Welcome back to our weekly look at Stranger Things season four, today we’re looking at:
“Chapter Two: Vecna’s Curse”
Written and directed by the Duffer Bros.
Hawkins reels from the discovery of Chrissy Cunningham’s mutilated body, and the missing Eddie Munson is the prime suspect, with Max, Dustin, Steve & Robin, Nancy & Fred, the police, and Hawkins High’s basketball team all on his trail. Mike arrives in California to spend spring break with El, while Murray Bauman also flies to the state to meet Joyce, and verify the letter claiming Hopper is alive.
1. Hopper’s Alive, OK?
But before all that, we return to the night of July 4, 1985, when Hopper sacrificed himself to blow up the Soviet gate, and it’s revealed he survived by… just jumping off the platform. (This is despite it being established that an exploding key disintegrates everyone in its vicinity.) After three years of waiting for an answer, it’s an underwhelming reveal, to put it mildly. Anyway, the Russians nab him before Sam Owens and the military show up, and torture and process him in a series of flashbacks that frankly drag down the pacing even more: it could’ve all been woven together into a single cold open. The Duffers were probably trying to keep the audience in suspense as to whether Dmitri “Enzo” Antonov (Tom Wlaschiha) was actually Hopper’s prison guard, since it’s technically not confirmed until we see Jim being taken to his cell, but I don’t think it mattered.
2. Satanic Panic Comes to Hawkins
Jason Carver (Mason Dye), the captain of the basketball team, and Chrissy’s boyfriend, can scarcely believe she would go to Eddie’s trailer to buy drugs, and persuades most of his friends that Eddie murdered her as part of a Satanic ritual. Lucas is the sole skeptic, but can’t bring himself to admit he and his friends were avid Dungeons & Dungeons players, telling Jason his sister’s a fan instead. The Satanic Panic’s integration is sadly pretty topical, given we recently saw this moral panic (itself a rehash of antisemitic blood libel) get regurgitated as QAnon, and the optics of a white, popular, presumably upper class boy spreading misinformation is very accurate to how these conspiracy theories primarily spring from racist Evangelical communities. Poor Lucas: he had no idea the popular kids grow up to become the mob wielding pitchforks and torches.
3. The Awful Truth
Over in California, Mike finds out pretty quickly that El’s an outcast at school, when Angela and her cronies show up to ruin their date at a skater rink. It’s absolutely stomach churning to see Hopper’s little girl being utterly helpless to fight back against the abuse, as well as to see her bullies filming it with a video camera (grim shades of “happy slapping” attacks from the UK two decades later there.) El eventually finds the strength to stand up to Angela, and when she refuses to apologize for her behavior, El picks up a roller shoe and smacks her in the face with it.
I won’t condone that action (Angela’s not a monster or soldier, just an asshole), but I fully understand her decision (again, she’s an asshole): unfortunately, others, including Mike and Will, are simply appalled, leaving El feeling the way she did in season one — like a monster, one Brenner believed he had to restrain. That’s not true, but mistakes like these can definitely plague with you with guilt and self-doubt, as well as ammunition for your enemies.
4. How to Deescalate a Hostage Situation
Season four’s padded runtimes paid off here with the scene where Max, Dustin, Steve and Robin find Eddie hiding in weed supplier Reefer Rick’s boat storage shed, which emphasizes everyone doing their best not to provoke the frightened and paranoid dungeon master. He holds a knife to Steve’s throat, but Steve has faith in the others to get him to listen and explain they’re here because they believe he’s innocent, as opposed to whacking him with an oar. It felt very Spielbergian, with the emphasis on listening and observing (eg. the stand-off over the medicine in The Terminal, one of the Beard’s most underrated films), so I further appreciated the pacing here.
Continued below5. Zombies
Nancy and Fred investigate Chrissy’s death by going to Max and Eddie’s trailer park. While Nancy interviews Eddie’s uncle Wayne (Joel Stoffer), who states Chrissy’s gouged out eyes remind him of the Creel murders from the ’50s, Fred finds himself being targeted by Vecna, who exploits the survivor’s guilt he has from a car accident that killed a friend the year before. Fred — who very foolishly wanders into the forest — sees the fiend’s grandfather clock lying atop his friend’s coffin, before being taunted by an undead congregation. The unexpected sight of zombies on this show was great, but there was something off about them, with their large missing noses, lending them a cartoonish sheen, almost like… they’re an illusion. That’s not an issue with Vecna himself, who is almost entirely practical, lending him a genuinely menacing presence in both senses of the word.
Other Things:
– Like other beasts of the Upside Down, Dustin gives the Vecna his in-universe name from a D&D character, an undead wizard, whose Hand and Eye bears a curse similar to the One Ring from The Lord of the Rings.
– For the record, Hopper’s shaved head and moustache were meant to distinguish him from the other Russian prisoner David Harbour played recently, Alexei Shostakov in Black Widow, which is funny, given Shostakov is generally clean shaven in Marvel comics.
– Similarly feel like stating the obvious here, but casting Tom Wlaschiha as “Anton” was awesome given his Game of Thrones character, Jaqen H’ghar, was one of the coolest on that show (and the inspiration for a neat Kimmy Schmidt tribute.) By the way, here’s the Wiktionary entry on the Russian slang term used for cops in the episode.
– Max, Dustin, Steve and Robin finding out someone’s address via their film tastes? On a show inspired by movie nostalgia? Scandalous.
See you all next week for “Chapter Three: The Monster and the Superhero.”
