Is it the monster itself? A series of tunnels like the ones Will keeps seeing in his visions? “It’s a vine,” declares Hopper, and he heads out to the first pumpkin patch that was afflicted with the ectoplasm rot.
At first, it’s just a mishmash of angry marks, but Joyce and Hopper eventually see the map lurking inside the crayon rage. In an attempt to get answers from Will, Joyce turns to that old art therapy trick we’ve all seen in Law and Order: SVU and asks him to draw what he sees and feels. His demand is clear: “No, he likes it cold.” Remember how Dart shied away from the UV light over Dustin’s turtle cage? Whatever is inside Will bears some relationship to the creature Dustin is now hiding. The creature has attacked - or overtaken - his mind, and in the brief instant when Joyce explains that he needs a warm bath to raise his body temperature, an angry but placid look comes over Will’s face. But whatever is inside Will doesn’t want him to warm up, and the mere sight of a bathtub filled with steaming water sends rivulets of fearful sweat rolling down Will’s neck. Whatever is inside Will is wearing him down physically, too: He complains he feels sick, and a fever check reveals an oddly low temperature of just 95 degrees. “I felt it everywhere, I still feel it everywhere.” “It’s more like a feeling,” he explains to Joyce, who promises not to get any more doctors involved. Either way, he’s terrified of the strange compulsions springing up unbidden inside his mind. Obviously, Will is now possessed or on the cusp of mutating into a shadow monster himself. But in the Upside Down, the giant shadow monster is crawling up his nose, ears, and eyes, swirling around him and rendering him lifeless and mute. When Joyce and the boys discover Will on the field at Hawkins Middle School, to their eyes he’s in a daze.
The rest of “Will the Wise” is essentially a game of connect the dots that bridges the first few episodes to the rest of the season. Now she just needs to decide what to do with it. How security didn’t notice the textbook-size recorder in Nancy’s delicate purse is unfathomable, but nonetheless, she has the receipts. Owens, including a bit where he admits the role Hawkins Lab played in Barb’s death. He also offers them a glimpse of the portal that leads to the Upside Down, which grows like a weed and requires constant tending via blowtorch.īut, surprise! Nancy turned herself into a walking, talking Trojan Horse, pulling the oldest trick in the book to record their entire conversation with Dr. Owens, who actually makes some astute points about keeping this discovered technology out of the hands of the Soviets. After their car doesn’t start and the lurkers start to move in on them, they’re brought in to Hawkins Lab for a lecture from Dr. Holland and asking her to meet them in the park for a chat about Barb’s disappearance (which seemed awfully harebrained), Nancy and Jonathan find themselves surrounded by a bevy of supposed parents, dog walkers, and idle parkgoers, who are actually leering feds in disguise. It’s a bit too little, a bit too late, but fans of Barb (is there a support group for us?) are finally seeing that delightful ginger icon treated with the respect she deserves.Īdmittedly, the entire Nancy-Jonathan plotline in “Will the Wise” is a bit too clever for the two of them: Remember, they used a yoyo to try to trap the demogorgon last season. The audience has spent the past year asking why nobody seemed to care that Barb had been sucked into an alternate dimension by a flesh-eating monster, and that surely fueled the hard focus on Nancy’s revenge plot this season. We all process grief differently, but the bonds of female friendship didn’t seem to mean much in that case. No insistence that the Hawkins Lab produce another fake body so Barb’s parents could have some closure. No demands that her body be returned to the real world. Sure, Nancy “Let’s Burn That Lab to the Ground” Wheeler sobbed when Barb’s body was spotted in the Upside Down last year, but that was it. If you’d never seen an episode of Stranger Things season one, you’d think that Barb’s mysterious disappearance immediately left Nancy an emotional basket case, unable to carry on after her best friend’s shocking death.