If that sounded a bit scatter-brained that’s only because that describes the last two episodes perfectly, still, they’ve scattered an entertaining series of clues for us to be engaged by along with some teen relationship drama. Let’s see how things continue…
Chapter 3: The Case of the Missing Lifeguard
El and Max are hanging out at the Hopper shack, talking about the Kid who plays the Karate Kid. Girl talk and all that, Max reassures her that Mike will come back to her, begging for forgiveness. Max makes a remark about wanting to see their stupid faces and El has an idea to do just that using her powers.
What she sees is Mike eating himself to sleep and wallowing self-pity, Lucas giving a talk about the female ‘species’ acting on emotion and not logic and then it just goes to gross-out. El takes off her blindfold and bursts out laughing, glad one of us found that funny. Hopper bursts in, clearly drunk and bursts in on El and Max, they’ve agreed to a sleepover and Hopper is OK with this, more than OK, he smiles as soon as he closes the door.
They play a game of spin the bottle with El using her powers to see the people it lands on. It lands on Billy and El takes a look, seeing his idle car with the shattered windscreen, but no Billy inside, just a whimpering girl, she’s basically seeing a distorted version of what happened at the end of the last episode. And so pieces start to connect, roll credits.
Will is still trying to convince his friends to play D+D, getting into costume and playing music to wake the others up. Hopper takes his shower and pills, probably nursing another huge headache, which isn’t helped the moment Joyce arrived. Apparently after seeing Billy, they decided to tell Hopper they moved the sleepover to Max’s house. Anyway, Joyce explains about the weird magnetism issue but Hopper isn’t really listening until she suggests it’s something to do with the lab, even going as far to take a torch and bolt cutters to try and break in.
Max and El break into Billy’s house, finding a bath full of ice, blood on a cabinet, and a whistle coated in blood.
Jonathan and Nancy are developing photos with Nancy convinced this story is good enough for her to be taken seriously, poor naïve fool. But Nancy has an interesting case as many other farms have reported things doing missing, pesticides, cleaning supplies, diesel, unfortunately the evidence leading it to the rats being responsible is tentative at best and most of the men mock her for it.
We cut to Scoops ahoy as Robin is listening to Russian and ignoring all the customers. Steve and Dustin are busy staking out the mall for any potential Russian agents. Steve laments his romantic failings and Dustin points out that Robin is a good fit for him. She’s apparently not his type, and he’s not her type, either but more on that later.
At the Wheeler house, the game is underway but only Will seems even remotely invested in it. Soon Will sees the message and storms off, Mike heads after him, trying to persuade him not to cycle home in the storm outside, but in their blowout, Mike hits Will with some hard truths and his attempts to stop him fails.
El found another lifeguard’s first aid kit and she and Max arrive at the pool, it belongs to Heather, the lifeguard Billy had killed. On the board is a photo of the lifeguards, and El nicks it so she can find her. With the showers imitating radio static, she enters the void. A red door shows itself, she opens it and inside there’s a bathtub, filled with Ice like the one at Billy’s house. Heather shows herself briefly, calling for help before being dragged down. The bath disappears but we can still see heather being dragged down, below where El can reach for her.
Joyce and Hopper arrive at the lab and find its still in a state of disrepair following the events of the last season. Joyce however still sees Bob being torn apart. A camera is activated as they look around.
Dustin finds someone he thinks is suspicious and follows him, not very discreetly either. But it turns out he’s just a yoga instructor and his duffel-bag. Robin is still mulling over the code and gets a delivery, she notices the deliverer is Lynx deliveries, something she relates to a line from the code about a silver cat. Heading out into the mall, she cracks the rest of the code. A trip to china relating to a Chinese restaurant, light footedness relating to a shoe store, and blue meeting yellow being the colours of the clock hands.
Inspired by a prank from the news-writers, Nancy decides to pay the rat another visit, and have animal control look it over, since it didn’t look well and might provide some answers.
Joyce and Hopper continue to inspect the lab, with Joyce having more flashbacks to her traumas in the lab, this time relating to Will. Hopper says that he’s been trying to keep things as safe as he could, especially since he finds out Joyce is planning to move. Something which she hasn’t told any of the others yet, which is a terrible idea. They hear a clanging and Hopper goes to investigate, priming his gun for action.
Mike and Lucas rode after Will but find he’s not at home, he’s at Castle Byers in the middle of a thunderstorm. Will…
He’s remembering better times, if only those just before things went to sh*t back in season 1. Then the whole Ghostbusters thing in season 2 before things went to sh*t that day too. He begins tearing up his old memories before taking a bat to Castle Byers and tearing it down, and omg, is there an actual fire in there?
Nancy and Jonathan arrive at Mrs Driscoll’s house. She doesn’t answer the door, so they enter in case she fell. The two begin looking around, not finding her. They head into the basement, finding more savaged fertiliser and a lot of monstrous squeaking noises. They find Mrs Driscoll eating the fertiliser.
The group begin staking out a Lynx delivery, but they miss a crucial moment and almost get caught when Steve tries to take the binoculars off Dustin. The area has a couple of armed guards who are definitely speaking Russian.
Hopper continues his search for whatever’s making the noises in the lab. He finds a door opened and is soon attacked by our faux terminator. Joyce finds him unconscious faux terminator rides away.
Max and El head to Heather’s house, and break in. Lot of that going on today, they find Billy with Heather’s parents having dinner together. Heather comes in with a warm plate of cookies and Billy explains that Heather wasn’t very well, so took the day off. And yes, I said Heather was killed earlier, more on that later. They leave and as Billy watches, he sees what El is capable of, as she sees her close the breach, it awakens the Mind Flayer inside him and Will begins to feel it again as Mike and Lucas catch up with him.
Back at the house, it seems Billy managed to drug the drink of Heather’s father, causing her to collapse and he and Heather knock out her father as well.
Another pretty scatter-brained episode but the individual aspects are all interesting and entertaining in their own rights so it remains compelling
Rating 8/10
The Sauna Test
El is brushing her teeth and getting flashbacks to everything that happened in the last episode. She and Max discuss how thing seemed a bit off, but Max more or less brushes it off. El gets introduced to Wonder Woman. Doris is taken to hospital, but she’s screaming, saying she has to go back. Heather’s parents wake up in the steelworks, tied up, they try and bring Heather around but it’s no use as they become the latest victims of the mind flayling.
At the Hopper shack, Joyce is seeing to Hopper’s injuries, despite everything he insists he’s fine and is soon getting beer from the fridge, Joyce got a partial plate on the thug, hoping to get answers like who he is, why he’s there, why he’s skulking around, how he knew they were there, etc. The one good thing is that it not being a car, it might be easier to track.
Lucas tries to radio Max but she turns off the radio, Mike then calls on the phone, telling her it’s urgent and to come to his house now. They’re not having much luck with Dustin, who’s busy working out what they’re up to at the mall, there’s a secret area but the only guy with a keycard is heavily armed. Dustin and Steve debate whether Steve should try sneaking up on him, but Robin has a better idea, taking the money from their tip jar to enact her master plan.
Nancy and Jonathan are read the riot act by their boss. The woman they were talking to is apparently a paranoid schizophrenic and their actions are being part blamed for the whole situation, and her family are threatening litigation against the paper. They are fired.
Max and El arrive at Mike’s house and Will begins explaining the whole situation of him feeling that the Mind Flayer is back. Will then theorises that when they closed the gate, the bit of the Flayer that attached itself to Will never actually left Hawkins and is still about, likely having bonded with a new host.
Hopper played Mayor Kline a visit, thanks to Joyce he realised the guy that attacked him was the same guy who was at the Mayor’s office back in episode 2. Kline tries to bullshit but Hopper is having none of it. He tries psychological threats with various scandals that would likely further cloud the Mayor’s reputation but Kline responds with similar threats against Hopper and his ‘professional conduct’
Hopper elects for the more physical approach, with Joyce stopping his secretary calling the police. Kline confesses that he works for Starcourt mall and he was involved in getting people to sell up land for it. The land deals have records and Kline ‘agrees’ to show them. Nancy’s ranting on the journey home and Jonathan has had enough.
Robin’s master plan was getting the blueprints for the mall, turns out their secret room still has air vents which by co-incidence are big enough for humans to squeeze through, well very small ones anyway. Dustin, despite his several missing bones won’t fit, but Erica, our annoying sister to Lucas, she just might.
The suspect Billy to be the Mind Flayer’s host and Mike has a plan to find out for sure, lure him into the sauna somehow.
Meanwhile, Erica wants to know what’s in it for her if she goes through the air vents, apparently enough ice cream to make you sick, you could just offer her free ice cream for any given period of time, right? She still considers it child endangerment, and wants free ice cream for life.
Larry leads Joyce and Hopper to where he keeps his records, at this house, he claims its for his protection as these guys don’t mess around. Joyce remembers that these sites are all centred around the power plant, theorising that the machine they hypothesised is drawing power from the plant and is located on one of these sites. Kline tries to jump out a window, I don’t know if it was escape or suicide but Hopper manages to stop him.
Nancy gets console with her mother, admitting that part of it was an obsessive need to be proven right, consequences be damned. It’s a fantastic little moment and Nancy’s encouraged to finish it on her own and sell it to a bigger paper and humiliate them that way.
Back with the kids, they’re busy setting up their trap and it leads to a couple of awkward moments, the first between Lucas and Will, regarding the campaign and the other between Mike and El, regarding that whole situation, Mike brings up the whole Hopper thing but El is still annoyed about the whole ‘girls are a different species’ bit.
Night falls and Erica begins her Breaking and Entering. Kline’s girlfriend arrives, finding him handcuffed, and asks to make a call. Hopper and Joyce begin scoping out the farm sites, without much luck as Erica successfully completes her part of the mission. The pool is closed, and Billy finds himself locked in as the plan commences without a hitch.
Nancy arrives at the hospital with some flowers, and has to lie about her relation to her to get past the receptionist. She begins looking through the file. Steve finds a vial of green something but when they try and leave, they discover the whole room is an elevator. Nancy begins taking notes as the old lady’s heart rate goes off the charts.
As the sauna hits 220 Billy is down on the floor, telling Max that it isn’t his fault and ‘he’ made him do it. Will can feel that the Mind Flayer is activated and it was all a distraction as there’s a convenient broken tile that Billy uses to break the sauna window, Lucas briefly knocks him back down again, and the lights flash as the Mind Flayer is almost ejected. We see a similar effect is happening on Mrs Driscoll at the hospital.
Billy eventually escapes, El tries to stop him but the mind flayer overpowers her. Chocking her and almost knocking her out, Mike saves El but it soon becomes the other way around. El throws him through the wall and he skulks off. It’s revealed now that the Mind Flayer has in fact infected dozens of people and likely also Mrs Driscoll.
It’s another sinister turn, with a battleground being set up on two different fronts.
Rating 8/10
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