Netflix Month: Stranger Things Season 2 - The Pollywog/Will the Wise

It's Netflix Month

And we continue our retrospective on Stranger Things. Last time, Mike was missing El, Will’s keeps flashing and seeing a creature in the Upside Down, Nancy said some words she’ll regret to Steve, and Hopper, whilst partaking in being El’s child-minder has stumbled across some rotten pumpkins with black goo. Oh and there’s a girl named Max and Lucas and Dustin have the hots for her, Dustin also found something in his trash can.

Chapter 3: The Pollywog

Pollywog, now there’s a name you can take seriously.

We open in Dustin’s house. His mum, who the subtitles tell me is named Claudia, stops him and asks how Halloween was, he says it was ‘tubular’ I think you’ve got the wrong decade for that. Claudia can tell something’s up (FINALLY! I’ve been waiting for years for a parent to do this) and part of his costume begins to shake. He tells Claudia that he’d rigged a motor into his vacuum thing to make it look like he caught a ghost, and she believes that, I take everything back. He evicts his turtle from its tank and puts in what he found, a small lizard creature. He decides to feed it chocolate because that’s totally safe for animals and decides to call him… he’s nicknamed Dart and I’m gonna call him Dart.

As Dustin sleeps we see Dart, now noticeably bigger and screeching. We flash back and watch as Hopper leaves food out for El again, this time she decides to show herself to him. She wakes up and is tempted out of bed by 8000 kcal of waffles. She is gonna have a heart attack or diabetes or something. It’s not like she exercises! El also misses Mike but whilst Hopper tries to convince her he’s making progress he’s been saying it for nearly a year and she no longer believes him.

After having trouble finding her keys, Joyce is late for work, she tries to get Jonathan to take Will to school but Bob volunteers. Bob is adorable, it’s a shame his fate is pretty much sealed. Dustin heads to the library and begins taking books about lizards, hoping to identify the one he has. Bob heard Will ‘dotting around’ and assume he had another nightmare.

Bob relates to a nightmare he had about clowns… As if it wasn’t already apparent how IT was a major inspiration for this. He faced his fear head on and told it to go away. This is terrible advice for Will but of course Bob doesn’t know the nature of his problem. Max asks about why Will is called Zombie boy to Lucas, Lucas gives her the half-truth explanation.

In class, and how f*cking convenient, they’re discussing the case of a guy who got stabbed in the head and though survived, his personality changed. Max looks at Will throughout the entire lesson. Dustin bursts into the lesson late and begins talking to the group right in the middle of class. D*ck move, d*ckhead, you’re right at the front where Mr Clarke can see you

Hopkins gets into work and joins the crosses where the markers are on a map, unsurprisingly it all centres around Hawkins’ Lab. El is staring at the TV, she puts on a blindfold but immediately takes it off again. She puts on her coat and, flashes back to Hopper showing her in. It’s his grandfather’s old home that was mainly used for storage, Hopper offering it to her as her new home. They put on a music track, so you know what that means?

  

They discuss ground rules in the past and in the present, El proceeds to break all of them as she heads outside in the daylight. Billy proceeds to beat Steve at basketball as Nancy confronts him. She’s forgotten pretty much everything that happened last night. Nancy denies everything she said last night was true, and Steve asks her to simply tell him that she loves him. Nancy for some reason can’t bring herself to do it.

Dustin shows the club, including Max, Dart. Apparently, Pollywog is another name for Tadpole, glad Tadpole stuck. Dustin thinks he’s discovered a new species, since it doesn’t match the description for any known lizard or indeed tadpole. Will looks at it intensely and remembers throwing up a slug thing… OK, that’s the thing he puked up and oh god, I’m just putting this together. That’s disgusting… I’ll get to it later, I think. Will ends up a bit shell-shocked from that.

Bob visits Joyce at work again, apologising if he overstepped his grounds last night. Bob mentions he notices his camcorder was a little banged up, and that Will was picked on by someone. No mention of Jonathan not being anywhere nearby. Hopper confronts Dr Owens about his findings, insisting that the scientists test all the sites marked on the map. Dr Owens is defiant but the agreement is they keep quiet as long as nothing from the lab spreads into the town.

Nancy asks Jonathan what happened and he says that Steve asked him to take her home, he was really upset. Nancy has felt an emptiness inside her since well the whole incident with Barb, Jonathan says he feels it too, remarking that Will is not the same as he once was. Remembering that Bob works at Radio Shack, Nancy comes up with a plan.

El walks through the woods and sees a mother pushing her kid on the swing as she flashes back to her asking Hopkins about her mother. He’s honest, to a point but he doesn’t know everything. The mother eventually notices and El asks where school is. Joyce comes home and tries to watch the video, needing Bob’s help to set it up. She does so and after the bullying she pauses the video, and sees a digital shadow of the Mind Flayer, she traces it and compares it with Will’s picture.

Dustin is about to show Mr Clark Dart but after Will tells Mike what he knows, Mike stops them. Billy goes for a drive with some lady and we find out that according to him at least, Max is not his sister. Max is locked out as the boys discuss what Mike tells them. Mike wants him handed over to Hopper, but Dustin doesn’t want that, as it would mean Dart is as good as dead. Max gets bored and picks the lock as Dart is struggling to escape containment.

They let Dart out and it’s already considerably bigger and grows legs. Max opens the door just at the wrong time to allow him to escape. Nancy and Jonathan arrive at Nancy’s house with some stuff from Radio Shack, they call Barb’s mother with some vague information that’s monitored by Hawkins Lab, speaking of they’re running tests on the pumpkins, when Hopper gets a call about their ‘Russian Girl’ Hopper heads off.

El arrives at the school, seeing the bikes belonging to the boys. El barely misses Mike, none of them seem to have a clear view of Dart. Mike sees someone or something exiting through the doors in the gym, he follows, picking up a mop but only finds Max and the two finally have it out. El catches Max trying to impress her with skateboarding and knocks her off, jealous much, El?

Joyce calls the school, wanting to be transferred to Mr Clarke but after hearing Clarke has left, rushes to the school herself. Will enters the bathroom and can hear Dart, making noises that unsettle him, upon being scared by the monster, he has another episode, with some kind of gas infecting the school. Dustin finds Dart and hides him under his hat and lies to the others about it.

Will runs out of the school, but then remembers the advice from Bob and decides to stand his ground over the monster that’s 20 stories tall. He screams at it to go away and you’d be shocked to hear it doesn’t work, the creature begins reaching into his mind through his eyes, ears and mouth

Again, not a bad episode per say, and I like the escalation and where things round off. I like the plot-line with the kids more than with anything else right now. Joyce’s over-protectiveness is actually beginning to annoy me, despite Bob being a friendly presence, and Steve’s over-reaction feels a little OTT all things considered.

Rating 7/10

Will the Wise

We get the fast driving irony shot as Joyce rushes to the school. They all find Will in the field, as he’s continuing to get infested by the Mind Flayer. Eventually he does wake up. Joyce takes her home and eventually she gets the truth out of Will about what he saw, and the fact the Mind Flayer got him.

El heads back to the house and Hopper is p*ssed off and waiting for her. El is pissed off too and that means she starts using her powers, something Hopper is, for some reason, not ready for. He unplugs the TV, meaning El can’t use it to amplify her signal to contact Mike. Jonathan arrives home and finds Joyce and Will sleeping together, but even with Will’s eyes closed, something is moving in them.

Nancy blags her way to having being gone overnight and meets up with Jonathan. Joyce is having no luck with Hopper but finds that Will has a cold temperature. She runs him a hot bath. Dustin gives Dart some breakfast and heads to school, incidentally it looks like he forgot to put on the lid, before putting a blanket over the tank. He arrives and finds Max, Lucas and Mike searching the trash for Dart.

After another weirdly specific lesson from Mr Clarke. Will looks at the bath but can’t get in it. ‘He’ likes it cold. Hopper is busy repairing the damage done by El in the last episode. He asks that El continues to fix the place and finally decides to call in, the secretary tells him Joyce has called 8 times, please deal with her.

There’s another scene where Billy is trying to be threatening to Steve and Steve at least acts like he doesn’t care. Jonathan and Nancy are in the park and notice plenty of people following them around, they break for Jonathan’s car but it stalls, and they’re confronted. Hopper arrives at Joyce’s finally and Will is in his boxer shorts, with all the windows and doors open, in November.  Will is having difficulty describing what he’s seeing so they give him paper and crayons and he’s quickly to work.

With Mike unable to contact Will, he calls a meeting, and once again Max is shafted. Mike tells them about the Halloween vision and thinks they need more intel to find out what’s going on, that means finding Dart. El beings cleaning up, but then notices something under the floorboards, mostly stuff related to his father but she finds one labelled Hawkins Labs.

Nancy and Jonathan are shown the portal to the Upside Down in Hawkin’s Lab by Dr Owens, he tells them they can’t let the truth reach foreign powers, as they may try to replicate it. Will’s drawing spans a lot of pages but Joyce and hopper eventually figure out how the images connect, showing a mass of sprawling tunnels, Hopper works out that they’re vines and heads out.

Lucas tries to talk to Max but she’s p*ssed off about being brushed off so often. Lucas tries to justify it, but damn if he’s doing a bad job at it. “We’ve been sworn to secrecy,” these are not hard words to say! Billy continues his semi-aggressive douche-baggery so I wish something plot related would happen with him involved. Every scene he’s in seems to establish the same thing, he’s an asshole, can we move on please? He tells Max to stay away from Lucas

Hopper heads back to the farm and begins digging where the dead pumpkins are. El finds information about Terry Ives, and begins realising that she might be her daughter, and finds a photo with her and Brenner. She finds a radio and begins tuning it, looking for Terry through the void using the photo. She eventually finds her, and actually starts to converse but when she tries to touch her she disappears.

Mike pays a visit to Will but Joyce only lets him in when he reveals he knows about the Mind Flayer, Jonathan and Nancy are let out, but Nancy has taped the entire conversation in unreasonably high quality given the time period. Dustin arrives home and finds the tank Dart was in broken, he sees a trail of blood and finds Dart eating his mother’s cat. Hopper digs down and finds the vine, and breaks his way inside the conveniently hollow vine, you can tell immediately he’s in the upside down and in case you didn’t, the camera rotates 180 degrees.

It’s a better episode for building on its respective plot-lines. Unfortunately, Billy continues to be the weak link here

Rating 8/10