1x08 Chapter Eight: The Upside Down

[9.0/10] I’m always impressed when a show manages to make its finale the best episode of the season. It’s a lot easier to tease things and whet the audience’s appetite with anticipation than it is to actually pay those things off and bring everything to a satisfying conclusion, so I have a lot of respect for shows that can pull it off.

“The Upside Down” basically breaks the show into three major storylines, setpieces, and climaxes, and each of them works, which is no small feat.

I even like the teenager focused one. I love how Nancy and Jonathan’s plan at the Byers’ house basically turns into doing Home Alone for some dark dimension plant monster. There’s a very tactile quality to the way they lay their traps and meticulously plan everything out for how they’re going to both lure and beat the monster. It’s actually a solid plan, arguably the most solid we’ve seen from any of the show’s major characters, who seem to be mostly winging it.

But I really like the narrative choice to have Steve show up at the worst possible time. His presence immediately adds a sense of discomfort and extra urgency, when he’s an unpredictable ingredient to this already tense situation and another variable they have to account for. It makes the moment when The Monster emerges from the ceiling that much freakier and helps catch and expectant audience off-balance.

It also helps redeem Steve a bit! Look, I still don’t know where the show’s going with him exactly, but his willingness to join the fray and do the right thing despite clearly being freaked to all hell earns him some brownie points. The actual confrontation with The Monster, who is particularly frightening coming through the floor and ceiling, is riveting, and the bullet wounds, traps, and conflagration show our mortal heroes striking a blow against their supernatural pursuer.

Then, of course, you have the middle-schoolers, and theirs may very well be the best thread in this. You not only have the silliness of Dustin and Lucas exalting over the secret cache of chocolate pudding, but you have a sweet chaste kiss between Mike and Eleven that pays off their puppy love nicely.

That escalates into some crazy suspense when the feds show up and start stalking the good guys. I don’t know if Eleven has ever seemed as intimidating as when she wrecked the agents who had them surrounded. That was some crazy blood-bender shit. The fact that their subsequent capture is disrupted by the Monster freakily emerging from the walls of the school is perfect, and it seemingly giving Matthew Modine his just deserts is a fitting end.

But I particularly like the way this portion of the episode with Eleven’s defense and seeming sacrifice. You sort of knew this would have to come down to Eleven vs. The Monster, and yet the confrontation is still exciting, both because the show lulls you into the thought that the feds with their automatic weapons may have subdued the creature, and because it gives you your clearest shot of The Monster yet, with some cool strobe-like effects. Eleven thanking Mike for his kindness before closing the gate and apparently taking both her and The Monster with it is a powerful, martyr-like moment for the show’s most compelling character. (And it bears repeating that Millie Bobby Brown does a fantastic job over the course of the show, conveying so many layers to her character and emotional state despite having very minimal dialogue.)

The Joyce/Hopper storyline is very good too. We see them traipsing through the Upside Down, giving us our clearest view yet of this shadow realm. The show really gives us atmosphere through all of this, making things feel extra creepy with the color grading and production design, in addition to Hop and Joyce seeing the after effects of what’s happened in our dimension.

I especially like the way the finale ties Hopper’s devotion to rescuing Will as a sort of cosmic recompense for the way nothing could save his daughter. Drawing a parallel to him telling Joyce and his daughter to breathe slow, pulling the Monster tentacle out of Will’s mouth in the same way his daughter had a breathing apparatus, and most importantly, performing CPR and saving Will when the same procedure failed to save his daughter makes this personal and poetic for the sheriff beyond just the monster-adjacent search and rescue.

It’s incredibly cathartic when they manage to revive Will, get him out of there, and reunite him with his friends and family. It does seem a little odd that Hopper would sell Eleven out like that, or that the feds would go for it (I initially thought it was some kind of double bluff), but I can see how, psychologically, Hopper would be willing to sacrifice some girl he’s known for maybe a couple hours for a family he cares about, in the name of not forcing another parent to lose their child. It taints things a little bit, but frankly, I appreciate the complexity of that.

The only thing I don’t love in this episode is the epilogue. If things ended with everyone reunited at the hospital, I think I would rate this one even higher, but there’s too many pat scenes and sequel hooks that didn’t wow me at the end.

Case-in-point, the hints that Hopper is feeding Eleven out in Murkwood, and that Will might be turning into a Monster, are fine, but weaken the choices the characters made up to that point. I get the commerce side of needing to include teases like that, but it just feels too cheesy and easy to me. Likewise, I think it’s a lot more interesting if we see Hopper ushered into some government vehicle and don’t see him again than to just see him alive and well and otherwise unperturbed one month later.

That said, it’s really heartening to see the boys playing Dungeons and Dragons together again, bringing us full circle. I also like where the show leaves things with the Nancy/Steve/Jonathan love triangle, with her (and implicitly Steve) giving Jonathan a replacement camera to help make things right, but the original couple persisting with Nancy slouching toward a relationship like her parents’. It’s warm yet cynical in a really strong way. There’s less cynicism to it, but it’s still nice to see the Byers family reunited at the holidays, even if there’s something dark in the offing.

Overall, Stranger Things’s first season was a great ride. The writing wasn’t always brilliant, and I don’t know that the show had anything terribly deep to say, but it was very well structured and well-paced in terms of its long-form storytelling, and the cast of characters and ecosystem of Hawkins, Indiana kept things interesting. In the same way, the acting, direction, and production design were all a cut above. It turned out to be some really good meat and potatoes horror/sci-fi/genre storytelling, which works just fine for me. It may not achieve the heights of some of its “elevated horror” brethren, but it’s well-made and lots of fun, and manages to avoid some of the slog that its prestige-aping equivalents fall into.