[8.1/10] Honestly, this one could have stopped at the opening credits, and I’d still be a happy camper. The urgency of the “bad people” bearing down on our heroes, the crackerjack coordination of the kids via their walkie-talkies, the van flip that Eleven performs to save the day, and the mutual apologies and reconciliations among Mike, Lucas, and Eleven are all just the best. That one series of sequences may be enough to single-handedly justify Stranger Things, as the build to that point and the series of cathartic payoffs along the way was riveting and heartening in equal measure.
But the rest of the episode works well too! Things are truly going down at this point, and I like how “The Bathtub” brings the various far-flung corners of the show together. Hopper and Joyce link up with Nancy and Jonathan, who compare notes and realize they’re on the same page. That quartet makes contact with the middle-schoolers, and after some tense moments spent deciding whether they can trust the adults (“Lando Calrissean!!!” a still-fresh betrayal in 1983), finally everyone working on Team Upside Down is on the same page.
(As an aside, I really like the touch that Jonathan figures out that the best way to make contact with Mike is through Will’s walkie talkie. It’s a smart call.)
Still, stuff is happening on the other corner of the show as well. The Wheelers continue to be some of T.V.’s most incompetent parents. (I suppose parents have to be half-blind in order for these kid adventure stories to work.) The feds make contact with them and Mr. and Mrs. Wheeler try to help them find Mike and his cohort.
The strangest side story though belongs to Steve. To be frank, I don’t know how I feel about the character or what they’re doing with him. Sometimes he seems like a generic jock jerk. Sometimes he seems like he genuinely cares for Nancy and is having epiphanies about the wrongness of his action. I want to give him some slack as a young adult, especially one who’s realizing that he could be better to do this, but that’s really damn hard one episode after he was slut-shaming Nancy and crossing a line with his comments about Jonathan’s family. I can appreciate the show going for complexity/multitudes here, but in the short term Steve just seems a little schizophrenic.
Still, Team Upside Down is united, and it gives the show some real momentum. For one thing, it gives us some pairings we don’t usually get or at least haven’t so far. There’s a vaguely paternal vibe between Hopper and Jonathan which seems to be hinting toward the role the good sheriff may play in his life in the future. We see Nancy and Mike really talk for the first time, expressing concern and care for one another, amid the usual teenage “No, I don’t have a crush on that person!” protestation. And I particularly like Joyce and Eleven together, with Ms. Byers providing the sort of genuine parental care and compassion that Eleven’s been so deprived of for so long, subjected only to Matthew Modine’s twisted version of the same.
(As an aside, I continue to love Dustin as a character. His phone call to his science teacher, which interrupted a date no less, was nothing short of hilarious. I got a big kick out of speech about “locking the doors of curiosity.”) That all leads to one more effort to connect to the Upside Down before (presumably) some of our heroes actually journey there to retrieve Will and maybe Barb. I like the idea of trying to recreate Eleven’s sensory deprivation tank in some form so that she can reach the two kidnappees, and the efforts to retrieve the supplies and knowhow necessary give the characters a lot of cool moments.
The sequence where she makes it into the Upside Down continues to give me cool, scary Under the Skin vibes. It’s the closest look we’ve gotten at poor Will, who’s surviving in “Castle Byers” but seems much worse for wear, even before the monster seems to attack him. Likewise, the glimpse we get of Barb is not pretty, raising questions of whether she can be saved and showing off some real cool production design. But the most important part is that when Eleven gets scared, when she’s rattled, she hears Joyce’s voice reassuring her, and it helps center and steady here. The show’s clearly building something there, and I like it.
But we can’t leave things without some big cliffhangers. So we have Hopper and Joyce getting surrounded and held at gunpoint by the authorities. We have Nancy and Jonathan retrieving their army supplies and planning to go kill that thing themselves. And we have poor Will seemingly in the maw of the monster. Excited to see the raging climax!
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2020-10-02T01:30:05Z
[8.1/10] Honestly, this one could have stopped at the opening credits, and I’d still be a happy camper. The urgency of the “bad people” bearing down on our heroes, the crackerjack coordination of the kids via their walkie-talkies, the van flip that Eleven performs to save the day, and the mutual apologies and reconciliations among Mike, Lucas, and Eleven are all just the best. That one series of sequences may be enough to single-handedly justify Stranger Things, as the build to that point and the series of cathartic payoffs along the way was riveting and heartening in equal measure.
But the rest of the episode works well too! Things are truly going down at this point, and I like how “The Bathtub” brings the various far-flung corners of the show together. Hopper and Joyce link up with Nancy and Jonathan, who compare notes and realize they’re on the same page. That quartet makes contact with the middle-schoolers, and after some tense moments spent deciding whether they can trust the adults (“Lando Calrissean!!!” a still-fresh betrayal in 1983), finally everyone working on Team Upside Down is on the same page.
(As an aside, I really like the touch that Jonathan figures out that the best way to make contact with Mike is through Will’s walkie talkie. It’s a smart call.)
Still, stuff is happening on the other corner of the show as well. The Wheelers continue to be some of T.V.’s most incompetent parents. (I suppose parents have to be half-blind in order for these kid adventure stories to work.) The feds make contact with them and Mr. and Mrs. Wheeler try to help them find Mike and his cohort.
The strangest side story though belongs to Steve. To be frank, I don’t know how I feel about the character or what they’re doing with him. Sometimes he seems like a generic jock jerk. Sometimes he seems like he genuinely cares for Nancy and is having epiphanies about the wrongness of his action. I want to give him some slack as a young adult, especially one who’s realizing that he could be better to do this, but that’s really damn hard one episode after he was slut-shaming Nancy and crossing a line with his comments about Jonathan’s family. I can appreciate the show going for complexity/multitudes here, but in the short term Steve just seems a little schizophrenic.
Still, Team Upside Down is united, and it gives the show some real momentum. For one thing, it gives us some pairings we don’t usually get or at least haven’t so far. There’s a vaguely paternal vibe between Hopper and Jonathan which seems to be hinting toward the role the good sheriff may play in his life in the future. We see Nancy and Mike really talk for the first time, expressing concern and care for one another, amid the usual teenage “No, I don’t have a crush on that person!” protestation. And I particularly like Joyce and Eleven together, with Ms. Byers providing the sort of genuine parental care and compassion that Eleven’s been so deprived of for so long, subjected only to Matthew Modine’s twisted version of the same.
(As an aside, I continue to love Dustin as a character. His phone call to his science teacher, which interrupted a date no less, was nothing short of hilarious. I got a big kick out of speech about “locking the doors of curiosity.”)
That all leads to one more effort to connect to the Upside Down before (presumably) some of our heroes actually journey there to retrieve Will and maybe Barb. I like the idea of trying to recreate Eleven’s sensory deprivation tank in some form so that she can reach the two kidnappees, and the efforts to retrieve the supplies and knowhow necessary give the characters a lot of cool moments.
The sequence where she makes it into the Upside Down continues to give me cool, scary Under the Skin vibes. It’s the closest look we’ve gotten at poor Will, who’s surviving in “Castle Byers” but seems much worse for wear, even before the monster seems to attack him. Likewise, the glimpse we get of Barb is not pretty, raising questions of whether she can be saved and showing off some real cool production design. But the most important part is that when Eleven gets scared, when she’s rattled, she hears Joyce’s voice reassuring her, and it helps center and steady here. The show’s clearly building something there, and I like it.
But we can’t leave things without some big cliffhangers. So we have Hopper and Joyce getting surrounded and held at gunpoint by the authorities. We have Nancy and Jonathan retrieving their army supplies and planning to go kill that thing themselves. And we have poor Will seemingly in the maw of the monster. Excited to see the raging climax!