Stranger Things - The Body

With the ending of the previous episode regarding the discovery of a body believed to be Will drowned in a quarry, Stranger Things had taken a turn that seemed to indicate that perhaps his mom, Joyce, was imagining what she was seeing and hearing regarding her son “speaking” to her. Although there is a string of alternating subs, involving different characters among Hawkins, it all ties back to Dr. Brenner and his lab’s experiments. That body supposedly found in the quarry didn’t have the local coroner perform the autopsy which raises Sheriff Hopper’s suspicions. Supposedly “state law enforcement” were involved in the body’s recovery and autopsy, initiating a quiet investigation by Hopper. Hopper smacks around one of those involved in securing the body, watching as a mysterious car drives off. He investigates the body after punching out the guard, and the realization that all is not what it seems is a real surprise.

Joyce has been persistent that her son is not dead. Even as her older son, Jonathan, has decided to begin preparations of a funeral, Joyce insists to him and Sheriff Hopper that the body found in the quarry is not that of her boy. In another sub, Mike also hears Will’s voice across his walkie-talkie thanks to the mind power of Eleven. Will is somewhere. When Joyce actually sees Will on the other side of this parallel “wall” separating them (I was thinking of Carol Anne lost with her parents trying to find her in Poltergeist), it becomes quite real that her son is still alive. When Mike gets his boys together, Eleven helps him prove to them that Will is not dead. So with Mike and the gang, Joyce, and Hopper all learning that Will is not dead as so thought, one more sub involving Jonathan and Nancy Wheeler (still looking for Barb, a witness to the very creature Joyce also saw coming out of her wall) also links to this development. Nancy held onto the ripped up remains of photographs taken by Jonathan, seeing the monster that took her friend. Jonathan takes his negatives and provides her with a new photograph intact. Both see the monster. Joyce’s supposed mad ravings are no longer seen as such. Her impassioned inability to give up on her son is finally paying off. Lonnie, her ex, arrives at the end to hug a visually distraught Joyce, having just axed a hole in her living room wall.

Mike and company know that the walkie-talkies they have just won’t offer a strong enough signal/reception needed by Eleven to truly communicate and hear Will. So they use their teacher’s ham radio as an alternative, actually hearing Will as he attempted to reach his mother. Joyce wisely tells Will to run before the monster in that parallel dimension catches up to him. So we clearly have this alternate dimension as Dr. Brenner sends a protégé into the growth attached to a wall in his lab. This pulsating “sac” (the best I can do to describe it) seems to be the door into the dimension. Sufficed to say the monster with no face and a very foreboding growl gets a hold of Brenner’s protégé and the cable attached to him returns with no body. The story is starting to become clearer as all the subs converge…Will must be found somehow and different folks are trying to locate him.

Two bullies (“mouthbreathers”) to Mike and his friends are actually mocking Will during a high school gym ceremony. Mike can’t stand for that and confronts them. Pushing one of them down, Eleven causing his approach to halt dead in its tracks, forcing the kid to pee in his pants! Steve wants Nancy not to mention the alcohol consumption when questioned by Hopper’s deputies about Barb and that night she disappeared. This relationship is starting to strain due to Steve’s douchebaggery. Nancy is motivated much like Joyce to find Barb as she appears to be in the same dimension as Will. Barb’s condition could very well be as Brenner’s protégé, however.