Stranger Things S01E08 Review: Shadowfell

Stranger Things, Season 1, Episode 8: The Upside Down

Pretty cool end to the first season (good thing I literally can boot up the second season immediately, and it apparently features Cthulhu). It does end up being a wee bit too action-packed for my tastes, but I guess there's nowhere else to go. The finale ends up taking place in three parts, just as Stranger Things has been for a majority of the season. Hopper and Joyce end up managing to hand over Eleven in exchange for access to the gateway -- well, Hopper makes the deal, anyway, which we'll talk about later. The two walk through the Upside-Down world (with some cool references to how they change the real world) and manage to rescue Will, ripping out the long parasitic leech-thing from his mouth.

I'm not quite sure if the flashbacks to how Hopper didn't manage to 'save' his own little girl and the forced parallels of the 'breathe in breathe out' is necessary at all, and that probably gets my vote for the weakest part of the finale.

The Upside Down is basically a creepier version of the real world, and surprisingly enoguh for me Hopper doesn't get to be the action hero and kill or even wound the Demogorgon -- something I thought was going to happen when Hopper and Joyce reach the Byers house just as Team Nancy is setting the Demogorgon on fire. But alas, we don't get the Demogorgon hopping between worlds and getting beaten up by two sets of protagonists.

But man, Nancy, Jonathan and Steve fighting the Demogorgon is pretty cool. Steve ends up redeeming himself somewhat in this episode -- previous episodes have shown that he's remorseful for what he did to Nancy at least, telling his bad-influence friends to GTFO, cleaning up the slut graffiti and here he shows up to apologize to Jonathan (and, well, Nancy's there). And while the shippers are probably going to riot over Nancy and Steve still being an item in the epilogue, it's not like Steve didn't redeem himself in the action scenes -- I just question if it's necessary. 

Regardless, though, they manage to draw the Demogorgon with blood, and while Steve showing up was a complication they didn't quite forsee, Steve ends up helping out. They draw the Demogorgon out, fill it with bullets, whack it with a spiky baseball bat, drive it to a bear trap (good thing Steve didn't step on the bear trap, huh) and set it on fire. Which sends the Demogorgon, while wounded, back to the Upside Down.

Before it could return for vengeance, though, it gets attracted by more blood -- the dead agents that 11 kills in the school, including the bitch who killed poor Benny. Turns ou that Team Nancy is actually quite lucky and over-estimated the power of bear traps and gasoline, because apparently an army of agents with machineguns are mere fodder to the angry Demogorgon. Brenner, too, gets murdered by the Demogorgon. 

Can I just say the sight of the Demogorgon breaking his way through the school walls is just amazingly well-done? The CGI for the Demogorgon isn't perfect all the time (though the fact that they rely on keeping it in the dark for literally all but this episode), but it's definitely amazing in that one scene.

In the end, we get the kids fighting against the Demogorgon and it's honestly hilariously pathetic how the show focuses so much on Lucas reloading the 'wrist cannon' and launching rocks at the Demogorgon's head, which barely serves to annoy the flower-headed creature. Of course, it's 11 who ends up killing the monster, walking up and to it and vaporizing both it and herself. It's bittersweet, of course, since earlier on we get yet another scene of cutesy kid-shipping with the talk about how 11 could stay with Mike and go with them to the ball and stuff. We didn't quite see a body yet, though...

Well, at least Brenner dies, so there's a happy ending for the part of me that just wants to see villains suffer. Sadly, Troy the bully doesn't appear or even gets noticed by the Demogorgon. 

And, yes, Hopper does give up 11's location to the government. Can you blame him, though? Out of the cast, he's one who doesn't have any sort of attachment to 11 whatsoever, and his biggest character trait has been to get the little boy back, no matter the cost. The epilogue seems to imply that Hopper ends up still kind of working for the Hawkings Lab or something along those lines -- leaving waffles... somewhere? It's a bit unclear, but maybe 11 is still alive in some way or fashion?

The epilogue does show that while the kids are playing D&D, Jonathan gets a new camera and Steve is frolicking with Nancy, it's not all well and good. Hopper still has the government's hooks in him, and while Will is alive and healthy and back with his family, he took a bit of the Upside Down world with him, where he still vomits out a leech chunk and sometimes sees flashes of the Upside Down. Is he turning into another Demogorgon, or is he just harbouring some Alien-style parasite? Time will tell, but if the Demogorgon is an eldritch abomination from another dimension with the name of a D&D creature and reproduces like the xenomorph, and hunts its prey relentlessly through time and space, he's like the perfect sci-fi horror monster ever.

There are some questions, though -- if the Demogorgon did abduct Barb and Will, how in the hell did they even survive and not get murdered immediately the way that Brenner and the others were? I mean, Barb did almost immediately after she gets pulled into the Upside-Down, but Will? Come on. Even with 'good at hiding' I really wished we had more reasons for Will surviving so long.

Overall it's a pretty neat series overall. It's not super-amazing that it will change all your perceptions of horror movies or a series with mind-blowing plot twists or the like, but it's a neatly told story with reasonably well-developed characters (or at least developing the stereotypical 80's trope characters well),  a very well-crafted world and a very neat throwback to the 80's era. But even without appreciating the throwback to the 80's, it's still a solid story nonetheless and at 8 episodes it certainly doesn't wear its welcome. So yeah. A couple of weeks ago season two of Stranger Things dropped... and if you'll excuse me, I'll definitely watch that.