Stranger Things – Chapter 8: The Upside Down

By starrymag | August 29, 2016

By: Kathryn Trammell

 

Joyce and Hopper

 

Chapter Eight opens inside the Hawkins Lab where both Joyce (Winona Ryder) and Hopper (David Harbour) have been taken in for questioning after they were caught trespassing. Hopper is able to negotiate for his and Joyce’s freedom by giving the Men in Suits an offer they can’t refuse – Eleven’s location in exchange for access to the gate into the Upside Down, which Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine) and his team agree to. The team helps Hopper and Joyce get suited up, but once they are through the portal the Men in Suits get back into their vans and head to the high school to recapture Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown).

 

Inside the Upside Down, Hopper and Joyce make their way into the forest where they begin to look for Will’s fort. Joyce finds “Castle Byers,” but it is ruins after being blown apart by the monster at the end of Chapter Seven. She begins to scream for Will (Noah Schnapp) while Hopper investigates what looks like a yellow monster egg lying on the ground near the fort. Seeing that Will is obviously gone from the area, Joyce and Hopper decide the next best place to search for him is inside her house where things get much, much stranger.

 

Inside the house, Joyce and Hopper notice blood on the floor and surmise that it indicates the monster has been wounded. Again, finding no sign of Will, they decide to leave. Just before Joyce walks out her front door, she hears the soft echo of Jonathan’s voice say, “Mom, is that you?” She turns and stares into her decaying Upside Down house and says back to the voice, “Jonathan?” When no further response comes her way, Joyce leaves her house and heads with Hopper towards downtown Hawkins.

 

As the two walk up the city’s main street, they come across the City Library, which is especially decorated in Upside Down swampiness. Knowing this to signify their need for further investigation, they go inside where they find hall after hall filled with decomposing bodies, thus making the library the official feeding ground of the Hawkins monster. Joyce flashes her light along the wall and her beam falls upon Will who is encased in a cocoon of sludge. A slimy appendage of some kind is also attached like a grotesque umbilical chord to his mouth. In a scene straight from “X-Files: Fight the Future,” Hopper pulls the appendage from Will’s throat and flings it to the ground unloading a couple of rounds for good measure into the tentacle as it wriggles and dies. But its removal doesn’t help Will to breath again, causing Hopper to beat on Will’s chest when CPR just doesn’t cut it. The chest pounding works because seconds later Will gasps, sputters, and lives. Joyce takes him in her arms and tells him he’s coming home with her.

 

Nancy, Jonathan and Steve

 

After learning in the previous episode that Barb (Shannon Purser) is dead, Nancy’s (Natalia Dyer) desire to finish what she and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) started grows and she tells him that more than ever she wants to kill the monster. They go back to Joyce’s house, where Stranger Things becomes a demented version of Home Alone complete with enough booby-traps and weapons that could easily dispatch any beast or bandit. Their plan, if it succeeds, is to lure the monster into the hall where Jonathan and Nancy have set a bear trap. Once caught in the trap, they plan to throw a flame onto the ground below the trap where they’ve doused the carpet in lighter fluid. This, they assume, will surely do put an end to the monster. All they need now is to cut their hands wide open so the monster can sense their blood in the air.

 

As they wait for the monster to appear, Nancy wraps Jonathan’s hand while he tells her about the lights and how they will flicker when the monster is about to arrive. Their conversation is interrupted by a knock on the door and it turns out to be Steve (John Keery) who has come to Jonathan’s house to ask for his forgiveness. What Steve doesn’t expect is for Nancy to answer the door and when he sees that her hand is wounded, he pushes past her and into the house to accuse Jonathan of hurting her. Neither she nor Jonathan have time for Steve’s jealousy – what with monster hunting afoot – so Nancy does the only things she can to give Steve the hint that he is not safe or welcome inside Jonathan’s home: she cocks and aims a gun at his face. She is too late though because the lights above her head begin to flicker announcing the monster’s arrival. Confused and still raging, Steve watches as Jonathan picks up a nail-studded bat and Nancy aims her gun into the air, both of them anticipate something Steve isn’t prepared to see. But see it he does, the monster crawling through the ceiling and onto the ground in front of the three kids who run down the hallway and towards Will’s room jumping over the bear trap on their way.

 

Inside Will’s room, Steve screams at Jonathan and Nancy to explain to him what he’s just seen. They are too busy concentrating on the yo-yo they’ve attached to the bear trap in the hallway the way a fisherman watches a bobber attached to a hook. The yo-yo never moves and the lights stop flickering so Jonathan, Nancy and Steve go back into the hallway to investigate and come to the conclusion that the monster has gone for now. Steve takes the opportunity to try to call the cops, but Nancy takes the phone from his hands and throws it onto the floor. She tells him that the monster is going to come back, which means he needs to leave, but as Steve runs outside and opens the door of his car preparing to flee, he notices the lights inside the house flicker again and decides to stop running.

 

Inside the house, the lights go out making it impossible for Jonathan to notice the monster when it materializes behind him. It attacks him pinning, Jonathan to the ground where it postures to eat him. Nancy unloads every round from her gun into the beast, but it seems to only annoy the monster who turns its attention away from Jonathan to go after Nancy. Out of nowhere, the nail-studded bat slams into the monster’s chest where Steve has taken aim, shocking both Nancy and Jonathan who thought Steve had left them. Steve swings again and again until he backs the monster down the hall and into the trap where Jonathan tosses a lighter near its feet. They watch as the monster ignites, burns and then disappears into the ground leaving only traces of singeing tissue on the trap behind it.

 

The lights in the hallway above their heads flicker and glow in a trail that lead first into Will’s room and then back towards the front door. Nancy and Steve think it may be the monster, but Jonathan thinks otherwise. With tears in his eyes, he stares at the lights above his head and asks, “Mom, is that you?” He then follows the lights outside into the driveway where the streetlamps begin to flicker as well.

 

Eleven, Mike, Lucas, and Dustin

 

The boys sit with Eleven inside the gym guarding her while she rests, her energy still depleted after making contact with Will inside her mind. Mike (Finn Wolfhard) becomes restless though and goes outside into the school’s parking lot to look for Nancy and Jonathan, but they are gone. He goes back into the gym to tell everyone that he can’t find Jonathan or Nancy and asks if anyone saw them leave. Eleven says she did and when he asks her where they went, she says to him “Demagorgon.” Mike wants to go look for them, but Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) remind him that the most important thing to do is to keep Eleven hidden and safe. They also need to restore her energy so Dustin and Lucas head to a teacher’s classroom in search of chocolate pudding Snack Packs, claiming they know the teacher is infamous for hoarding the delicacy away from her students. Mike and Eleven follow them and sit down at a table inside the room. He tells her that after Will is found and Hopper brings the Bad Men to justice that he won’t have to keep her hidden anymore from his mom. She’ll be able to live with him, get her own bedroom inside his house and eat dinner at the dinner table as a member of the family. Eleven understands this to mean that she will be like a sister to him, but Mike is quick to dispute this presumptive title to their future relationship. Unable to explain why he opposes thinking of El as his sister, he prefers instead to show her by giving El a kiss.

 

The moment the kiss ends, Mike hears the sound of a car pull into the parking lot outside. He runs towards the sound thinking it to be Nancy, but it isn’t. It is instead a hoard of cars carrying men from the lab, their tip about from Hopper about Eleven’s location proving to be accurate. Mike runs back into the school to warn the others and they flee into the hall in search of a place to hide. They become cornered inside the hall when a group of men approach their flank and the woman who killed Benny leading her own group of men walks down the hall in front of them. She stops and aims her gun at Eleven, but Eleven has no reason to cower from her. She looks the woman straight in the eyes, bows her head in her trademark stare and glares at the women until her eyes and the eyes of the Bad Men around her hemorrhage with blood. Blood also pours from Eleven’s nose and the lights inside the hallway flicker just before every Bad Man and Woman drops dead to the ground. Eleven drops to the ground to, and this time, Mike cannot wake her.

 

He and the other boys are pulled away from her by another group of Bad Men that arrive inside the hall. They are lead by Dr. Brenner, who takes Eleven in his arms and tries to wake her with promises that he can make her better again. But she doesn’t trust him this time. She only trusts Mike and it’s him who she calls out for when she regains enough energy to speak. Suddenly, the lights begin to flicker again. Mike looks down at ground at the mess Eleven made when she squeezed the heads of their attackers and says the word “blood” knowing the monster has been drawn their location because of it. Almost immediately a wall inside the hall begins to crumble, the bricks falling loose under the pounding of the monster’s fist as it breaks its way into the real world attacking the Bad Men who try to fight it with a hail of bullets. The gunfire does nothing to slow down the monster who attacks everyone, including Dr. Brenner.

 

With the monster preoccupied and Dr. Brenner dead, Dustin scoops Eleven into his arms and rushes her, with the other boys, down the hall and into a classroom where he lays her on a table. Mike takes her hands and tells her again how everything is going to get better now that the Bad Man is gone. He even says they can go to his school’s winter dance together. It’s a pretty picture he paints for her and she makes him promise that it will come true.

 

Outside the classroom the screams from the monster come to an end and the gunfire ceases as well. Dustin barely has enough time to ask his friends, “Is it dead?” before the monster bursts through the classroom door and charges at them. Lucas tries with all his might to annihilate the monster with a slingshot. He loads one last rock into the sling, stretches it taught, and lands a direct hit on the monster that hurls it backwards against the wall as if the rock he used was made of magic. But it wasn’t the rock that was made of magic. It was Eleven, who walks into frame and towards the beast, the subconjunctival hemorrhages around her irises making this power glare more menacing than any that came before it.

 

Mike tries to run after Eleven to make her stop, but she knock him backwards with her powers never once taking her eyes off the beast. It isn’t until she is standing directly in front of the thing that she turns to looks at Mike and says to him “Goodbye.” He watches with tears streaming down his face as Eleven uses the last of her powers to obliterate the monster and herself to dust, her last act of protection emphasized by her final words “No more.”

 

One month later . . .

 

Mike, Dustin, Will and Lucas play Dungeons and Dragons in his basement. They begin to horse around once the game ends, but Mike stops playing to stare at the pile of blankets where Eleven used to sleep. It hasn’t changed since the last time she slept there.

 

Jonathan comes downstairs to collect his brother and take him home, but before they leave, Nancy stops Jonathan and gives him a Christmas gift. He lets Will open the present inside his car and it turns out to be a new camera from both Nancy and Steve.

 

Inside the police station, Hopper puts food from an office party into a piece of Tupperware. On his way home, he pulls off onto the shoulder of the road and gets out of his car. He walks into and through the snow-covered forest until he arrives at wooden chest. He opens it, puts the food from the office party inside, and places a pile of Eggo waffles on top before closing the chest’s lid.

 

At the Byers’ house, (now devoid of any Christmas lights despite it being Christmas) Jonathan, Joyce and Will sit down at the dinner table and prepare to eat a holiday meal. But before Will digs in, he excuses himself from the table to go wash his hands in the bathroom where he stares into the mirror as if he’s about to be sick. He begins to hack and cough and doubles over spitting the same kind of yellow-spotted slug that oozed from Nancy’s dead mouth in “Chapter Seven” into the sink. Although spitting up slugs isn’t enough to phase the boy, a glitch in the Matrix does and Will jumps back to look around the bathroom in horror when the version of the bathroom he’s standing in becomes the version from the Upside Down.

 

The glitch ends, though, and the bathroom returns to normal. The look on Will’s face makes it apparent that Upside Down visions like these are a typical occurrence as of late. They are so typical in fact that when Will returns to the dinner table he acts as if nothing has happened, his game of D&D far more important to his family’s dinner conversation than Upside Down glitches and the slug that’s just slithered out of his mouth.

 

And that, ladies and gents, is the end.