4x05 Chapter Five: The Nina Project

[6.9/10] Pretty weak stuff. Most of the storylines here were fine-ish, but none of them were out-and-out good.

I don’t know where they’re going with Eleven. I am real reticent about them bringing back “Papa”. I know we never saw a body, which means nothing’s for sure in genre stories, but it still feels like a cheat for him to be back. More than that, they presented him as an abusive parent, and yet are hinting that he at least sort of has Eleven’s interests at heart? It makes me uncomfortable. I’m not averse to moral ambiguity in characters or stories, but I’m leery about where they’re going with this.

To the point, I like the idea that Owens isn’t necessarily the pure-hearted guy we thought. The notion that he seems amiable and avuncular, but is actually turning Eleven over to the same group of people who hurt her originally is an interesting one. But I’m not sure they’re going that way, and he’s still worried about her health and safety during the new “training” so who knows.

All of that said, I’m intrigued by what they’re actually doing with Eleven. We’ve seen her power come from a sense of protection, love, and even anger before. But this suggests it can come from a downright murderous rage. We saw hints of this sort of thing, a connection to her powers, with her escapades with her “lost sister”. But there’s emotional depths to plumb if this is what makes her a “superhero” again.

But everything else is pretty weak. The junior detectives in Hawkins figure out that Vecna is skulking around the Creels’ old house, which...duh? It seemed pretty obvious, the point that I assumed the house had been torn down and replaced with the trailer park. There’s not much to glean from the gang doing a haunted house experience.

They continue to gesture toward putting Steve and Nancy back together, which bleh. They also gesture to putting Max and Lucas back together, which I’m on board with. And the meta-ish back and forth between Steve and Dustin continues to be gold. But otherwise, it’s a bunch of cheap, standard scares, and some more arachnid imagery that suggests Vecna is luring victims into his web and feeding on them like a spider does to a fly. It’s all fine, but nothing special.

There’s nothing special about Jason and the basketball jerks pursuing Eddie either. We get another kill, but beyond that, this whole subplot is treading water, literally in Jason’s case. They know that Lucas is a traitor, and they’ve scared Eddie out of his hiding place, but for the most part this is all table-setting.

The California contingent isn’t much better off. Again, they’re mostly in an interstitial phase, burying the agent who helped them and finding a pretty basic clue. They lay it on pretty thick with Will’s comments to Mike about it being hard to tell someone how you feel for fear they won’t understand. The double meaning, of Mike being hesitant to say “I love you”, and Will being hesitant to express his feelings for Mike, is good storytelling though. And I’m interested to see them deciding to link up with Dustin’s girlfriend Susie to take advantage of her hacking skills, which at least adds a new element to the mix.

But the worst material in this one is the Russia/Alaska business. I figure this is supposed to be Hopper’s big episode, where he gives the grand dramatic dialogue delivering heretofore unknown backstory and grim introspection. Unfortunately, his “I am the curse” speech comes off flat and unmoving, despite using the power of montage and other TV tricks to try to make us feel something. Hopper and David Harbour were some of my favorite parts of the show in its early seasons, and I don’t know how this season has managed to drain the life out of both.

Somehow, though, it’s better than Joyce and Murray somehow managing to subdue Yuri the smuggler and successfully crash land a prop plane using only peanut butter jars and karate. Don’t get me wrong, it’s amusing to see Murray deploy his teenager taekwondo on his Russian kidnapper. But even for a show that’s always had a supernatural bent, this feels cartoony and implausible, like a cheap action movie, rather than the relatively down-to-earth take on creatures from another dimension invading a small town that Stranger Things started as. Now we’re getting into hand-to-hand combat with foreign smugglers in rocking prop planes and successfully landing them in the middle of the forest. It’s just too much.

Overall, this follows up the best episode of the season with the weakest, which is still perfectly watchable, but makes a lot of head scratch-worthy choices.

I'm a bit on the fence about this episode because it wasn't even half as intense as the previous one. It mainly concentrates on Eleven's training in a n underground base which looks a bit tardisy unil Brenner appears and Eleven is forced to re-live her past in some form of an experiment. At the end of the experiment, she breaks free and tries to escape the underground base, but as she finally releases her power and knocks out the guards, she is confronted by Brenner and in the end she agrees to come back to the base with him and continue the training, she also begins to call him "Papa" again, so in a way it seems that she accepted her past and does not rebel against it anymore.

Nancy recognises the Creel mansion in the pictures Max has been drawing, and the crew set off to visit the haunted house, where they finally locate the lair of the monster. Max and Lucas reconnect during the search for Vecna, which is great, though I am not sure whether it was a good idea to take Max for a trip to the monster's mansion just after she barely escaped his clutches and is still reeling from her ordeal.

The preview of the episode said that Vecna claims another victim and luckily it is not someone we like as the lot goes to some guy from the baskeball team chasing Eddie. He only sees and hears the clock but we don't get to know what Vecna tortures him with as any other visions than the clock are not shown, he is killed during the chase after Eddie, which probably saves Eddie, but the viewer never gets to care about the guy who is killed. So there is nothing emotional about this death and in a sense Vecna killings are starting to become a commonplace occurence in Hawkins. In a way it cheapens the threat of this monster somehow.

I agree with the other reviews that the Russian subplot is totally unnecessary and even a bit jarring in comparison to the rest of the story as it takes the focus away from the main plot of the fight against the monster. I usually fast-forward it when watching an episode, though Hopper's confession to this ex-guard and now co-prisoner was a bit moving and I watched it at normal pace.