Stranger Things, Season 1, Episode 4: The Body
Pretty cool stuff, as we continue down the mysteries of just what the fuck's going on. Hooper goes on the more mundane stuff as he realizes that things doesn't exactly add up, and begins his own investigation. Perhaps he doesn't quite believe Joyce when she talks about talking to her son through lights, or the claim that a faceless man walked out of the walls, but he knows enough to realize that something's fishy. Beyond his interrogation of the dude that found Will's body (who claims that he was told by someone to call it in, and that he's told not to get too close to the body), realizing that whoever performed the autopsy isn't someone from his own department, and his constant references to his supposedly-dead daughter Sarah, Hooper ends up charging into the morgue, cutting open Will's corpse and finding out that it's filled with foam.
Meanwhile, poor Joyce has gone off the deep end, because she soudns like a lunatic... except she knows that she's not crazy, and so does the audience. Yet no one, and definitely not Jonathan, believes her -- it's a pretty harrowing scene in the street where both scream at each other. Jonathan's angry that her mother's refusing to move on in a time where they have to bury his beloved brother, and Joyce is angry that no one's believing the chance that Will's not dead, and could very well still be alive. Joyce gets to actually see her son again, ripping apart the wallpaper to see the mysterious amber-like wall that separates this world and the next, and her attempt to axe down the wall is greeted with failure. I'm not sure whether Will just happens to manifest, or if it has something to do with 11 'channeling' him at school, but the mystery sure deepens.
Jonathan, meanwhile, is having some problems with her mother's seeming denial. He's already having some problems with life in general -- his dismissive attitude towards his father in previous scenes (especially in that one flashback with Will) already shows that he comes from a broken family, and as he confesses to Nancy near the end of the episode, he already have quite a fair bit of people problems. But as he tries to deal with coming to grips that his little brother fell down the lake and drowned, Nancy (who's been desperate in this episode to find Barb) shows up with tales of a faceless man, as well as the picture that Jonathan took -- which apparently caught the Demogorgon on film. This leads to Nancy and Jonathan working together, maybe with Joyce and the boys, as they realize that something's not quite right with Barb and Will's disappearance.
Nancy's storyline is... okay, but it feels like a teenage, watered-down vesrion of Joyce's story. She tries to tell a story, that Barb's disappeared, but ends up sounding fantastical when she brings up her own encounter with the faceless Demogorgon. And, of course, her mother ends up being a wee bit more focused on the fact that she snuck out of home to fuck a boy, while Steve is more concerned that the beer party would be found out -- a little bit crass, perhaps, but at the same time also very human feelings. So yeah, Nency ends up finding solace in Jonathan.
The kids are a bit less interesting this time around, where they're involved in a plan to try and get 11 to channel Will for them. Mike is the believer like Joyce, hearing Will's voice over the walkie-talkie, as impossible as it may have been considering they saw the body last night. Lucas, the most pragmatic out of the group, tells him to piss off, because he's not in the mood (not sure why he ends up following anyway). There's a neat bit of them dressing up 11 as a normal girl, which was fun, and the assembly has Mike stand up against a bully, and 11 making the jackass bully piss his pants. (Honestly, I'd go for far worse than what 11 did, but 11 is clearly a better person than I am). There's a bit of a questionable quantity as to just how assholish bullies can be, or the fact that the bullies are quite literally mocking the dead in the same room with like 100 other kids and teachers with no one calling them out on it, but eh.
The other big scene in this episode is the characters going into the hole in the laboratory wall, which... I think is happening concurrently, but I've been bamboozled by Westworld so all of this exploration of the weird webbed hole on the wall may be happening before everything else in the show. We get to see Brenner, 11's "papa", talk to Shepard, who appears to be his son, as he journeys into the mysterious ghost-realm beyond the ghostly goop, before meeting a horrible and off-screen death.
Oh, and add 'holes' as the recurring theme that we have in this episode. Between the hole in the reality in the underground lab, the hole that Joyce makes on her wall, and various references to people 'falling down a hole' or 'leaving a hole in the community', its another neat, subtle repetition of a theme that I certainly approve of.
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