the D&D board, they realise that she means another plane of existence, which Dustin likens to the Vale of Shadows, an evil reflection of the material plane in this world's version of Dungeons & Dragons, which actually sounds a lot like the Upside-Down as we have seen it. At Will's funeral they quiz the science teacher about alternate planes - props to the teacher for knowing exactly what the Vale of Shadows is - and receive the titular explanation: The acrobat can go forward or back along the rope, but the flea can climb onto the sides; or the Upside-Down. For a human to pass through would take a massive amount of power to generate a gate, and Dustin - who is on fire this episode - realises that there is a massive power spike of some kind messing with all of their compasses.

Glub.

As they attempt to track the distortion, however, El recalls her own first encounter with the Upside-Down. Placed in an isolation tank in order to better focus her powers on spying on a Russian, she was pursued by the creature. Frightened for her friends - and in particular Mike - she deflects the compass needles, which precipitates a fight with Lucas. She intervenes, hurling Lucas aside, which of course sparks anger from Mike and ends with Lucas storming off and El running away.

In the woods, Jonathan and Nancy find an injured deer. Neither can quite bear to put it out of its misery, but then it is dragged away. Nancy finds a mysterious and fleshy rift in a tree trunk, and when Jonathan doesn't hear her first call, goes in solo and headlong, finding herself in the Upside-Down and confronting the monster. This time, Jonathan hears her scream, but finds only her pack, missing the closing rift entirely. I can not imagine this is going to work out well for him. It's like Richard Marx' 'Hazard' all over again.

'The Flea and the Acrobat' has some brilliant moments, and moves the plot forward, but I admit I left feeling a little let down by Nancy's last-minute dive into stupidity. I know she wants to save her friend, but seriously... Ah well. The series is still a cut above average and, while boneheaded, it's a very eighties decision to have made. Overall, the eightiesness remains on point, with basically every aspect of the production spot on.

Moreover, despite a somewhat reduced role this episode, Hop and Joyce were a delight, with Hop's appearance at the door and insistence on unscrewing every Christmas light bulb to look for microphones a particular highlight.

Stranger Things - 'Chapter 4: The Body'

"I got a real positive feeling about this."

After the shock ending of Chapter 3, Mike lashes out at El for giving him false hope, but she responds by causing his walkie talkie to receive a cry for help from Will. He's still out there, he concludes, and assembles the kidvengers to share in the revelation. Lucas is of course skeptical still. Joyce (why was I calling her Nora last review?) believes the same thing as Mike. She calls the body fished from the water a 'thing' and refuses to believe that this is Will. Jonathan and Sheriff Hop both think that she's in serious denial, but they will both come to question their own certainty later on, as will Lucas.

In short, this is the episode where shit gets undeniably real.

Girls, apparently, are blonde in these boys' world.

Mike, Lucas and Dustin disguise El as a girl (once more, they essentially see her as alien just because she has short hair and is wearing Mike's clothes. Put a dress and a wig on her and they're like, dude!) to sneak into school and try to use the ham radio to boost her signal. Unfortunately they get caught and pushed to attend Will's memorial service. Here, Mike sees the standard issue bullies laughing and calls them out. They homophobe for a bit and Mike shoves one of them. When the bully comes back at him, El paralyses him and makes him wet himself, and maybe it's just me, but nose bleed notwithstanding she seems a little too into it. Kids are vicious, yo.

Nancy tries to report the faceless figure she saw at Steve's house, causing a bust-up with Steve, who is much more worried that he'll be found out for having a party with beer and sex than that Barb is missing. The police seem convinced that Barb just ran away, hinting that it was out of jealousy after Nancy slept with Steve, which in turn leads to a bust up between Nancy and her mother. Feeling isolated, Nancy notices a distortion on the photo of Barb and approaches Jonathan to enlarge it. He's a bit distracted, until she mentions the lack of a face, a detail Joyce also described. He enlarges the shot and sure enough, a faceless figure is watching Barb. Could his mother be right about Will? And what does that mean for Barb?

"All work and no play makes Joyce something something."

Joyce meanwhile cranks up the Clash and tries to make contact with Will. This time he is able to speak to her directly, Nora peeling back the wallpaper to reveal a weird membrane, through which Will calls to her while the boys hear the conversation over the ham radio, which pretty much puts the mockers on Lucas's doubts. Something approaches and Joyce tells Will to hide; she will find him. Then she gets all Shining on the wall, but merely bursts through to the outside while the ham radio ignites.

Back at Hawkins Lab, a volunteer is sent through a similar membrane and killed by a monster. Science is a harsh mistress.

Hop hits the bar, but it turns out he's quizzing a state trooper about why Will was found by state troopers on non-State run land, brought in under heavy guard and investigated by a state coroner. The trooper admits he was tipped off, but warns Hop he'll get them both killed. Hop heads back to the morgue and knocks out another trooper. He cuts open the body and finds... flock. The body is a fake, so Hop heads for the Lab and a possibly ill-advised break-in.

Stranger Things continues to be a powerful blend of smart sci-fi thriller and eyes-open love letter to a past age. I'm really starting to worry that Mike and El are going to end up as an underage, telekinetic Bonny and Clyde given their shared rage and delight in anti-bully vigilantism. I'm also concerned that Hop's good traits - intelligence, observation and deduction - will be overwhelmed by his reckless need to atone and we'll be bidding him a farewell sooner rather than later. On the upside, Joyce and Nancy both take a step for the proactive this week. I'm particularly intrigued by Nancy's attitude to Jonathan. He's clearly embarrassed about the photo of her - and he should be - but she seems genuinely to accept it as a mistake and to consider him awkward more than he is creepy. It's not something you would have seen a lot of in the actual eighties, where girls tended to be judgmental and guys needed to prove themselves in one way or another.

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.

Stranger Things - 'Chapter Two: The Weirdo on Maple Street'

Being nice to the odd kid in class is one of those things that could go either
way in the eighties.

Things take a turn for the even more sinister in episode two of masterful eighties period piece, Stranger Things.

The boys bring Eleven into Mike's basement, with the plan that she will rock up to the door in the morning and Mom will sort everything out. It becomes apparent, however, that she is not comfortable with this, or with confinement, although to the boys' utter consternation she clearly has no problems with nudity, almost changing in front of them until directed to the bathroom. Mike apparently gets her, giving her the 'real world' tour in much the same way as Elliot in E.T., although it's not clear how much this is him understanding her removal from societal norms and how much is him acting out a role.

He dubs her El (for short) and when she recognises Will becomes convinced she knows something about what happened to him. She tries to explain this using the D&D board to indicate the presence of something monstrous pursuing Will; not on the grid, but on the other side of the board. Is Will even alive? Perhaps. After all, his brother Jonathan reminds the Sheriff, 'he's good at hiding.'

D&D: Gateway occultism.

Sheriff Hopper - who did have a thing with Nora once, and who despite his skepticism continues to display the qualities of an excellent copper - isn't convinced that the heavy-breathing call was from Will. It's far more likely to be some douchebag who things spoofing the bereaved is a right laugh. Will's mother gets a new phone, but receives another sinister call, then one of Will's favourite songs - The Clash's 'Should I Stay or Should I Go' - plays from his room when no-one is in.

Government agents poke around and lights flicker and something seems to lurk in the corners like a Hound of Tindallos. El rejects the call for her to turn herself in with a firm 'no' and a burst of telekinesis, and Nancy gets laid.

Yeah, there's this whole thing where Nancy agrees to go to a party at her boyfriend's house, and she dismisses her sensible friend. Jonathan, somewhere between a teenage sage - advising Will 'you shouldn't like something because people tell you to' - and a creeper - taking photos of the party from afar, shies from actually shooting the object of his affection having sex, instead taking a melancholy snap of sensible Barb sitting by the pool, then leaving mere moments before Barb is snatched by something. To be honest, the bulk of this subplot is not very interesting.

Doors are important in Stranger Things, and not just physical doors. Doors bar the way, and doors let things in. El hates confinement, and we see that she was locked in a cell by her Papa, not so long ago. Plans involve doors - sneaking through doors, knocking on doors; Jonathan and Will's father slamming the door on Jonathan, not wanting to be involved - and there are apparently doors that are not even doors. 'Chapter Two' also loves it some windows, which repeatedly allow characters to view a scene they are not party to, with Jonathan's camera acting as an ersatz window, insulating him from the party even when the partygoers are outside. The dichotomy of access and exclusion is redolent in the series.

It also strike me that Stranger Things is also part of the quite recent move of the eighties setting to the realm of full-blown 'period,' worthy of the same level of exacting recreation as the Regency or the Old West.

Stranger Things - Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers

My three year old daughter took one look at this promo image on Netflix (en route to PAW Patrol, naturally,) and said: "Someone lost a bike." Clearly the image communicates its message.

In small town America a boy goes missing after a D&D game. Reluctant at first, the Sheriff begins to share the concerns of the boy's mother, launching a major search, which the boy's friends join on the sly. A lost girl with uncanny abilities appears in town, pursued by sinister agents who will kill to retrieve her.

Welcome to Stranger Things, a Netflix original love story to 1980s science fiction.

I'd like to see the casting calls for this series: "Will Byers, a nine year old boy
who looks like he was raised on CRT television and pizza to a soundtrack of
unironic Michael Jackson."

The main thing you notice about the series is just how goddamned 80s everything is, from the clothes to the music (I'm pretty sure one of the producers rang John Carpenter's doorbell while another nipped in the back window and stole a load of demo tapes) to the faces. I mean, seriously; how do you cast 80s looking faces? And yet... I guess those kids have always been there, they just haven't been on TV for twenty-five years. It even somehow affects to treat D&D like some mysterious new thing that no-one knows  much about except that it was in E.T.

As in Spielberg's seminal tear-jerker, at the centre of the series - or at least at the cnetre of episode 1 - are the kids: Eternal outcast nerds Mike, Lucas, Dustin and the soon absent Will, and the enigmatic and powerful Eleven, who seems to be connected to the local super secret science lab where a dark, looming presence that kill scientists and makes lightbulbs flicker may have hatched from a thing. It's the 80s, so the boys act with a freedom undreamed of in this endarkened age, despite the acres of lonely forest surrounding the town of Hawkins and the darkness that descends from about 4.30 and enfolds the town in the kind of night that falls and really means it.

"Joyce Byers, a single mother with hella 80s hair."

There are grown ups and teenagers, but they're less important so far: Will's mother drives the search for her son, but has no existence beyond that yet; Mike's parents, his sister and her horny boyfriend are just around, the latter two most making out in her room and listening to 'Now That's What I Call a 1980s Soundtrack Album*'; Sheriff Hopper is a bit more rounded, a lost soul mired in drink, but under it all a good, solid copper; the government agents are ruthless and sinister; and the guy at the diner is a decent soul until he's shot in the head. So it goes.

Stranger Things is intensely familiar and retro, which somehow manages to be new and interesting. There are shades perhaps of Super 8, but it's a slightly later period and leans a little more towards horror than SF, despite many trappings of the latter genre. 'Chapter 1: The Vanishing of Will Byers' is very much a foundation, but hints at good things to come with its sparse, practical effects and deft recreation of the visual and auditory language of 1980s cinema.

* If I were an 80s nerd or hunting for the Easter Egg in Ready Player One I'd probably be using this scene to date the series exactly.