Stranger Things S04E06 Review: Water Gate

Stranger Things, Season 4, Episode 6: The Dive

Yeah, with one episode left before the "first half" of season four is over, "the Dive" offers a pretty exciting episode where a lot of the plot threads are finally starting to pick up. It is, again, a problem that I felt the season had throughout its first three episodes where there's simply a bit too much fat that shold've otherwise been trimmed off. Again, I don't mind the season focusing a lot on the characters. I really don't! That's one of the biggest strengths of this show, in fact. It's just that the interactions this time around just distract so much from the storylines that are happening that I wonder if stuff like the Alaska plot or Team California (minus Eleven) wouldn't have better served as being singular episodes focused on them, like Eleven's runaway episode where she hangs out with Nine in season 2. 

And... well, I feel like the distraction with Team California going on to talk to Suzie and get her to hack a primitive version of the internet to find where Project Nina is ends up easily being the weakest part of the episode. Whereas Hopper/Joyce/Murray's Alaska plot is an interesting storyline that just takes too long in setup, Team California's foray into Suzie is... well, at least it's not a cringy song that takes up a huge chunk of the climax of a season? But Suzie comes from a family with lunatic children that feel like they wandered out of an anime or something, the random subplot with Argyle falling in love with Suzie's goth sister Eden is nowhere as funny as the show thinks it is, and... well, the fact that the previous scene we saw of Mike, Will and Jonathan were them discussing Eleven, government conspiracies and the agent they buried and we whiplash to this Home Alone wackiness feels so out of place. I wouldn't have minded this earlier in the season, but it just feels like such a weird place to have it when every other pot throughout the show have been ramping up to a climax. There's a version where they could keep the Suzie hacking scene and still make it tense instead of bizarrely comedic in a tone that didn't fit the rest of the episode. 

Another side-plot that kind of runs through this is Sullivan torturing the one surviving agent in California. It's whatever, and it's not like this agent is anyone important that we needed to keep checking back with him holding on and trying not to betray Project Nina's location. 

And as much as the Alaska story is preferrable to the side-quest to get Suzie to help, it's still... just doing what it's expected to? I don't know. It's okay, I guess, and it's telling what it wants to tell, but the whole side-quest to rescue Hopper seems to be destined to take up the entirety of the season... which means that it's just an excuse to have the adults not be involved in the main Hawkins plot, which I'm not the biggest fan of. This ends up feeling, again, like something that could've been better as a single gaiden episode since everything regarding Hopper doesn't really have anything to do with Eleven or the fight against Vecna.

There are admittedly some great acting on Hopper's part, and he's trying his best to action-movie this sequence and create a fight against the Demogorgon, 

A side-plot that I actually appreciate is the basketball gang, though, where Jason ends up being rescued by the cops alongside the mangled body of Patrick. Jason ends up thinking that Eddie can channel the power of Satan to murder people, and in his anger, grief and general unpleasantness (and a great meta-joke at how D&D was mistreated as promoting Satanic worship in real life) Jason ends up flying off the deep end and thinking that the D&D Hellfire Club is a Satanic cult. 

Again, Team Hawkins and Eleven provide the best sci-fi/horror entertainment this time around. Eleven's story basically is an extension of the previous episode's trip down the memory lane. I don't really buy Brenner's comparison of Eleven's loss of power being like someone who had a stroke (wasn't there like a piece of Mind-Flayer flesh that crept into her wound?) but at least there's an explanation as to how Brenner wants to get Eleven to regain her powers by unlocking her repressed memories. It's kind of a common excuse in these sort of shows, but it gives the writers an excuse to explore Eleven's backstory, and fill in the gaps with some information that the season seem to be building up to. 

A lot of the Eleven stuff is just well-realized flashbacks of how Brenner treated these human lab-rats, and how during one of the competitions, Eleven ends up embarassing the most powerful among her siblings, Two. Two ends up bringing a bunch of his siblings to bully poor Eleven around, and there was a brief moment where it seemed like the show is trying to hint this as a reason to Eleven potentially (but probably not) murdering her siblings in a fit of anger. 

Team Hawkins, again, provide the nice balance of tension and comedy. I haven't really mentioned nor cared about the whole Steve/Nancy maybe-they-are-getting-together stuff that's been built up this season... mostly because it's not at all that interesting. But there sure is a bunch of those shipping hints. But in a neat callback to the creepiness of the first season, we get to see more Upside-Down affecting the electronics of the real world. I do like how this was worked into Dustin and Steve arguing about the location of Skull Rock into an actually plot-relevant detail about compasses.

The older kids row to the lake and Steve dives down to check out a potential portal. Some pretty strong death flags for Steve, actually. He finds what the cast dub the 'water gate' at the bottom of the lake, but as Steve wisely tries to swim back up, he gets pulled into the Upside-Down by some Cthluhu tentacles, and he gets attacked by... Demo-bats? Is that what we're calling those?

Also, haha, I get it. 'The Dive' refers to Eleven's 'dives' into her memories, as Brenner calls them, but Steve also literally dives down the lake!

Anyway, pretty fun stuff on the Eleven and the Team Hawkins front. I've raised my multiple frustrations with the Hopper/Joyce side of things which is just moving a bit too slowly (and neither Enzo nor Yuri are that interesting to justify spending so much time on them) but the storyline in Suzie's hacking grounds is easily one of the weakest parts of this episode. Next episode is a full-on movie-length mid-season finale, which hopefully will live up to its hype.