‘Stranger Things’ Season 4 Episode 8 Recap: “Papa”

Hello, and thank you for joining us for the epic, feature-length finale of Stranger Things Season 4! Our heroes are still on their own journeys, but we’re in the endgame, and it’s looking like all roads lead to Hawkins.

Now that we’ve had a few weeks to recover from that Big Vecna Reveal (BVR), it’s time to pull the second half of what’s known around these parts as the Cotton Eye Joe Maneuver: We know where he came from, now let’s find out where he go.

Let’s begin in Nancyland, because there’s still just a bit more for our girl reporter to investigate here.

Let’s Nancy Drew this

Still on Vecna’s Magical Mystery Tour, Nancy sees Young Papa enter the lab, surveying the fallout from Eleven and One’s stand-off, cracked tiles and all. Baby Eleven’s face abruptly goes from fury to exhaustion and she falls to the floor, surrounded by carnage and Montessori toys. Nancy sees the now-familiar scene of Papa tattooing One, except this time, his eyes go blue and he turns to her, speaking in Vecna’s growly voice: “There’s nothing to be afraid of, is there, Nancy?” Not…great. She can’t run, and finds herself strapped into the chair by Vecna’s vines. “Now you see where I’ve been. I’d very much like to show you where I’m going,” he tells her as she screams. She sees carnage, fire, more gates opening, that clock bonging four times. “I want you to tell Eleven. I want you to tell her everything you see.”

In the real world, or at least, halfway between the Upside Down and the real world, Steve is holding her entranced body. They get her into her real world house as the gang hunts for whatever her magic song will be and hilariously negging her taste in music along the way. Robin sums it up as “all this shit while Eddie holds up his own Iron Maiden cassette, screaming that “this is music!” Turns out, they don’t need to find that Beatles tape they’re hunting for, because Vecna releases Nancy to tell the others. She’s the messenger. Things are not. Looking. Good.

Russian Around

While Nancy catches her breath in Hawkins, let’s check in on the Russia crew. The Demogorgon is still a-rippin, and our heroes (and Yuri) need to find a way out of there. Hop finds another door, revealing a kind of Demogorgon experimentation lab. They’re in tanks, they’re in jars, there’s one with its chest sliced open on an operating table! We do not love to see a monster breeding ground.

After more firefights, our pals find another manhole, emerging into the snow, Yuri in tow. After busting through the prison’s gates in a stolen van, Murray screaming “SAYONARA!” and then giddily saying, “Nothing like a little prison escape to get the day started, am I right!” they convince Yuri to help them get back home. For a “glass of water and hot steam bath and five-inch stack of American dollars, Yuri will fly you to the moon.” Or maybe…maybe just for not getting shot in the face. Six on one hand, half-dozen on the other, right? He’s delighted to introduce them to Katinka the helicopter, named after a woman who had “very beautiful, round buttocks.” They are unimpressed to say the least, and then remember that phones and other people exist. They place a call to reach Sam Owens for help, which Antonov warns them will be returned in “five minutes, five hours or five days,” and most certainly with the KGB listening in. Maybe Katinka isn’t looking like such a bad option anymore.

Get a Pizza That Rescue Mission

The Surfer Boy Pizza crew is, yes, still driving through the desert looking for Nina and Eleven. Argyle is convinced that Nina could be “a small woman” hiding behind “a small tree,” and that’s why they can’t find her. They all marvel at how high he still is. This is a nice opportunity for Will and Mike to have a Feelings Talk, where Mike confesses his insecurity that El won’t need him anymore when they find her, and Will in turn finally shows him his ding dang painting, which is of the four boys fighting a three-headed dragon, Mike in the lead with a coat of arms featuring a giant heart. He says El commissioned it, which I’m not totally buying, and, that she (“she”) is “so lost without you.” Let’s all just…understand that Will is talking about himself as he literally weeps, telling Mike that “when you’re different, sometimes you feel like a mistake. But you make her feel like she’s not a mistake at all, like she’s better for being different, and that gives her the courage to fight on. And if she’s mean to you or seems like she was pushing you away, it’s probably because she’s scared of losing you, just like you were scared of losing her. And if she was going to lose you, I think she’d rather just get it over with, like ripping off a band aid. So yeah, El needs you, Mike, and she always will.” Mike, obviously, does not notice that his bestie is basically confessing his love to him, nor that I’m screeching “now kiss!!!!” at my laptop. Even Jonathan knows! Even Argyle knows, and he’s so high he’s making up a secret handshake with an angel!

Argyle continues to prove that he’s worth much more than his weight in pizza when he tells them that while he hasn’t found Nina or her small tree, he has spotted some very large tire tracks, and correctly assumes that they’re military. Oh, it’s going down.

Eleven It Up

Rebelling against your parents is a normal part of growing up, but Eleven is absolutely squandering the chance to tell Papa he’s not her real dad as she’s defibrillated and given oxygen. As Papa and Sam ask her if she’s okay and if she can hear them, she has a vision of her nice mom. She gets up and looks at the tank, then levitates it off the ground with barely a nosebleed. She’s back, baby!

Papa explains that she fell into a coma after blasting Vecna into the Upside Down back in the day and blacked out the memory of the confrontation. He’s always known what she was capable of, just that she needed help accessing it. Owens shows her the files of Vecna’s three recent victims, saying that he’s sending them a message that he’s back. Papa shares that “I always thought that Henry was out there, hiding in the darkness. I didn’t know for sure, not beyond a feeling. Until now.” The duo really put the “uhhhhhh” in “reassuring” when they say that her friends in Hawkins are safe “as far as we know,” but that they haven’t actually checked. Papa is more concerned with dramatically snapping a pencil to illustrate Vecna’s intention to “chisel away” at the dam between the two worlds, his eventual intention to take over. “And when that happens, Hawkins will fall.” El stomps away.

She turns on her sink and uses it to sink into her dark place and spy on her friends in Hawkins, who are now gathered at Max’s house and making a game plan.

Max Relax

Nancy is telling Lucas, Erica, Steve, Robin, Max, Dustin and Eddie about Vecna’s story hour: Four gates across Hawkins. Her whole family dead. An army of monsters. Basically: Nothing good! They realize that the clock in the visions has always chimed four times, and that that must be telegraphing his plan to make four kills, meaning he only needs one more. Nancy decides they need to go back into the Upside Down literally guns a-blazing and kill him before he can kill again and complete his takeover. Steve is…not thrilled.

Robin asks the question we all have: “What are we calling him now?” Dustin: “One.” Erica: “Vecna.” Nancy: “Henry.” Whatever they’re calling him, Robin points out, he’s “like Eleven, only a sick, evil, child-murdering version of her with really bad skin,” and incredibly powerful. (Eleven, in her darkness world, is still listening in on this, by the way, my absolute nightmare of people talking about me come true. Like, they’re really fond of her, but yikes.) Dustin points out that they can use this to their advantage: Since he’s like Eleven, and they know Eleven’s powers, they can assume that he also shares Eleven’s weaknesses, like her vulnerable state when she’s walking the ol’ spectral plane. Max’s idea is to “ditch Kate Bush” and use herself as bait, allowing the others to attack Vecna’s vulnerable body in his attic hideout while he tries to kill her. They’re not thrilled, but they are intrigued.

Also not thrilled: El, back in the earthly world. She tells Sam that her friends are not safe and insists that she go to them, which Papa is not into. Sam supports her and says they can work his contacts and be in Hawkins by nightfall, as my closed captioning tells me “determined synth music” plays.

In Hawkins, the crew needs to gun up. Eddie knows of a store called The War Zone, in a real mark of branding subtlety, just outside Hawkins. To avoid the “angry hicks,” they’ll need to take some back streets and fly under the radar. Which translates to “put Eddie in a Michael Myers mask, tuck and roll across the trailer park, break into an RV and hotwire it, then speed away while the owners scream after them.” Very low-profile. Steve drives, natch, telling Nancy in a calmer moment that he’s dreamed of having six kids (!!!) and road tripping in an RV. It’s cute, and I will be very sad when he has to sacrifice himself, as I’m having a weird feeling he’s going to. Lucas and Max are also bonding, with Max telling him she’ll “hide in the light” and pull a real Patronus-esque happy memory, admitting that he was involved in that memory. Smug! He reserves the right to call in Kate Bush if things get dire, which is also my backup plan for life’s stressful moments.

The War Zone, which has decor including a large sign that just says KNIVES, is hoppin’. As Robin and Steve grab “five or six” cans of kerosine, they spot Robin’s crush Vickie, mackin with a guy. Nancy, examining a shotgun, also runs into a friend: Captain Jason the Basketbro, who is there with his team being menacing and buying a bunch of guns and knives. He asks after her brother and his friends, and the crew book it out of these with their assorted weapons and accelerants (yeah, I’ve seen CSI, I know what an accelerant is, it’s ok to be impressed).

They saw off shotguns, battle with trash can lids, make some homemade explosives, the usual hangtime activities. Robin and Steve share a solemn toast to their crew. They look out on everyone messing with their weapons and horsing around. “To killing Vecna,” Steve says. “Slash Henry,” Robin adds. “Slash One,” Steve says. They cheers grimly.

Don’t Desert Me

Things are coming to a head at Nina: Eleven is in street clothes, taking a last glance at Nina the Tank before going to save the day, when Papa literally steps out of the shadows and tells her he can’t let her go. He tells her that everything he’s done has been for her own protection, including torturing her mother and One. She brings up One’s revelation that “Papa doesn’t always tell the truth,” and he tries to gaslight her into thinking that she’s feeling guilty for releasing him. Bro.Eleven tells him that “The gate, the Mind Flayer, so many dead, and all because of you, because you could not stop, and you could not let go. I came here to try and understand what I was, to see if I was the monster. Now I know the truth. It is not me. It is you. You are the monster.” She’s going to leave with Sam. Emotional blackmail failed, Papa goes for the next best thing: The jugular. He stabs her in the neck, and she uses her powers to throw him against a wall, then passes out. When she comes to, she’s wearing the shock collar we’ve seen on Henry/Vecna/One (Hecna?), controlled by Papa, natch. He’s almost immediately distracted by a siren going off: the military has found them. “They’ve come to kill you,” Papa tells Eleven, scooping her up and taking her into the open, away from the firefight in the lab.

Sam, naturally, has been handcuffed to a pipe by Papato stop him from helping Eleven. When the Colonel discovers him, it looks like he may convince him not to shoot Eleven, where she’s been spotted with Papa, but no dice. “Take her.” Papa gets shot…a few times, and goes down, dropping El. The crosshairs find El with her arm outstretched, collar be damned, taking the helicopter down to a massive explosion as the Surfer Boy Pizza van squeals up. She has a sweet reunion with both Mike and Will, then with a click, her collar snaps open, falling to the ground. In the immortal words of Monty Python, Papa is Not Dead Yet. He’s released the collar, and tells El how proud he is of her before he dies. “Everything I did, I did for you. I need you to understand. Please.” She lays his hand down. “Goodbye, Papa.” She seems fine, stands up and marches away back to her chosen family, into the van. They speed off, Surfer Boy and all, leaving him in the literal dust.

This penultimate episode closes to the strains of Journey’s “Separate Ways,” with our two crappy steeds, the RV and the Surfer Boy van, driving into battle. El tells her friends that they need to get to Hawkins, stat, or “they are going to die.” In the RV, lots of Intense Faces and Determined Staring Out the Window from our heroes as the extremely on-the-nose lyrics kick in: “Sleepless nights, losing hope, I’m reaching for you, you, you.” Max gets out of the RV with Lucas and Erica, Walkman strapped to her waist. They walk up to the steps of the Creel house with a dramatic sunset behind it, opening the door to…our final episode.

Body Count:

Rest in pieces, Papa, plus some lab and military buds too, in all likelihood.

Most ’80s Moment of the Episode:

I know that RV accessories aren’t necessarily era-specific, but for some reason, the striped camper awning falling off the RV as the crew speeds off felt very of the moment to me.

Kase Wickman is a writer, editor, Ravenclaw and certified fraidy-cat who lives in New Jersey. If she had powers, she’d never have to wash off mascara again. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram, if you dare.