Sorcerer
Season 5
Episode 4
Editor’s Rating
5 stars
*****
After a gruesome battle in Hawkins and the Upside Down, it looks like the tables have turned.
Photo: COURTESY OF NETFLIX
One thing to keep in mind while watching and discussing “Sorcerer” — this is only the midpoint of the season. This is only the midpoint. So many major revelations are made, each one bigger than the next, and we are only halfway through the final season of Stranger Things. I mean, that battle sequence in the MAC-Z alone is finale-level stuff. If this is what they’re giving us now, what are we in for next? I’m exhausted, both emotionally and physically speaking. (Complimentary.)
In any other episode, learning about what Max has been up to in Henry’s mind prison would be exciting, but in this episode, it’s like fifth on my list. Sadie Sink does her best with the heap of exposition she has to impart, but it’s definitely the breather of a story line in this episode. Max brings Holly to the cave she’s been living in inside the rock formation and recaps season four for her before catching her up on what happened once she died and then was revived only to be left in this coma. Basically, she realized that she’s trapped in a maze of Henry’s memories. She wakes up in the Hawkins Lab Massacre (because we haven’t seen that visual enough), takes a walk through Hawkins High in 1959, and eventually winds up in the memories Henry has about her.
She almost escapes thanks to Lucas. Playing Kate Bush over and over again at the hospital does make a difference, it turns out. Once Max returns to the last memory Henry has of her — the night he killed her — and she hears that music, she sees the way out. She begins to run, but then the tape ends and the music stops. She has nowhere to run anymore. Lucas begins rewinding it, but it isn’t fast enough — some of you have no idea what we had to put up with before music went digital, okay? — and Henry finds her again. Since then, she’s been living in this cave, which seems to be the one place or memory that Henry is afraid of. He won’t follow her inside. (Anyone see Stranger Things: The First Shadow? Because there are caves there, too.) Since then, she has given up on finding a way out of the mind prison. Until Holly showed up. She has a plan for an escape, but she needs more time. She sends Holly — really embracing her Holly the Heroic character; I’m very proud of her — back to the Creel house to pretend all is well.
This is surely all very important for what’s to come, and Max has been through hell — her reunion with Lucas is going to be worth the wait, isn’t it? — but we have much more pressing matters literally everywhere else in this story.
The Demogorgon reaches the farm where Joyce, Will, Robin, and Erica are holding the Turnbow family and runs right into Joyce and her shovel. I hope that at the next Demogorgon team meeting, they take some time to reflect on how they seriously underestimated the mothers of Hawkins. Thankfully, Joyce doesn’t have to fend off the Demo on her own for too long — the tracking team (Steve, Dustin, Nancy, and Jonathan) slams the Beamer right into the monster, knocking him off his feet and sending him running into the Upside Down via a gate it rips open in a nearby silo. Steve is really batting a thousand on saving people’s lives via vehicular assault in this series. But we can only be happy about this little victory for about half a second: Not surprisingly, with the Demo being so close, Will has been thrown deep into the hive mind, which means when that Demo gets slammed by a car, Will feels it, too.
The tracking team has no idea their friend Will is writhing in pain on the barn floor because they continue to follow the monster, still rocking the telemetry tag. When Steve gets the crazy idea to drive through the rapidly closing gate in the silo, it’s Nancy who backs him up. “Do it,” she tells him from the back seat. I wish these two could make out right now, but it is both logistically and emotionally complicated at the moment.
Steve’s crazy plan works — they make it into the Upside Down. And then they crash right into that giant wall. The crash (and loss of the Demo’s whereabouts) don’t ease any of the tension already boiling in this group — every one of them is angry with at least one other person in the car. Still, they can pull themselves together enough to walkie Hopper and Eleven and ask El for an assist with car dislodging. Those two are a little busy at the moment, but Hopper still manages to provide some immensely useful info: Yes, the tracking team has run into the same wall as Hopper and El, but at completely different locations. It’s enough info for Dustin to do some math that is very much above my and Steve’s pay grades, but leads him to conclude that this wall is a giant circle, and in the middle of it? Hawkins Lab. It’s not exactly surprising, but it is exciting: It was obvious that at some point this ride would bring us back to where it all started and this is the way. No one yet knows how to get through, over, or under the wall just yet, but that is a problem for another episode.
So why can’t Hopper and Eleven drop everything to reconnect with their friends who are having car trouble? They’ve decided to infiltrate the military base in the Upside Down — the one Eleven is convinced is holding Vecna. Even Hopper is like, that makes zero sense given everything we know Vecna is up to, but get it, girl. Okay, he actually says, “Let’s go see if the training has paid off,” which is the same general vibe.
The first obstacle getting into the base is the guards around the perimeter. El makes her big jump over the fence and onto the roof. Does she have to snap the neck of one of the guards? Sure, but they make it inside. If only they had trashed Akers as easily as that guard. You know that little psycho wakes up, runs to the base with backup, and alerts Dr. Kay that her white whale is literally in her office. El is rendered powerless when the kryptonite noise comes blasting through devices set up in the room, and it’s stronger than before. But Hopper is still a one-man army and he makes short work of Akers and his men. That is, until that one Upside Down vine we’ve seen in the glass container snatches him, and Kay gets to interrogate him while he’s being strangled to death. Like all creatures of the Upside Down, heat is its kryptonite, and Kay toys with Hopper by toying with the temperature in the room. She’s a straight-up villain with Hop, but when she first runs into Eleven, she doesn’t seem all that evil, does she? She comes off curious more than anything. Will there be some kind of twist with Kay?
Regardless, El drags herself out into the room and distracts Kay long enough for Very Tall Hopper to kick the temperature controls to high heat and get out of the vines (was he having flashbacks to season two?). He ties Kay up and grabs her access card — the one that will open the hallway to the vault where Eleven believes they are leeching all of Vecna’s power out of the guy to use for this kryptonite. But Hopper isn’t letting El anywhere near Vecna. He breaks open a window and tells her to go and connect with Nancy — he is going into the vault to face Vecna or whatever is in there alone. And finally we get to see what Hop has been hiding from everyone — in that bag hidden in his room, in his jacket that he’s been fiddling with, he’s strapped a bunch of dynamite to his chest as a fail-safe. “I will not risk losing you,” he tells her. Once again, Hopper gets this big, emotional moment in which he tells Eleven how proud he is of her. How he loves her. He calls her Jane. This is a man prepared to die!
Eleven calls out for him as he walks to the hallway, but she is powerless to stop him while the kryptonite is blasting from all over the room. Hand on the explosives trigger, Hopper makes his way down the hallway to the vault and again has flashes of Sarah. Is this it? Is Hopper about to sacrifice himself?
Uh, no. They faked us out again. How many times, Stranger Things? I’m very fragile! It’s hard to stay annoyed for too long, though, because the reason Hopper doesn’t make the big sacrifice for his daughter is a good one. It’s not Vecna back in that room strapped to a machine to harness the power to make the kryptonite. The noise stops. El, who never left the lab, who refused to leave Hopper — a realization that, yes, did make me tear up — follows Hop down the hallway and into the vault to find someone else strapped to the kryptonite machine. It’s Eight. Sister.
The season-two episode in which Eleven travels to find Eight remains a complete dud, but at least there’s a nice payoff here. After all that time. I’d say, Hey, isn’t it great that we now have two superpowered people to take on Vecna? But it turns out, I’d be shortchanging us one.
We still have to talk about Will the Wise.
Back in the barn, when Will comes out of the hive mind, he is trembling. He’s seen a lot of terrible things, but this is bad. In a callback to season two’s vine scribblings, Will paints what he saw in the hive mind on the barn door: 12 giant red spires. Holly is hooked up to one of them, just like Will was in the library, and next to her are three other kids that Vecna has taken while we were focused on Derek. If it’s what it looks like, Vecna must have plans to take eight other kids. But why kids and why 12? As far as the latter, we already know Vecna has a real kink of clocks, so perhaps it’s related. But the kids? We’ll have to wait a little longer for an explanation.
Mike and Lucas arrive at the barn with news: There’s more than one group trying to wrangle the children of Hawkins. At the direction of Dr. Kay, the military has rounded up the 73 remaining 9- and 10-year-olds in Hawkins and is bringing them to the barracks in the MAC-Z to protect them. Of course, they think El is the one taking them — although Kay does curiously note that she doesn’t care if Eleven is attempting to harm them or protect them — but regardless, they have all of Vecna’s potential victims corralled in one place, and everyone is aware that the military won’t be able to stop what’s coming for them.
If you thought the Turnbow Trap was ridiculous, you’ll want to disassociate for a while. The team has come up with a new plan, I write with a shudder. This one is still focused on kidnapping children, but this time in the style of The Great Escape. They’re going to send Derek into the MAC-Z to join his classmates in the barracks. He’ll have to find out which of the other kids have seen Mr. Whatsit — they’re Vecna’s targets. Lucas echoes all of our feelings when he laments: “I can’t get over the fact that the fate of the world rests in the hands of Derek freakin’ Turnbow.” But Joyce believes in him, and reminds him that he can be more than just Dipshit Derek.
While Derek deals with the kids in the barracks, the rest of the group is going to be following the tunnel system, which conveniently runs under the barracks. Once there, they’ll dig a hole up into the floor of one of the bathroom stalls, signal Derek to start sending kids back, and then shuttle them back through the tunnels to Murray’s truck, where he’ll drive them out of Hawkins.
For a while, everything goes according to plan. Even Derek rises to the occasion — may we all have a Joyce Byers in our life! There’s even enough time for what turns out to be life-changing emotional development, if you can believe it. Robin notices Will and Mike having a conversation in which Mike is beginning to believe that Will might actually be able to control the hive mind just like Vecna. He has innate powers and they could use a little magic, he says. Will is just as in love with Mike as ever, and this time, Robin sees it. She realizes why he’s been so interested in her relationship with Vickie.
In the tunnels, she slows down to chat with him, and in some rather vague terms tells her coming-out story. She talks about Tone-Deaf Tammy Thompson and how her world ended the day she lost her to Steve. But one day, she found an old video of herself from when she was a carefree kid, so sure of herself. She didn’t recognize her. It made her realize that she was trying to find answers about who she really was and why she didn’t feel whole and why she was scared to find out why. “But I had all the answers,” she tells Will, both of them teary-eyed, “I just needed to stop being so goddamned scared.” Once she did that, she felt free, like she could do anything. Will knows exactly why she’s telling him this story, and despite the urgency in everything else going on at this exact moment, it not only hits him deeply, but it is exactly what he needs to hear.
The plan to get the eight kids out of the barracks goes well despite some cringe-inducing dick jokes (why does Lucas act like it’s cool to make a dick go soft? I’m concerned), until they hit a water line and the bathroom begins to flood. Despite a valiant effort from Will, Mike, and Derek, if you can believe it, the water seeping into the room and one narc kid gives them away, and they’re caught halfway through the operation. Robin makes it out to Murray with the first three kids, and Lucas isn’t too far behind her in the tunnels with two more, but Mike, Will, Joyce, and the rest of the kids are caught inside the MAC-Z.
That’s when the Demogorgons arrive. Whoever made the decision back in season one that the sign of Upside Down monsters approaching should be flickering lights is a national hero — it immediately ups the tension and throws a veil of creepiness and chaos over everything that follows. The lights in the MAC-Z go crazy. Will feels the hive mind itching at his neck. And that metal “Band-Aid” they put over the big gate that ripped through Hawkins that seemed so naïve to anyone who knows what’s actually happening in Hawkins? Demogorgons start popping up, one by one, right through the metal. It was never going to hold them back. Dozens of soldiers begin fighting back, but Dipshit Derek was right — these guys can’t protect shit.
With the boundary so thin between real Hawkins and Upside Down Hawkins, Demos are just ripping gates all over the place. Three of them pop out of the ground and begin chasing Murray, Robin, and three of Vecna’s kids in his big truck. Two of them pop out in the tunnels, surrounding Lucas and the two kids with him. At the MAC-Z, Mike attempts to lead the remaining kids, Joyce, and Will, who is feeling every bullet and flame the soldiers are sending into the Demos, to some sort of exit. This whole sequence is shot on handhelds and it is wild.
For a moment, it seems like the good guys might have a shot. A soldier with a flamethrower lights up the Demos and all of them (including Will, unfortunately) are incapacitated. The good guys could win this.
And then Vecna walks through the gate. Like El, he must have been training since last we saw him because he seems even more superpowered than before. He casually tosses people through the air with the flick of the wrist. He pulls grenade keys with his mind and causes giant explosions — even burning Sullivan to a crisp. At one point, he shoves his spiky fingers through a dude’s skull and pokes his eyeballs out. We know how much he loves removing people’s eyeballs.
He raises his Demos and they begin dragging all of the children he targeted away into the Upside Down. And then he finds the one person he really wanted to speak to this evening: Will. Joyce tries to stop him, but she’s simply a gnat in his face. He tosses her away. Vecna lifts Will and floats him over as he tells us exactly why he is taking children: Children are weak. They are easy to break. He can bend them to his will. And he knows this is possible because he did it with Will. “You were the first, and you broke so easily,” he tells a terrified, frozen Will. It was Will who showed him what he could achieve.
This idea that children are weak is, of course, the antithesis to what Stranger Things is really about. From the very beginning, this series has been about the bravery of kids. The kids are the ones who don’t back down from a fight, who refuse to let the bad guys win. It makes sense that the big bad would have it all wrong — that he would underestimate the most powerful people in this story. He has certainly underestimated Will Byers.
Vecna drops Will to the ground and slowly returns to the Upside Down. His Demos have gathered all the kids he needs to begin the next step in his plan. He sends them back to kill Will’s friends. On the ground, Will is hurting. He is bereft, but then he remembers what Robin told him. That all the answers are already inside him, and once he realizes that and stops being scared, he will be free.
We cut to Will’s own version of a childhood video — it’s little Will meeting little Mike for the first time. It’s little Will realizing he loves to draw. It’s little Will building Castle Byers with Jonathan. He is happy. He is free.
The three Demos are about to rip into Will’s friends, but when Mike opens his eyes, ready to accept his fate, he finds the Demo about to pounce on him is suspended in midair. He can’t move. Something, someone is holding him back. And then he looks over at Will. Will is up, his eyes shrouded like he’s in the hive mind, and his arm is out like Eleven. Will is holding back the Demos. All three of them. And then he cracks their bones just like Vecna did to his victims. The Demos fall. Will drops to his knees and wipes the trickle of blood coming from his nose. Will Byers has powers, and he’s not afraid to use them anymore.
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