Chapter 5 – The Flayed
The elevator descends at stupid speed, unfortunately they can’t get the elevator doors to open again without a key-card, they exit through the roof hatch and find they’ve come down quite a long way. Hopper pays a visit to the latest site, there are at least signs of people being home. Hey, don’t you two both have young children that are supposed to be at home, not exactly responsible parents, are you?
There’s a lot of noise and Joyce can hear that it’s coming from below. They find a secret passage under the bed, unfortunately for them, our Terminator knockoff is right behind them. They enter and find 2 lab guys, including the one from the opening, but there’s a language barrier as Hopper becomes every ignorant tourist ever.
The hear discount terminator arrive and Hopper manages to get the drop on him. Unfortunately, discount terminator is good and counters, disarming him. Joyce gets the gun but fails to pass it to Hopper, they decide to run, kidnapping one of the scientists. They make it out, with knockoff terminator giving chase. Roll credits.
Jonathan wakes up to the phone ringing but it being 5:48 in the morning, he isn’t really willing to listen. But the phone keeps ringing, Nancy has pieced some of it together, and believes it may have something to do with upside down and wants to talk to Will, not sure where he stayed that night but it wasn’t at home.
Joyce is having a bit more luck communicating with the scientist but it’s slow-going. Seriously, you two both have children. Apparently his name’s Alexei, so Joyce got something out of him. The car’s gone a bit to crap and when Joyce tries to test Hopper’s fix, Alexei can see something’s wrong and tells them to stop, much to Hopper’s ire. The car explodes.
Hopper hopes to take Alexi to Illinois to an acquaintance who speaks Russian, but they need transportation. El is trying to locate them through the Upside Down, hearing their plans for Illinois. They suspect this all can’t be co-incidental. Nancy and Jonathan arrive soon after
Back with the trapped team, they’ve spent all night trying to figure out ways to get out, and Erica’s considering drinking the Green Liquid, yeah, I can only imagine how bad that would be. Some guys open the elevator from the other side, the guys narrowly avoid detection and use the green vial to prop the door open long enough for them to get out, apparently that contained had a very strong acid in as when the door eventually breaks the canister, it begins eating through the floor.
Nancy and Jonathan catch up with the others and their new hypothesis is there are a lot of people being ‘flayed’ given the connection to the Lifeguards, Nancy has a potential next victim, Tom, head of their newspaper and father of Heather. Meanwhile discount Terminator has arrived at the exploded car, and sees footprints. Alexei starts to run but is really only pointing out a nearby gas station. Yeah, taking a guy in handcuffs into a space is probably not the best idea, even for a police officer.
Hopper sees a car outside and decides to commandeer it. Joyce, finally doing something sensible decides to check in on Will, who she assumes is with Mike. They drive off, leaving a screwed rich guy named Todd who’s never seeing his car again. The trio head down a long corridor, and theorise the mall is in fact a cover to transport the green fluid in, when Robyn questions why they’d set up in Hawkins, Dustin and Steve both assume the worst.
They don’t answer the doorbell so El breaks in, and they find they’ve been feasting on cleaning and refrigeration chemicals, they also find the bottle and blood from Heather hit him on the back of the head. They deduce there must be a source for all this, and finding that would help stop the spread, or whatever the Mind Flayer is making with the chemicals, the only way they can do so is by freeing Mrs Driscoll from the hospital.
Meanwhile Discount Terminator arrives at the gas station, finding Todd talking to the police, the guy from the store, Ricky is interrogated by our knockoff. Turns out Hopper’s friend is our favourite journalist Murray. In who happens to speak perfect Russian. Funny how Joyce is the one who speaks the most sense here, it’s amazing how far we’ve come.
Meanwhile, Team Scoops have found
an area crawling with guards and people. Erica thinks she spotted the coms
room, and the group begins sneaking towards it. They enter but seem to be
blissfully ignorant to the idea that someone might be inside until they all
spot him. Robin distracts him by talking what little Russian she knows until
Steve manages to win a fight and knock him out.
Dustin steals a key card as Robin sees something up there, they all take a look and see the machine using the green acid from earlier as a stabiliser or lubricant or something, anyway, it’s firing a laser at the wall and creating a portal to the upside down.
Team Nancy arrive at the hospital but only Nancy and Jonathan get to see Mrs Driscoll, both apologise for their outbursts the day before. El uses her powers to help Mike get a stuck KitKat and Lucas says that’s her offering an olive branch for their relationship. Unfortunately, Mrs Driscoll is already gone, Tom had already gotten to them and this was all a trap. At least one of the assholes from the newspaper has been flayed. One one hand, Olive branch accepted with M&Ms on the other, dead doctors and patients in the hospital.
Nancy and Jonathan head into a wing having work done for it. It means they’re entirely alone being pursued by the Flayed newspaper staff. Jonathan is knocked down and the two are split up. Tom nearly finishes him off, but thanks to Nancy and their hive connection, he’s stunned long enough for Jonathan to stick a pair of scissors in his throat.
Knocked out, the Mind Flayer turns them to goop as it did with the rat. They begin slithering way with Nancy and Jonathan following them, they goops join together to form another horrifying CG monster.
Things are starting to come together as we’re down to 3 plotlines from the half dozen in episode 2.
Rating 8/10
I mean most episodes this past 3 seasons have had easy titles, but then they go and hit you with...
Chapter 6: E Pluribus Unum
I guess my American readers, all 2 of them may understand this better than because it’s apparently a motto or something. Never heard it before in my life.
We open back at the Russian Lab, Steve and Dustin are both rightfully concerned and the others rightfully confused, but all that’s put on hold as they coms guy they knocked out earlier has come to and sounded the alarm. They run straight at the machine with guards on their tail, saying sh*t the entire way.
Steve and Robin hold the door, allowing Erica and Dustin to escape but in the process get captured by the guards. Back at the hospital Will senses that the Mind Flayer us about and the lighting is ready to give everyone seizures as the creature gives Chase to Nancy. Jonathan, still weak from his injuries gives chase. Nancy locks herself in a room but of course the monster is made of goo so easily slips in.
Jonathan finds her and tries to break the door down but it only successful when El arrives. El is becoming a bit of dues ex-machina for all these attacks, I wonder if they’re about to go the direction they are. She pushes the monster out the window, saving Nancy but it ultimately escapes down the drain so they can’t follow.
It’s absorbed into the Flayer, back at the steelworks and Billy believes it’s time. Roll Credits.
It’s the date of Mayor Kline’s fair. Klein is there, hiding his injuries with the use of sunglasses but discount terminator wants a word with him. Hopper is now a fugitive and everyone’s on the look out for him, he also suggests discount terminator bring backup with him. The guy’s a glutton for punishment, isn’t he?
DT says that Kline is his problem and gives him 1 day to find him. Back in Illanois, Hopper has got some Burger King in an attempt to try and bribe Alexei, when he get a strawberry slushie instead of the Cherry he asks for, Hopper loses his temper. It’s not easy to watch in the light of everything that’s come forth lately. This is the second time he’s beaten someone up.
Hopper tosses him out with the keys to his handcuffs. And I’ll admit, Hopper is starting to think smart. Hopper roughing him up accomplishes nothing, but given that he’s stuck with them this long, he’s clearly scared of the people who hired him, in particular DT. So, he could leave and be entirely alone, hunted by the police and DT or he could stay with some level of protection and give them what they need.
And of course Hopper is absolutely right, Alexei stops short of leaving and agrees to talk. Dustin and Erica are progressing through vents but incredibly slowly because of the fans they have to stop, Erica is apparently very good with numbers, making her officially a nerd in Dustin’s book, and Dustin is officially a Brony so… there’s that too. Dustin also used this time to catch her up on the whole upside-down situation. She believes everything except that Lucas was a part of it. Figures
Meanwhile, the Russians are torturing Steve, believing he was a spy for an enemy agency. Steve keeps talking, directing attention away from Dustin and Erica. He’s knocked out and he and Robin are locked in a room together and tied together. Robin is equally as defiant, spitting in the face of the Russian soldier interrogating them.
El is in the upside down, searching for Heather or any of her family. It’s leads to a massive argument over whether El people should be pushing this hard, with both sides making interesting points. El’s powers do not yet have a defined upper limit, and El is the only one who can concisely say that she’s hit said limit, she is capable of independent thought and we should not knock her for that., that being said, when people are determined to do something, they may start pushing well past their limits in order to achieve those goals and put themselves at risk in the process, sometimes it helps to have someone who cares about you holding you back. But again, there are also times where the risk is too great to hold back, and this is quite a dire situation.
All discussion is rendered moot anyway as El has in fact found ‘him.’ Back with Hopper’s crew, Alexei tells them everything and despite some questionable metaphors he gets his message across, at this point however, we’ve already seen what they’re up to so it’s not new information for us. Alexei says he can turn it off, but will not be able to do alone as he’s considered compromised. Hopper promises to get him there but Alexei just laughs given the level of their security, he says breaking in is impossible, now back to the children who broke in earlier.
They’ve found themselves in a room filled with the acid containers they found earlier. Erica finds a taser stick and tries to convince Dustin to mount a rescue but the Russians have guns and they’re outnumbered 2 to… a lot, Dustin tells her their best option is to get help. Steve comes around and Robin begins to devise an escape plan but it ends in total failure.
Robin recounts how she was kinda obsessed with Steve during school, even sitting behind him at class and apparently at lunch too. It’s a nice bonding moment between them, further fuelling hints of a romantic connection. The soldiers enter with a doctor with truth serum which is injected into him.
El, despite having found him in the last episode, goes in again, tracking Billy’s movements. She goes to the kitchen to get some water and has a flashback of her mother after seeing Lucky Charms. She thinks she may be able to see where Billy has been and find the source of the Mind Flayer. Mike reminds her that the last time the person she did this too was more willing but El asks him to trust her and he does.
Billy grabs her and whilst she manages to get free, she falls backwards into his memories, it takes a while for her to adjust to that. Billy asks for some time surfing and his mother agrees, she explores further, believing she’s found the source, visualised as a dark oncoming storm in the memory. Hopper calls in a favour with the government, but in the process compromises Murray, so he’s mad and will have to move.
Joyce isn’t happy with the slow-nature of this and calls again to convey that to the other line. I kinda see Hopper’s point since he presumably realises that his ‘talk’ with the Mayor will have had repercussions by now. It seems they’ve both been injected with the truth drug, and it’s time for now to begin torture.
Before too much can be revealed, an alarm is sounded, a plan was formed, Dustin and Erica used the acid to divert attention and lower the guard on Steve and Robin so they can rescue them. The storm contains some of Billy’s worst memories. His abusive father berating him and beating his mother, his mother running and leaving him with his father. His own aggressive tendencies, being introduced to Max, she eventually arrives at the steelworks. Thanks to the yellow-pages they find the location, it takes a good while for El to supposedly escape, but finds herself alone, turns out she’s still there and Billy tells that whilst she was looking in his mind, they found her as well. The flayed all begin converging on the steelworks. Billy reveals the whole purpose of the monster they were creating is to end El.
All the flayed turn to goo and the mind Flayer absorbs them, becoming a giant monster, the Mind Flayer is in the real world.
This is an intense episode with a pretty sophisticated climax being set up.
Rating 8/10
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