I wanted to write this in earlier comments: Does anyone think of Black Mesa while the Hawkins Lab scenes (the current time, not Eleven's flashbacks)? specially when they send in the one dude in the Upside-Down. That could've been Gordon Freeman.
Anyway, as a i expected the protagonists are shifting now in the offensive. But i cringed on Hopper's plan. What was his exit strategy? I know, he is more an intuition type, but that was seriously dumb. Another thing that felt out of place was the scene at the vigil with Mr. Clarke. Firstly it was an unusual amount of explanation for Stranger Things, secondly this punch-a-pencil-through-paper-explanation was very cliché. And not 80s cliché, i looked it up. It was first used in Event Horizon in 1997 (or has Mr. Clarke the ability to watch movies from the future, which would be awesome btw.), then recently in Interstellar.
I really enjoyed the duo Nancy-Jonathan. Nancy finally left her 80s-trope-shell and showed some soul. The confrontation developed both characters much further.
Speaking of Duos: Joyce was in combination with Lonnie also very good. She used her maniac energy, that she had built up in the last episodes in converted it into an emancipatory act.
One final thought, that i also wanted to write in earlier comments: I think they showed the monster too early. We saw already the head and parts of the body in episode 3 or so. I would've wished they wanted until the end of this episode to show anything of the monster directly. So the picture analysis in the dark room and everything else connected to finding the monster would have had so much more impact.

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@vanilla-chief oh yeah I see the Black Mesa/Half-Life thing you mentioned there. I actually thought it was more like The Poltergeist (1982) because it being a portal (or gateway to the other side), and tied to a rope.
I agree with you on the early reveal too, but that seems more fit for a full-length film. I'm not too bothered by it though. There could be more "things" (as the show title suggests) later on.

@vanilla-chief I do wonder who first came up with the hole-in-the-paper metaphor, but it makes the best logical sense for most of us laypeople in trying to conceptualize a wormhole. It's hardly the trope-iest thing in this series thus far. Though I agree with you, the teacher is a little convenient and is obviously there for expository purposes; I guess they had to phone it in a little bit given the short span of the series. As to Hopper, I think it's partially that he doesn't want to let them get away with whatever they're doing, and he's a miserable man on his own with not much left to lose; I suspect it's not so much foolishness (he may be a drunk, but he's obviously very intuitive) so much as it's a "here's my chance to do something worthwhile and well at least I'll go down swinging" mentality.

@vanilla-chief I completely agree about the monster reveal. Revealing it later was more along the lines of what I was expecting of the show before I started watching. It definitely would have been more effective to have a big reveal in this episode rather than earlier.

@vanilla-chief You've said everything I wanted to say lol

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