Date of release: July 15, 2016 (Netflix)
Written by: Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer
Story by: Paul Dichter
Directed by: Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer
”MIKE! I FOUND THE CHOCOLATE PUDDING!”
It might be an unintended part of the genre, but a question I asked myself during this episode was: How did the Upside Down come to be? There are buildings there, roads have been made, cars are parking on the side of the road, street lamps are illuminated... There is all this supposed human activity and infrastructure in the Upside Down, but there are no humans to be found anywhere. Which begs the question of how much the Upside Down can be described as a parallel world when it seems to be more of an exact mirror image of the real world, but no humans live there for some reason. Heck, even Castle Byers made it into the Upside Down, and that's not because someone built it there. It was most likely copied from the real world and pasted into the Upside Down dimension, just like everything else. Now I'm asking myself: How often does that copy-and-pasting happen, and could Joyce and Hopper not have left a box of water and food for Will to find in his fort, so that he could have collected some strength right before his mother was going to find him? Could a person survive in this dimension with the help of another person in the real world knowing their whereabouts at every second, by leaving stuff for the person in the Upside Down to find? And did this show ever bother with any of those questions during the next four years, or nah?
With this episode, Eleven turned into a real killer of people. She dispatched a whole army and the evil, creepy woman by blowing the insides of their heads – at least it's what I was thinking was happening there. It turns out that “Papi” made a weapon after all, only he was too greedy and evil to take care of his weapon by treating her like a human, like a child, instead of like a science experiment. Let this be a lesson to all of you conducting illegal human experiments: if you treat your subjects inhumanely, they will come back and kick your butt or blow your brains out through your eyes. So, maybe treat them like actual people.
The one thing I was happy about was that Steve took a right turn on the path of redemption. He may have been freaked out by the monster show at first, but he got into the fight quickly, assisted Nancy and Jonathan in their battle, and behaved, which in turn made him Nancy's boyfriend in an official capacity. They spent Christmas together because Steve realized that his behavior was crap (and because he saved Nancy's life). Who knows, maybe he will even become Jonathan's new best friend after gifting him a camera. Steve, the man who began his existence in Hawkins, Indiana as a dick and possible antagonist, and concluded his stint as an ally. See, men can change for the better after all.
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| The monster and the little girl: Thankfully unlike anything Luc Besson has ever written. |
