Stranger Things – Chapter Three: Holly, Jolly

By starrymag | August 8, 2016

By: Kathryn Trammell

 

Previously on “Stranger Things,” the monster that escaped from the Hawkins Lab made itself known to Joyce, who continued trying to communicate with the son it took from her. Realizing that the answers to her questions regarding Will’s (Noah Schnapp) disappearance lie within her own home, Joyce (Winona Ryder) chooses to stay inside her house despite the monster that’s inhabiting it in some strange way. Eleven, another product of the Hawkins Lab, befriends Mike the way she tried to befriend Benny in “Chapter One.” After she explains to him that bad people are looking for her and that she knows where Will is hiding, Mike (Finn Wolfhard) decides to keep her hidden from his parents while using her powers to ensure the other boys agree to do the same. Sure, being able to slam a door in kid’s face when he’s threatening to nark on you is a pretty cool trick, but it’s going to take a heck of a lot more strength to beat the kind of monster that snatches Barb from the poolside than any power we’ve seen Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) display thus far.

 

Barb, Nancy, Steve, Jonathan

 

Chapter Three opens on Barb’s face as she spits a green slimy goo from her mouth, her face and glasses fogged with the kind of sludge that grows in a Louisiana bayou. When she stands, we see that she is at the bottom of the pool is completely devoid of water and covered in root and vine-like growths that look similar to the protuberances the Men in Suits found inside the Hawkins lab in Chapter One. From behind her, the monster growls and although she tossed her glasses to the ground at the start of the scene, she sees the monster clearly and screams. Barb (Shannon Purser) runs for the ladder at the deep end of the pool when the dust that stirs behind her starts floating up instead of down and fights to pull herself to the landing.

 

She never makes it. No one hears her screams for help. No one sees her fighting for her life desperate to escape the monster tugging at her feet. Because in scenes interposed with Barb’s horror, we also see Nancy (Natalia Dyer) losing her virginity to Steve (Joe Keery) and that the pool in his back yard is the exact same pool in which they were swimming only minutes ago. It’s apparent in the juxtaposition of the pool Barb is trying to escape and the one that glows beautiful and blue below Steve’s window that two versions of the world exist, the monster being able to break through the seams that keep the two versions separated while hunting his next victim.

 

After receiving little less than a good-bye from her boyfriend who’s too tired to acknowledge her or what they just did together, Nancy goes home. Her mom catches her sneaking into the house and asks her to explain why she’s home so late. Although it would give Nancy all the comfort in the world to be able to confide in someone about the loss of her virginity, she instead puts on a stalwart face and insists “nothing happened.” We have to assume that her mom knows she’s lying given the tears that brim at her eyes, but Nancy trudges up the stairs, the potential for a moment of confidence between them dissolving.

 

At school the next day, Steve is able to lift Nancy’s spirits when he reassures her that he enjoyed being with her last night and that he won’t tell anyone they had sex. It’s a lie though because at lunch Nancy asks Steve’s friends if they saw Barb leave Steve’s house last night, they respond by telling her they were too distracted by Nancy’s moaning to notice.

 

Fortunately for her, someone did see Barb just before she disappeared and inside the darkroom of the high school Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) develops the photos to prove it. Unfortunately for him, it also proves to one of Steve’s friend that Jonathan has an eye for Nancy leading Steve and crew to confront him in the parking lot after school. They rip up his photos and throw his camera to the ground shattering it, but Nancy takes no part in the bullying. Her eyes instead fixate on one of the shreds of a Jonathan’s photos that show Barb sitting on the diving board below Steve’s window moments before she went missing.

 

Using the vantage point of the photo as her guide, Nancy ditches Steve and the high school’s basketball game to go to the place in the forest where she determines Jonathan was standing when he shot the picture of Barb. Behind her something moves and she turns just in time to see it blur into a shadow. Scared, Nancy runs from the forest to her home where she finally confides in her mom that something bad has happened.

 

Joyce

 

Seeing as how a monster tried to claw its way through a wall inside her son’s bedroom after luring her there with flickering lights, Joyce is taking the invasion of her home by a monster rather well. Inside Will’s room Joyce has collected every lamp light she can find as she is convinced Will is trying to communicate with her through their flickering.

 

She takes her theory one step further by filling the walls and ceiling of her house with strand after strand of C7 Christmas lights. Almost instantly the lights begin to flicker in a trail that lead her to a cabinet. She plugs in another tangle of white lights and crawls inside the cabinet asking the Will/Lights, “Are you here?” The bundle of lights glow and brighten her face both literally and metaphorically. She asks Will/Lights if he would be able to “blink” once for yes and twice for no if she asks him a series of questions and to prove he understands their system of communication he makes the glow just once. Joyce smiles again and steadies herself before asking the question she’s been wanting to know ever since her son disappeared: “Are you alive?” The lights flash once and the joy and relief that washes over Joyce’s face is palpable. But it’s short-lived because with her next breath she asks, “Are you safe?” The lights flash twice.

 

Needing a way to find an explanation on how to help her son, Joyce paints the alphabet onto the wall of her living room situating a C7 lightbuld above each letter. She sets down the paint can and steps away from the wall saying to the lights, “Okay, baby. Talk to me . . . where are you?” One by one the lights flicker above the letters R-I-G-H-T H-E-R-E. She says to the wall that she doesn’t know what “right here” means or what she should do to help Will, but the wall offers her a suggestion on what she should be doing right this very moment when it spells out for her the word “RUN.”

 

All at once the lights begin flicker erratically and the monster growls inside the wall behind Joyce. She turns to see it bend and flex as the claws of the monster rips through the barrier between its world and ours revealing its faceless and grotesque existence to Joyce. It lunges at Joyce who runs from her house and into Jonathan’s arms after he pulls off to the side of the road to comfort her.

 

Hopper and the Men in Suits

 

Hopper’s (David Harbour) continued investigation into Will’s disappearance and Benny’s death leads him to the Hawkins Lab where a guard tells him he and his deputies cannot go inside without special clearance. After convincing the guard that he wants only to peruse the lab’s campus as a means of checking off a box on his investigative list, the guard escorts him inside where he is shown video footage of the night Will’s went missing. In the video, no one appears to leave the lab and no one appears to wander in through its fenced-in perimeter. The only issue Hopper has with the videos is that they are devoid of rain, which was definitely not the case the night Will went missing.

 

At the local library, Hopper and his two deputies sift through any and all newspaper articles concerning the Hawkins Lab. It’s here where Hopper stumbles across an article about Dr. Brenner, whom the guard earlier identified as the lab’s head scientist, and a woman who claimed Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine) had taken her daughter to the lab to conduct LSD mind experiments on her. We see in a picture attached to the article that Mr. Brenner is the man Eleven called “Papa” and that standing beside him dressed in hospital gowns like Eleven’s are five of ten girls who came before her. But before Hopper can make any solid connection between Dr. Brenner and Will Byers, he gets another radio call that sends him and his deputies to a local rock quarry.

 

Eleven, Mike, Dustin, and Lucas

 

After being told that Will is hiding from “the Demagorgon” the boys gather their resources inside Mike’s basement and prepare to implement Operation Mirkwood (defeating the monster and finding Will). While Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) isn’t as convinced about the strength of Eleven’s powers as the other boys are. Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) insists she will be their secret weapon and asks her to demonstrate her powers by making a toy replica of the Millennium Falcon levitate. The look she gives him every time he drops the toy to the ground is a joy to behold and if you thought for a moment that Millie Brown’s power-concentration face or her closet-flashback face was something extraordinary, neither come close to the excellence that is her ask-me-again-to-float-the-Millennium-Falcon face.

 

But just because she doesn’t do it for Dustin, doesn’t mean she can’t do it. In the scene that follows, we watch as the spaceship levitates in front of her eyes. Bored of playing with toys, Eleven goes back upstairs to explore the empty house where she is hit with a series of flashbacks that reveal to us her life as a lab rat for the Hawkins lab.

 

In the first flashback, Dr. Brenner and his band of merry scientists scrutinize Eleven whose head they’ve hooked up to a device that seems to map out brain waves. Like a Richter Scale, the needle on the machine moves as Eleven concentrates harder on a can of Coke until at last she is able to crush it with her mind. In the second flashback, her task is not as simple as the research team requires her to do to a cat what she did to the can. Eleven refuses, detaching herself from the machine that is monitoring her, as two guards grab her and begin dragging her down the hall to the empty room she hates. This room is her punishment, we now realize, and before the guards have time to close the door Eleven blows it open with her mind slamming one guard into wall and breaking the other guard’s neck with a mere a flick of her chin. Dr. Brenner arrives at her cell just as she is about to collapse from over-exertion. He cups his hands around her face, calls her incredible and scoops her into his arms to carry her down the hall and away from the room she hates.

 

At 3:15pm, Eleven meets the boys outside Mike’s house and leads them to another home where she tells them Will is hiding. But the boys tell her she must be mistaken. The house she’s brought them to is Will’s, and there is absolutely no way he could be hiding so close to home without letting his mother know.

 

Instead of investigating the house, the boys decide to chase after a group of police cars that pass Will’s house on their way to the rock quarry. They abandon their bikes and hide behind an ambulance just as Hopper and his deputies arrive on the scene. From behind the ambulance the boys watch in horror as first responders pull the body of a boy from the water. When the body is flipped over, the bright red vest is a familiar sight from “Chapter One” and it becomes apparent that Will has finally been found.

 

Mike lashes out at Eleven telling her that he was wrong to trust her when she promised she would help him find Will alive. Unable to process what he’s seen and how he feels about Eleven’s betrayal, Mike rides home to his mom who holds him as he cries over the death of his friend.