‘Stranger Things’ Season 2 Episode 4 Review: “Will The Wise”

It’s worth remembering that Stranger Things season 1 was an intertwined mystery that carefully untangled: a missing boy, a mysterious girl, an invisible monster, Christmas lights sending messages from the beyond. It was about the unseen and the desperate power of belief. Stranger Things Season 2 has a different kind of urgency, the slower dread of turning to face the strange and finding it everywhere.

Season 1’s search for Will Byers left his mother in a perpetual state of frenzied adrenaline: in “Will the Wise” (Stranger Things Season 2, Episode 4) Joyce (an electric Winona Ryder) has to face the helplessness of a son transforming in front of her eyes. She arrives at Hawkins Middle School as the boys find Will in the field, still being filled up with monster smoke in an Upside Down only he can see. It doesn’t hurt him, not outwardly, and at home Joyce reveals she knows about the Shadow Monster he’s been seeing: “These episodes that you’re having… I think that they’re real.” This time, her intuition gets an easy confirmation from Will, who is scared and confused and cold.

The thermometer puts him at 95 degrees: like d’Artagnan (Dart for short), the Upside Down pollywog, he can’t take heat. Joyce runs him a bath, but Will won’t step into it: as he trembles, a voiceover arrives from Mr. Clarke’s science class lecture, one about how all living things “instinctively respond to danger.” At least that rules out Upside Down zombies. No, Will has something else inside him, like a parasite tapped into his brain. “He liked it cold!” he tells Joyce. She sits by the tub, paused. There is nothing to reach for to fix this, no panicking that can protect her son from whatever is happening to him. We’ve never see this Joyce before, and it’s quietly crushing.

At Hopper’s cabin, he starts a shouting match with Eleven, who’s made it home after her foiled trip to see Mike. Picking a fight with an emotionally volatile telepath who’s endured almost a year in cabin solitude with Hopper and his television and a lifetime of unpacked trauma is maybe not the best idea: she attacks him with her powers, hitting him with a dictionary and furniture, shattering every window in the building as she slumps against a slammed door. Parenting is hard enough without telekinesis, but Eleven has had as much as she can take, and more is coming.

If Stranger Things’ first season was about uncovering secrets, Stranger Things 2 is about keeping them, as well as the toll they take on their carriers. Nancy and Jonathan put their plot into action, waiting in a park to meeting Mrs. Holland, Barb’s mom: instead, every passerby seems like a spy, a picture of playground normalcy turned claustrophobic by quickening camera edits. The paranoia gets to them, and they try to take off: the car won’t start and they’re suddenly surrounded by all those watchful civilians.

As Nancy sneaks off with Jonathan, Billy schools Steve in basketball and gives him some locker room advice after the two hear Nancy’s on the rebound: “Plenty of bitches in the sea,” he says, as Steve smolders, still lathered up. Billy’s real identity—and his relationship with Max, who’s only posing as his sister—might be the season’s lone real mystery. He tells Max to stay away from Lucas, oscillating synthesizers rising to suggest there’s more to this, more to the two of them, than another casually abusive threat. Stranger Things has been praised for the authenticity of its score’s ‘80s revival, but evoking the era would be window dressing without the emotional instructions it communicates so vividly.

Struggling to reach Will, Joyce hands him his art supplies: he draws page after page of the blue tunnels he sees in clipped visions, pages Joyce and Hopper put together. “Maybe it’s roots,” Joyce says. It’s something like that: “Vines,” Hopper says, thinking of the rotten pumpkin patches. At the laboratory, Dr. Owens tries his charm offensive on Nancy and Jonathan, and shows them the unclosed door to the Upside Down.

“We can’t seem to erase our mistake,” he says. “But we can stop it from spreading.” He’s making another sequel mistake so fundamental it’s almost comical, the same one every greedy or corrupt human villain makes in films from Aliens to every Jurassic Park movie: this time, we’re in control. Whatever understanding they reach, science fiction has a way of telling people they rarely are. Owens, seemingly content with his work, tries patriotism on Nancy and Jonathan: “Imagine if a foreign state, let’s say the Soviets, heard about our mistake.” Ah, yes: the old “We have to keep this craven thing a secret in case it falls into the wrong hands” defense.

The Cold War propaganda doesn’t work. Nancy pulls a tape recorder out of her bag: she caught Owens on the record, confessing to Barb’s murder. Technically, to the Demogorgon’s Barb murder, but Nancy will take justice wherever she can get it. “Let’s burn that lab to the ground,” she tells Jonathan.

In Hopper’s cabin, Eleven begins to clean the home she threw into disarray and finds another secret: a basement door to Hopper’s things. There are boxes marked with his old lives, New York and Vietnam, and another marked with hers: Hawkins National Laboratory. She digs through the files and finds her mother’s: “Ives, Terry.” There’s a photo of Terry with her scientist “Papa,” and Eleven begins to realize what she’s seeing—she ties on a blindfold and reaches into the psionic void, finding Terry in a rocking chair, babbling to herself. But her mother looks back. “Jane!” she says, and disappears into smoke. Eleven knows herself for the first time and cries, not for the first time, and all this pain and loss has to build toward something more than broken windows.

After a meeting with his friends over Will’s Shadow Monster encounter, Dustin’s realized his pollywog secret may not be worth keeping just in time to catch ol’ Dart the size of his family cat, eating the family cat. The glow of their candy bar bond exits his face. What humbling will come to Dr. Owens and his trusty flame-throwing soldiers? The Upside Down is reaching across Hawkins now, hidden only by dirt: at the pumpkin patch, Hopper digs himself a hole deep enough to bury bodies and cracks into the tunnel in Will’s visions, tell-tale spores floating the air.

David Greenwald is a critic and cat owner in Portland who has written for The Oregonian, Billboard, and the Los Angeles Times. He has opinions on Twitter (@davidegreenwald).

Watch the "Will The Wise" episode of Stranger Things 2 on Netflix