2x03 Chapter Three: The Pollywog

[7.5/10] This episode felt a little less momentous than the prior two, more of a piece-moving episode than ones previous to it. But there’s still plenty of good stuff here.

I like the advent of the titular pollywog as the story engine for this one. Connecting Dustin’s new pet to not only the Upside Down, but to the e thing Will coughed up in last season’s finale is a nice way to again pick something up from before and move things forward. The detail about heat versus cold helps signify its origins, and there’s something that just feels like good ol’ fashioned kid adventure hijinks for the boys and Max to examine it and chase it around the school. The “boy and his pet” story is a classic trope, and the show does well with it here, both with Dustin’s protectiveness of it and Will’s reluctance around it.

I also like Eleven getting fed up of being stuck in the cabin, juxtaposed with scenes of how they got there in the first place. Franky, it’s my favorite part of the episode. There’s something really clever about doing a montage of how she and Hopper started this surrogate father/daughter relationship, watching them bond, and demonstrating how this place became a welcome home before it became an unwelcome prison. The precautions Hopper takes are good setup for when things inevitably go awry later in the season, and convey the gravity of Eleven violating these rules.

She doesn’t like what she finds when she sneaks out. For one thing, the episode sets up that she both yearns for a mother and is told by Hopper tha hers is gone. We know that’s not true, so it seems like plain setup for a “friends never lie” sense of betrayal when she discovers that her mom is still around, albeit in a diminished state.

But she also finds Mike, and it’s the one thing I don’t like in this episode. One of my bugaboos in storytelling is contrived misunderstandings. So Eleven just so happens to see Mike when she just so happens to be alone with a girl, at a point where it just so happens to be unclear that he resents that girl for replacing Eleven in their group rather than experiencing any affection for her chaps my hide. Hopefully it’s a very temporary headache and we get the sweet reunion between Eleven and Mike around...oh say...episode five.

There’s also some good developments on the broader threat arc, with Hopper realizing that the rot is radiating out from the government building in Hawkins, ultimately standing his ground with Paul Reiser over the feds needing to look into it if they want him to keep quiet. I like Paul Reiser in this. He does a good job of playing warm and cuddly while hinting that there’s still something sinister afoot.

We get a similar sort of discovery with Joyce, where she watches the video of Will’s Halloween on Bob's camcorder, only to notice a pattern in the static that matches the outline of the creature Will drew from one of his “episodes.” Given the series’ president for how the creates from the Upside Down interfere with electricity and similar signals, it’s a cool way to confirm these aren’t just PTSD flashbacks but that Will is seeing something real.

Speaking of which, I appreciate the notion of Will’s time in the Upside Down having given him “true sight”, to where he can experience that place in a way others can’t. His conversation with Bob is nice setup for the episode’s ending (even if I wish they didn’t belabor it by cutting back and forth to a conversation that happened within the same episode.) Will trying to stand up to the monster and tell it to go away is a good cliffhanger, especially when we’ve had two episodes of setup for this scary creature but don’t fully know what it can do.

(As an aside, I feel like there’s more to Bob than meets the eye. I don’t know what it is -- maybe he works for the government and deliberately got close to Joyce as part of a spying thing -- but there’s some extra layer to do this dude who seems to good to be true, and I’m curious to find out what it is)

The one part of this episode I didn’t care for is the teen drama. Why we’re back to the love triangle business with Nancy, Steve, and Jonathan, I don’t know. But it leads to her and Jonathan playing kid detectives again, either trying to spill the beans to Barb’s mom or at least trying to lure the feds out of hiding so they can force a confrontation. (Or, given the trip to Radio Shack, maybe so they can secretly record the feds telling the truth about the situation?)

That just leaves Max’s brother (or whatever he is), who is an irredeemable, stereotypical asshole at this point. He’s cartoonishly jerky, which makes me dislike him not just as a character, but as an element of the show. Still, maybe they’re going somewhere with him,

Overall, this one didn’t explore as many new avenues as I might like, but it did what it did well, and set up enough to make me curious to know where things head from here, so I’m hard-pressed to complain.