Stranger Things – Chapter Five: The Flea and the Acrobat

By starrymag | August 16, 2016

By: Kathryn Trammell

 

Hopper and Joyce

 

Chapter Five begins with Hopper (David Harbour) waiting for the perfect moment to break into the Hawkins Lab. When he does, a guard who asks for his name stops him and although Hopper obliges he also knocks the guard out. He uses the guard’s badge to swipe his way past a few “restricted access” doors until he finds his way to the elevator where the Hawkins lab tech was abducted by the monster all the way back in Chapter One. We know where this elevator leads and soon Hopper does too, following the dust-filled hallway down to the room where a wall covered in the same tissue-like decay that Joyce (Winona Ryder) found under the wallpaper in her living room looms. Like Joyce’s living room wall, this wall seems to be a portal, a supposition tested by the Men in Suits in Chapter Four when a lab tech they sent into the wall failed to come back from beyond it alive.

 

Hopper walks up to the wall, touches its slimy surface and something moves behind him causing him to aim his gun in its direction. We think it’s the monster, but as soon as Hopper turns away from the wall one of the Men in Suits grabs him from behind and injects a sedative into his neck.

 

The only reason it wasn’t the monster that jumped out to attack Hopper was because it was preoccupied with hunting Will, which was clear when in the previous episode he said to his mom through her living room wall “It’s coming.” Staring at the wall into which she chopped a hole in an attempt to reopen the portal that closed behind Will (Noah Schnapp) the moment he ran to hide from the beast, Joyce hears a car pull into her driveway and goes outside to see who it is. It’s her ex-husband Lonnie, who has come back to Hawkins for Will’s funeral, or so he says.

 

But when Joyce discovers a flyer for what my mom would call an “ambulance chaser” in Lonnie’s wallet, his intentions for coming back to Hawkins become more clear. She kicks him out just in time for Hopper to show up at her door with his index finger pressed firmly to his lips and a sign in his other hand that reads “Don’t say anything.” He spends the next hour unscrewing all of Joyce’s Christmas lights in search of the same type of bug he found inside one of his ceiling lamps after the Hawkins Lab returned him to his home the night they sedated him. Joyce asks Hopper why the lab would bug his home and he tells her, “It’s because I’m on to them and they know it.” He’s not sure who “they” are, but what he is sure of is that they are trying to cover up something dark and dangerous – something that her son became adversely involved in. He says to her, “I went to the morgue last night . . . It wasn’t him. Will’s body. It was a fake.” Joyce begins to cry, the weight of his words making her face to the ground. He leans closer to her, serious and scared. “You were right,” he says. “This whole time, you were right.”

 

Eleven, Mike, Dustin, and Lucas

 

After returning home from school and breaking into the A/V lab where Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) used the radio to channel Will’s voice, all three boys try to figure out what Will meant when he described the place where he is trapped as “cold,” “dark” and “empty.” Eleven overhears them from the couch where she lays exhausted from using her powers and a bit scared by how close the boys are to getting to the truth so she offers to them the words “upside down.” Dustin (Gaten Mattarazzo) and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) don’t know what she means, but Mike thinks he might.

 

Mike walks over to the table where Eleven first showed them Will’s location on their D&D game board. He explains to both Dustin and Lucas, “When El showed us where Will was, she flipped the board over.” It makes sense to him, but not to the others so he demonstrates what he means by flipping the game board face up saying, “What if this is Hawkins?” He flips the game board over to reveal its black underside and then asks, “What if this is where Will is – the Upside Down.” It would explain why El took them to Will’s house when she said she could help find him. Will was at his house all along, they just couldn’t see him because he was “on the other side.”

 

They take the theory of the Upside Down to their Science teacher, who just so happens to be at Will’s wake. In the best metaphor for quantum mechanics I’ve ever heard, their teacher draws for them a picture on a paper plate of an acrobat atop a tightrope. He explains that “the tightrope is our dimension and our dimension has rules,” specifically that the acrobat can move forwards and backwards. Then, the teacher draws a flea beside the acrobat. The flea can follow the same rules as the acrobat, but it can also move along the sides of the tightrope. It can even move upside down.

 

The boys dig deeper because they want to know how they can become like the flea, which isn’t confined by the rules that confine the acrobat, theoretically. The teacher tells them that the only way to do so – to walk/exist upside down – is to amass an energy source large enough to create a tear or gateway between time and space, which he emphasizes by stabbing a hole through the center of the paper plate. Mike asks, “but what if this gate already exists?” to which the teacher responds that they would know if such a thing already existed because it would disrupt the gravity and magnetic fields of the Earth. “Science is neat,” Mr. Clarke (Randall P. Havens) says, “But I’m afraid it’s not very forgiving.”

 

Back in Mike’s basement, Dustin figures out that his compass isn’t facing true north and after pooling together the other compasses inside the house, they find that none of them are facing north. Dustin theorizes that, based on what Mr. Clarke told them, the compasses are pointing towards the portal that has already been created because it has a stronger magnetic pull than the North Pole. The needles on the compass have defaulted to the stronger magnet.

 

They decide to follow the compasses with Eleven in tow and the closer they get, the more uneasy she becomes. When at last they realize they are making a circle and that they are heading back to their homes, Lucas suspects that Eleven might have something to do with it. He grabs her sleeve and sees that it is covered in fresh blood from where she has been wiping her nose, a sign that she was using her powers to redirect the needles of their compasses away from the portal this entire time. She pleads with him and tells him that she did it to protect them, his understanding of the dangers he is chasing nowhere near hers.

 

In a flashback, we see Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine) sitting with Eleven. He shows her a photograph of a man and says that this time he wants her to go “farther than we’ve ever gone before.” We have to assume that he means for her to do what she did in the previous episode, which is to telepathically locate the man and relay his words to Dr. Brenner using a radio and intercom as a transmitter for his voice. In order to ensure Eleven can focus all of her senses on the task, Dr. Brenner mutes the others by placing Eleven in a “bath” – a cylindrical water-filled tank where she is submerged, her brain wave transmitters protected by the dome that also supplies her with air to breath.

 

She succeeds in locating the man and as she transmits his voice into the control room radio for Dr. Brenner to hear, Eleven approaches the man inside her mind and begins to investigate him. The space inside her mind is black and the floor beneath her feet is filled with about an inch of water, but somewhere deep inside her head the Hawkins monster growls. The man Eleven has been listening to disappears as she looks towards the sound and when she turns to run from it, the camera cuts back to an image of Eleven inside the water tank pounding on the glass for the technicians to let her out.

 

It’s my belief that her mind just showed us the creation of the rift Mr. Clarke spoke of – that Eleven’s use of her powers were strong enough to open the gate to the Upside Down – but Lucas takes this one step further when he accuses Eleven of actually being the monster. Mike (Finn Wolfhard) defends her and the two boys fall down to the ground in a fight that Eleven breaks up with the power of her mind flinging Lucas off of Mike. Unfortunately, she flings him too hard and he hits his head on piece of scrap metal in the middle of the junkyard they’re currently standing in. Lucas passes out and Mike screams, “What’s wrong with you!” El, looks down at them both in tears. Mike and Dustin shake Lucas until he wakes up, but Lucas storms off to his house refusing to speak to either one of them. Mike turns to look for El, but she is gone, too.

 

Nancy and Jonathan

 

Nancy (Natalia Dyer) and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) meet in the parking lot after Will’s funeral to discuss the monster in his photo. They decide to go into the woods to look for it, but Jonathan insists that if he sees it, he’ll kill it. He breaks into his dad’s car (I think it’s his dad’s car) and steals the gun from the glove compartment. Nancy’s weapon of choice happens to be the baseball bat, which she practices swinging inside her garage. She nearly knocks Steve (John Keery) out when he walks up behind her to apologize for being an asshole about Barb’s disappearance. She accepts his apology, but not his invitation to hang out and “watch movies.”

 

Instead, Nancy meets Jonathan for some target practice knocking the can off a wooden post on her first shot. Jonathan on the other hand couldn’t hit the broadside of barn with his aim. They head into the forest as the sun begins to set, but it isn’t the monster they find this time making scary noises in the woods. It’s a doe who looks like she’s been hit by a car (or attacked by a monster). Feeling that she can’t leave her to suffer alone in the forest, Nancy begins to aim the gun at the doe’s head, but Jonathan takes the gun from her hands saying “I’ll do it.” He hands her the bat and aims the gun at the deer, but just as he places his finger on the trigger the doe is ripped from the ground and into the darkness.

 

Jonathan and Nancy ignore any sane rational to GTFO and follow the doe’s blood trail until it runs dry. Using flashlights to search for any other clues as to where the deer might have gone. The two become separated long enough for Nancy to find a hole in the trunk of tree, its insides coated in something slimy and otherworldly. We know what it is and we know now that the presence of slime might indicate a portal to the Upside Down, but Nancy doesn’t. Fortunately, her curiosity is about as tenacious as a cat’s and Nancy crawls through the hole, the slimy, sinewy tendrils, dripping down around her head and shoulders and comes out on the other side.

 

Dust floats around her like snow in a dark forest that seems to be devoid of all life. The trees look likes trees, but they are rotting and the rocks look like rocks, but they are covered in decay. We see what Nancy sees as she walks through the Upside Down forest, her eyes falling on a figure hunched over the unfortunate deer in an image that made me ask my TV, “Voldemort?” Alas, the figure turns to reveal it’s gruesome face, which is less He Who Should Not Be Named and more bifurcated-mouth-vampire circa Blade II, when a twig breaks under Nancy’s foot. It charges her just as she begins to run back at the tree that was her gateway.

 

On the outside of the tree, in the real world, Jonathan yells Nancy’s name as the hole in the tree she crawled through slowly closes up.