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If the first rule of Upside Down Club is don’t talk about Upside Down Club, everyone breaks it in Stranger Things Season 2 Episode 5, as newcomers from Max to Bob Newby to Dr. Owens realize they’re in over their heads—or six feet under in a Hawkins-wide network of squealing monster tunnels.
It begins and ends with Will. Like all proper sequels, Stranger Things 2 takes the heart of its predecessor’s central plot—the Upside Down has Will Byers—and repeats it with higher stakes. But creators the Duffer brothers have rarely met a trope they can’t twist, and Will’s conflict has been perfectly inverted: he doesn’t need to be saved from within the Upside Down. It’s the Upside Down inside of him that needs to be evacuated. That makes for a jagged, scarier narrative, one with less obvious solutions.
It makes Will like a bystander in his own body as the Shadow Monster’s reach across Hawkins and into his conscious brain expands, but Mike finds a way for him to find his agency. “You’re like a spy now,” he says. But what if the Shadow Monster within Will spies back? Could it even comprehend what it might see through his eyes—anything beyond instinct and savagery?
The question lingers in the air as Joyce surveys the Byers house, its walls covered now with Will’s tunnel drawings instead of the alphabet in Christmas lights. Down in the tunnels below the pumpkin patch, Hopper’s hole closes itself in Upside Down vines, like a wound stitching itself back together. The tunnels don’t just mark the Shadow Monster’s path: Hopper finds monster-pods in the dark, which splatter him with goo that knocks him out.
Nancy and Jonathan’s conspiracy plan continues, and they get a room at a motel to stay off the radar. A double, they tell the bored woman working the front desk. Lying in separate beds, the intimacy of the sleepover coaxes out feelings. “What happened… to us?” Nancy wonders, and with two words, she complicates the shape of the Nancy-Steve-Jonathan relationship into a pointy love triangle: “I waited!” Sorry, Steve. “Only a month,” Jonathan demurs. This is not the excuse Nancy’s looking for, and the triangle flattens again.
Will wakes up, his eyes beady: he’s had a vision from the Shadow Monster, a “now-memory.” It’s about Hopper. He’s somewhere out in the tunnels—waking up and leaving a cigarette trail to follow in case anyone’s going to dig him out.
As Will and Mike focus on the underground, Lucas and Dustin have their own problems: Lucas grappling with how to talk to Max about his supernatural secrets and Dustin dealing with the cat-eating beast in his bedroom. The series so far has had less of the geeky camaraderie which made the Mike-Dustin-Lucas trio so easy to root for in Season 1. Instead, they’ve been splintered, self-consumed, and conflicted, a mark of the way trauma and experience crack the natural bonds of trust that define childhood friendships—and how hard it is to build new ones.
“We have a lot of rules in our party,” Lucas tells Max after spilling his unbelievable tale of Will and the Demogorgon. “But the most important is, friends don’t lie.”
At first, she doesn’t believe it: “I thought it was a little derivative in parts,” she says, and the Duffer brothers see you, TV critics! I don’t remember any movies where a character dons hockey goalie gear to fend off his pet monster, but that’s where Dustin’s at in Chapter Five. He scoots his mom out of the house to look for her “missing” cat—friends don’t lie, but children do—and leads Dart out of the house with a trail of salami. It follows the trail, its four-piece mouth clenching like a cleaved raptor. Dustin smacks it into a cellar with his hockey stick and locks it in: “I’m sorry,” he says. “You ate my cat.” This storyline started dangerously Gremlins-y, but I’m on board for any and all cat-avenging.
Elsewhere, Eleven moves past frustration into action. She hitchhikes to her mother’s house, finding her aunt, Becky, and Terry herself, lost in a rocking chair and the string of words and numbers she keeps repeating. For the first time, Eleven calls herself Jane, the return of the daughter Terry had held out hope for—but she doesn’t seem to see her arriving. Upstairs, in what would’ve been her childhood bedroom, Eleven decides to stay. But flickering lightbulbs lead her back downstairs, away from the life she could’ve had. Terry’s nose is bleeding: she, too, has the gift.
As Eleven tries to understand her past, Nancy and Jonathan bring their revelations to Murray Bauman, the private detective. For a moment, the Duffer brothers could be the Coens: Bauman is a cartoon in a bathrobe, paranoid, pretentious, dismissive of “Them”—the suburban normies, who will never believe what the pair’s about to tell him—and a little dependent on jazz and vodka. (They help him think.) He’s worked through 200 tips about Barb, and he and his pin board just have to connect a few more dots.
“The timeline’s wrong,” Nancy says. Bauman’s going to want to sit down.
“Dig Dug” cuts past these exposition dumps, but manages to clue in most of its new characters to the Upside Down mythology—even Bob, who arrives on the Byers doorstep with well-meaning surprise brain-teasers. Despite Joyce’s reticence and then his own, he’s soon solving the mystery: Will’s tunnel-drawings are a map around Hawkins, and he charts it out with a ruler until he hits Will’s “X.” “The ratio isn’t exactly 1 to 1!” he says as night falls and Hopper lies trapped in a mess of monster vines. That’ll do, Bob.
The episode’s flashback exposition is saved once again for Eleven: this time the memories are her mother’s. They connect in the telepath-void, Terry’s nonsense words each a sliver of trauma: Eleven’s birth by C-section; her disappearance and the lie of stillbirth that followed; the lock combination for the gun Terry brought to the Hawkins lab to find her daughter and another girl, a rainbow sticker on their door. She’s pulled away and strapped down, blasted with the electricity that reduces her mind to the rocking chair. Like Joyce, she never gave up on her child—the malevolent forces she faced weren’t unknowable alien savagery but human cruelty. Eleven has now seen the breadth of both: is there justice left for her, or only the catharsis of the truth?
The Byers crew makes it to the tunnels in a dramatic rescue, Bob still blissfully unprepared for any of this. The lab’s scientists have finally caught on to the mistake they’ve failed to contain, and the episode ends with circling white vans and a blaze of flame-throwing. Will’s spy-connection goes both ways: as the tunnel burns, he collapses, screaming in Shadow Monster pain.
David Greenwald is a critic and cat owner in Portland who has written for The Oregonian, Billboard, and the Los Angeles Times. He has opinions on Twitter (@davidegreenwald).
