4x06 Chapter Six: The Dive

[7.1/10] We’re in prime wheel-spinning mode here. Things are happening, but little of it really moves the ball.

I am so over the Russian business. Every part of it feels so inevitable. There’s some juice to Murray threatening Yuri into bringing them near the prison where Hopper’s being held. But it just seems so insane. There’s no real plan, no way to get anyone in or out, and they were all just in a plane crash. Again, this is a show where demons from another dimension threaten small towns, so I’m not exactly asking for realism. The problem is that these storylines feel like part of a different show, some weird grim spy routine that's divorced in tone and focus from everything else.

I guess they’re moving closer, finding the safehouse where Hopper holed up previously. I’m not really interested in the plan though, sine posing as Yuri and pretending ott turn over Joye and the real Yuri as prisoners comes off like an idiotic plan that shouldn’t work by any right.

I’ve also completely lost my care about Hopper in the prison. Again, this is a big Hopper speech episode, with him talking about how they’re lambs to the slaughter or the demogorgon at what turns out to be their last meal. At least he has a plan to scare it off with fire, which has some minor intrigue compared to Joyce and Murray’s scheme. But the whole thing’s a big waste.

I’m also not terribly compelled by Jason the basketball star whipping up the town into a satanic panic. I feel like we’re eventually going to get a flash forward and find out he became a politician or a televangelist or something. There’s merit to the idea of connecting these events to the real life satanic panics that hit the country around the same time and had folks casting aspersions on D&D clubs. But the whole thing is so cartoony. Granted, it was cartoony in real life too, but that just means it’s not particularly compelling in fiction when you have a bunch of strangers worried that some dumb nerds have satanic powers.

I’m also losing my patience with the rival government agent business. Seeing Lt. Sullivan torture one of Owens’ men for information makes him seem like a generic baddie. I imagine they’re setting up some grand confrontation in Ruth, Nevada where everything collides, but it’s more throat-clearing in an episode full of it.

I feel mostly the same way about the Hawkins crew finding the “snack-sized” gate to the Upside Down. So they go find it. So what? What are they supposed to do without Eleven. Nobody has any halfway decent plans, something they at least kind of acknowledge in their discussion of what to tell Eddie. Sure, they’re gathering clues, which is a good thing, but who are they going to tell? What are they going to do with this information. There’s nothing really driving them, no target to hit, so it comes off aimless.

Plus good lord, why are we throwing Nancy and Steve back together. I’ve said my piece, bu the show’s leaning hard into it at this point, and spare me. The Nancy, Jonathan, Steve love triangle was bad in season 1, and it’s bad now. I won’t deny that the dynamic of the rest of the group can be a lot of fun -- Dustin in particular steals the show every time -- but these generally smart kids seem to be acting like idiots, just poking around at various demonic things without any precautions or thought process. We’ll see if Steve’s “Why don’t I poke at that evil-looking red thing?” strategy results in anything other than him being choked to death by demon bats.

I’m somewhat compelled by the Eleven material still, but even there, my interest is waning. We get it. Eleven’s powers can be spurred by the opposite of her “happy thought”. Her anger comes out especially when being bullied because she was bullied in her abusive “gifted” program. There was an original patient, one the assistant orderly tells her about and then gets tased for sharing the info. The prelude to the terrible event we witnessed in the first episode is starting to drag out, and while some of the hints we get are intriguing, everyone involved in this both past and present seems terrible, and it’s time to pull the trigger on whatever the point is.

Overall, this is all still fairly watchable, but lacks the excitement or momentum of prior seasons of the show. Maybe it’s just the overstuffed runtimes, or the surfeit of storylines at play, but everything feels more scattered, uninvolving, or pointless.

EDIT: I forgot about Mike and company linking up with Susie, which shows you about how important it is. I like getting a chance to see a deeper glimpse of Susie’s home life, and there’s something about Argyle and Eden’s instant obsession with one another that's oddly endearing. But overall, this is another piece-moving interlude in the story that functionally adds one more link in the chain for Mike’s crew helping Eleven, but doesn’t do much beyond that.

There are Tolkien references in the episode! Dustin and Eddie mention the Shire and Mordor and later on, when the adults in the gang find the entrance to Vecna's underwater lair, Steve has a "fly you fools" moment when he is dragged back to the Upside Down world by some tentacles just like Gandalf is dragged down by the balrog's whip. The others don't fly though but follow him underground.

Other breaking news from the episode:

• Jason gives the pep talk to the Hawkins community and inspires the people to go hunting for Eddie. You have to hand it to him that he is a great leader. In the end of this storyline, Dustin gets caught by the police.

• Eleven has to relieve her memories in order to regain her powers and it turns out that she in fact DID kill the kids from the institute for gifted children who were bullying her. So there is some seed of evil in her after all. It is a bit sad to know what she really killed them since I hoped it was only some nightmare of hers. I wonder if she could be targeted by Vecna now that she has a really dark secret in her past? It would make her a perfect victim of the monster, feeding on guilt and pangs of conscience.

• The other team with Mike, Will and Jonathan finally reach Susie; her family is hilarious as well as the plot they come up with to get access to the computer; though I wonder why they couldn't have used just any computer? or were computers so rare to find back then?

• In the Russian plot, Joyce and Murray break free and find a way to make Yuri show them the way to the prison whereas Hopper explains the demogorgon stuff to the other prisoners and come up with the idea how to slay the monster.