Stranger Things Season 5, Episode 1
"The Crawl"
Writers/Directors: Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer
Cast: Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Mataraazo, Caleb McLaughlin, Noah Schnapp, Sadie Sink, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Joe Keery, Maya Hawke, Brett Gelman, Priah Ferguson, Linda Hamilton, Cara Buono, Jamie Campbell Bower
Stranger Things! Season Five! The last one!
Yes, it's been forever since the last season of the show aired, thanks to the growing ambitions of its creators and cast, along with delays wrought by a global pandemic, a pair of Hollywood strikes, and Netflix wanting to wring every last dollar out of one of its foundational cash cows. And yes, the core cast is less "teens riding bikes through Stephen King homages" and more "adults with stiff backs and mortgage payments" at this point, but the important thing is, Stranger Things is back!
After a lengthy previously on montage, "The Crawl" drops us right into…the past, via a flashback to Will's (Noah Schnapp) time in the Upside Down during Season 1. This is the footage released by Netflix in advance of the season a few weeks ago. We see a digitally de-aged Will (technically actor Luke Kokotek with young Noah Schnapp's face rendered over his own) get attacked by a Demogorgon, escape Castle Byers, leap across a tree, and ultimately get captured and brought to Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower), who sticks an Upside Down Red Vine into his throat and fills him with … gunk. It remains to be seen if there's more to this scene than its obvious purpose of explaining the connection Will has to Vecna/the Mind Flayer/the Upside Down in more literal terms (i.e. he was physically infected by it), which isn't really something that needed more of an explanation, but here we are.
Rockin' Robin
After that cold open, the episode drops a steaming plate of exposition-laden pancakes on us. The Duffer Brothers have said that this season more or less kicks into gear immediately, as they have no time for the usual "how have folks' normal lives progressed in between attacks from the parallel monster dimension?" routine, and they were not kidding. The Byers are living with the Wheelers, and poor Ted (Joe Chrest) can't even get any bacon (it's fine, later events in the episode establish he doesn't deserve it anyway). Robin (Maya Hawke) and Steve (Joe Keery) have traded up their video rental store jobs to become radio personalities, with Robin's morning DJ schtick serving as a handy exposition dump on the state of affairs inside Hawkins post-Season 4: the town is under military quarantine, the residents routinely tested for disease (presumably due to the Upside Down dandruff that fell on the town at the end of the last season), while a contingent of the army is holed up in a secure location at the center of the town around the gate into the Upside Down (an area Robin has dubbed "the Big Mac"), conducting experiments and performing periodic journeys through the gates.
In its ways, life is still somewhat normal, though. The younger kids are still going to school, and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) is getting extra bullied for wearing his Hellfire Club shirt and refusing to accept the lie that the deceased Eddie is responsible for Vecna's killings in the previous season. While Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Will and an even beefier Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) still have his back when he's confronted by Andy (Clayton Royal Johnson), who has taken over from the delightfully bisected Jason as Captain of the Dumbass Psycho Jock Brigade, they worry he's splitting his focus between missions: finding and ending the threat of Vecna and preserving the memory of Eddie, while drawing unwanted attention to himself in the process.
Running Up The Hill
Cut from a wanted poster on the school bulletin board to its subject, Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), running an obstacle course through the woods and deploying her telekinetic powers to explode pumpkin heads and throw herself over a bus, while being timed by Hopper (David Harbour) and Joyce (Winona Ryder), who finally get a chance to be all couple-y in a normal, non-Russian Gulag setting for the first time. It's shortly revealed that Eleven is trying to beat a specific time so that she can join Hopper on the next crawl; it also turns out that the benchmark Hopper gave her was arbitrary, as he has little intention of letting his daughter accompany him back into the Upside Down anytime soon. Is this a refreshing return to the pair's Season 3 father/daughter dynamics, or a frustrating bit of backpedalling for the characters? You decide (at the moment, I lean towards the latter)!
We soon learn what this "crawl" business is all about, after Murrary (Bret Gelman) rolls into town with a delivery of groceries — and bullets and grenades and intel that the military is planning to go back into the Upside Down soon. Robin delivers the news to the team via a fun coded radio transmission, and in parallel scenes, Dungeon Masters Nancy (Natalia Dyer) and Mike lay out the plan: Hopper sneaks into the Upside Down hidden in the military convoy, his infiltration covered by the smoke of the burn required to clear the vines from the gate. He is tracked by Steve and Dustin via a van equipped to pick up the signal from Hopper's locator beacon, as they travel parallel to him in the Rightside Up, all in the hopes of finding Vecna and either confirming he's dead and his threat is ended, or that he's alive, at which point Hopper will beat feet and get reinforcements.
Given the way they often get pulled into their own separate storylines until the end of a season, it's easy to forget that Mike and Nancy are brother and sister; their roles here as, essentially, first sergeants to their respective platoons is an effective reminder of that fact. Nancy may not be a D&D nerd like her brother, but they both share a knack for operational planning and coordination.
They're not the only Wheelers in the spotlight this episode, however. Holly, the littlest Wheeler (now being played by Nell Fisher), who has largely served as a forgotten or background character (she unwillingly "donated" her Lite Brite to the fight against Vecna last season), has been said to have a much larger role in this season, and that's immediately clear here in the first episode. She has an imaginary friend named Mister Whatsit, and it's clear that, in true sci-fi storytelling fashion, he's far from a figment of Holly's imagination: even if the other characters don't see him, the audience does see at least part of a hidden corporeal figure at one point. Holly's involvement with Mister Whatsit both causes tension amongst her parents, and prompts a heart-to-heart from big brother Mike, who tries to help her be brave while revealing that the episode's title (and the general concept of Hopper's crawls) come from his D&D campaigns.
Prismatic Spray
In anticipation of the night's crawl, Lucas and Will stop in at the hospital to visit Max (Sadie Sink), who is still in a coma following Vecna's assault and her miraculous resurrection at Eleven's hands last season (though her limbs appear to have at least healed). Going to get a Coke, Will surreptitiously spots Robin canoodling with her girlfriend Vickie (Amybeth McNulty), her bandgeek crush from last season. He awkwardly flees the scene. Elsewhere, Mike and Eleven have an ominous discussion about the possibility of a post-Vecna future outside of Hawkins, in an attempt to remind audiences that they're meant to be in a romantic relationship. And Dustin visits Eddie's grave, turpentine in hand, to clean-up the headstone.
But Andy and his goons are waiting. Though Dustin gets in a few good shots-to-the-eye with turpentine, on his own without his friends, he ultimately takes a pretty severe beating. If not for the fact that we've seen him in trailers in scenes obviously set later, this would have left me thinking the Duffers might be going for a big "no one is safe" death to kick off the season.
Despite Dustin's absence, the plan for the crawl continues apace, with Jonathan filling in for Dustin in the Hopper Trackermobile. In a traditional season of television with more time to fill, this episode might have first given us a "typical" crawl, to provide a sense of what should happen so we're better prepared for the one that inevitably goes off the rails. But there's no time for that in the eight episode seasons of today (even when some of those episodes are feature film length)! "The Crawl" does make it clear, repeatedly, via dialogue, that the crawls are both A. regular occurrences and B. largely boring, which does some work to add impact when, after Hopper sneaks aboard the convoy and gets into the Upside Down per usual, things quickly go awry.
It starts when Will starts getting the ol' pricklies on the back of neck, before collapsing into full-on convulsions, the implication being: something is different — worse — this time. Inside the Upside Down, a demogorgon appears. It's not clear, but it seems like the soldiers usually journey through the Upside Down unmolested. Hopper manages to escape the Demogorgon, at least in part because he is not its target. As Will tells the crew back at the radio station, it's heading for the Wheeler house. As Holly sits in her room, doing her best to listen to her brother and be brave while her mother pours another glass of Chardonnay (no judgment, Karen), the lights flicker, her ceiling cracks, and out pops the Demogorgon.
Welcome to the plot, Holly Wheeler. Hope you survive the experience.
Other Thoughts
- And welcome to Pop Heist's coverage of Stranger Things 5! Even though Netflix is releasing this season in weird little clusters across a month and some change, our plan is to recap one episode per week as if this was a real TV show. That said, while each recap will, obviously, contain spoilers for that episode, I will not be watching the next episode until I've written my current recap, so my thoughts will be untainted by what follows.
- The opening minutes of the flashback sync up with the final moments of "The Bathtub," the seventh episode of season one, and proceeds to show what happened after the Demogorgon burst into Castle Byers in that episode's cliffhanger ending and when Joyce and Hopper find Will with the tendril in his mouth in the season one finale. All told, the pertinent new information is really just that Vecna is the one who attached the Upside Down Red Vine to Will, which again suggests the flashback is largely superfluous at the moment.
- I have a notoriously poor eye for bad CGI (what can I say, I'm a trusting sort), but the de-aging on Will seemed fine to me (certainly nothing on the level of Henry Cavill Superman Mouth), though I suspect the general consensus is "it was bad" because that's always the general consensus. I am less enthused about Will Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-ing it across the trees, but I guess he ultimately ended up flat on his ass so it's fine.
- The non-flashback portions of this episode takes place on November 3, 1987, setting it one year, seven months and five days after the end of Season 4. In addition to being my mom's birthday, November 3 is an odd time to have sprinklers running (as we see at the establishing shot of the Wheeler household). I get that Indiana isn't Minnesota, but November still seems close enough to winter to not be worried about how green and thriving the lawn is.
- We get one brief nod at the neverending Steve/Nancy/Jonathan love triangle in "The Crawl", when the boys race each other to the top of the radio tower to plug in a loose wire; the pan down as they each look for Nancy's approval only to find she's gone back inside is delightful.
- Hopper (who, while not wanted by the army like Eleven, is presumably maintaining the fiction that he's dead for operational reasons) seems to have created a series of tunnels around town, from the bus/training grounds to his cabin and to the outskirts of the military's Big Mac zone. It seems like … that would take a lot of work to complete undetected by hand.
- Linda Hamilton — this season's 1980s stunt casting in the tradition of Sean Astin, Paul Reiser, etc — makes a brief appearance as Dr. Kay, who is working with the military inside the Big Mac.
- The fact that Will starts experiencing vertigo while Holly is on the merry-go-round at her school makes it pretty obvious the two are connected — whether directly or via a shared psychic link to the Upside Down/Vecna remains to be seen.
- The woman playing Holly's teacher is Hope Hynes Love, the Duffer Brothers' real life drama teacher.
- One last Holly note — I really hope Mister Whatsit is someone other than Vecna, only because it being Vecna is frightfully obvious.
- Enzo's — the sight of Robin and Vickie's planned date — is the same "fancy" restaurant Hopper and Joyce talked about going to last season. It is clearly the default "special date" spot in town — and remains in business despite the quarantine.
- It feels like maybe someone should have gone to check on Dustin, given how adamant everyone was that he'd make it for the crawl and how odd it was for him to not be there? Surely someone hanging around the radio station could have been spared?
- Joyce's ongoing over-protectiveness of Will is clearly positioned as a point of contention amongst the group (and between Will and Joyce), though ultimately, it's a good thing he didn't go along with Steve since he gets walloped when Hopper is inside the Upside Down and probably would have lost track of him.
Stephen King Rules
The complex inner workings of small town Americana is a recurring theme throughout King's novels (sometimes in service of the metaphor at the heart of the horror elements, sometimes just to add color to the backdrop against which the horror elements are unfolding). In that tradition, Dustin's interactions with the bullies, the ways Hawkins is (and isn't) adjusting to life under quarantine, etc. calls to mind Under the Dome.
Assigned Reading
No TV show or movie ever makes a point of showing the book a character is reading only for that book to be totally random and unrelated to the larger themes or plot of the story. With that in mind, you don't need to have seen any subsequent episodes of this season to know that Holly being seen reading Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time is notable. It's also the source of the name "Whatsit" for her "imaginary" friend.
Who Won The Episode?
In an episode which seemed, by design, to give nearly everyone a little something to do as it established the new status quo and set the plot in motion, I'll give this to Robin who, frankly, seems to be living her best life in lockdown. She has a fun job as a radio DJ, her position within the unofficial anti-Vecna militia leaves her relatively far away from the front lines, and she's dating her longtime crush. Things can change on a dime, but for now Robin is hashtag winning.
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