Stranger Things Season 5, Episode 3
"The Turnbow Trap"
Writer: Caitlin Schneiderhan
Director: Frank Darabont
Cast: Winoa 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
In a traditional season of TV, the titular event at the center of this episode is something that would have unfolded as the climax to a multi-episode arc. The introduction of the Turnbows, the planning, the sidequests like testing the tracker or acquiring the knock out drugs would have unfolded across a couple episodes before culminating in the climatic springing of the trap. Stranger Things doesn't have time for that, certainly not in its final season, and so it speeds through all of that, putting all the beats of the arc into one episode.
Which, honestly, is for the best, because if we had time to luxuriate in the details of it all, it'd be much easier to see just how insane the Turnbow Trap really is. Fun, but insane.
Holes
Fresh off realizing he's a Vecna antenna, Will (Noah Schnapp) and Robin (Maya Hawke) are heading back to the Squawk while Joyce (Winona Ryder) is tearing down the road desperately looking for them. They do that thing where they hilariously cross each other on the road then double back, and Joyce proceeds to give Will and Robin (especially Robin) a dressing down for sneaking out. But Will stands up for himself, giving Joyce a relatively measured and well-reasoned version of the "I'm not a little boy anymore!" speech that seems to finally break through Joyce's uber-protectiveness. Will insisting he's not a little boy anymore carries more weight given that Noah Schnapp looks like he's closer to getting his AARP card than being carded at a bar, but keep in mind this character is meant to be roughly 16 years old.
With Hopper (David Harbour) and Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) still in the Upside Down, Holly (Nell Fisher) missing, and the Wheeler parents in critical but stable condition, the teens younger and elder along with Joyce reconvene at the Squawk to plot their next move. Will has determined that Derek Turnbow (Jake Connelly) — the snotty loud-mouthed kid who was harassing Holly on the playground last episode, scion of the wealthy real estate mogul Turnbow clan — is Vecna's next target. The gang hatches two plans, the one they go with being only slightly-less bonkers than the other: get someone friendly to the Turnbows inside their house to knock them out, then get them out of the house (blindfolded, so Vecna won't know where Derek really is) in order to lure in the Demogorgon, at which point they'll tag it with one of Hopper's trackers and follow it back to Vecna's base. Even before getting into what happens in actual execution of the Turnbow Trap, it's a plan with more than a few holes in it, despite Mike's (Finn Wolfhard) insistence to the contrary. Still, it's nice to see Mike once again taking a leadership role and doing something other than being an insufferable teen.
Plan in place, it's time to pull the pieces together. Will and Robin continue their Dynamic Duo routine to steal some benzos from an elderly woman in the hospital Robin has befriended in order to have an excuse to be around Vicki. In a sweet scene as they hide from Vicki (Robin doesn't want to have to break the news about their broken Enzo's date), Robin gives Will some indirect advice on dating while gay in late 80s suburban Indiana. Murray (Brett Gelman) rolls back into town with some very specific supplies faster than I get some Mountain Dew Kickstarts via Amazon Prime, and hassles Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) for not proposing to Nancy (Natalia Dyer) — turns out the cassette tape he delivered in "The Crawl" contained an engagement ring, not weed (or, to be fair, an engagement ring AND weed). Steve (Joe Keery) and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) squabble some more as they move the tracking dish from the van to Steve's faster, more agile Beamer. And most importantly, Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) and Mike recruit their inside person for the Turnbow household, leading to the triumphant season 5 debut of Lucas' little sister Erica (Priah Ferguson)!
I Think I'm Alone Now
Meanwhile, in the Upside Down, neither Eleven (psychic powers) nor Hopper (knife) can make a dent in the giant Wall of Goop. As they plot their next move, a Wolf Pack patrol arrives, driving a humvee with a big satellite dish speaker thing that causes Eleven to freak out (in its way, it parallels the Hopper Trackermobile, with its massive radio dish). A tense sequence ensues in which Hopper tries to hide Eleven from the troops (behind an Upside Down Turnbow Realty billboard), but the tension is broken when they get discovered and Hopper leaps into action. He takes out a couple soldiers (including a pair he straight-up grenades to death) and once he takes out the sonic dish weapon, Eleven finishes the job — leaving them with one captive soldier for interrogation.
After squabbling over how best to conduct the interrogation and what kind of info to seek out, the pair conduct a fun little double act, as Hopper appears to employ traditional (ie verbal) interrogation methods as cover for Eleven as she telepathically roots around in the solider's head and relays relevant info to Hopper via radio. There's a little bit more of catching the characters up to the audience — they learn about Doctor Kay (Linda Hamilton), and the presence of the military installation in the Upside Down — but the execution of the sequence — particularly Eleven walking through the solider's memories, but then being able to linger in them and explore a bit further past his perceptions — makes it go down easier. In the end, Eleven is repelled when she encounters the same kind of energy that knocked her out earlier from behind a locked door in Doctor Kay's lab, leaving her insistent that the military has got its hands on Vecna.
Elsewhere in Somewhere That Is Not The Real World, Holly is settling in post-kidnapping in the cavernous Creel house, enjoying a sumptuous breakfast and begrudgingly accepting the imminent arrival of school yard bully Derek. A dapper Vecna in his Henry persona (Jamie Campbell Bower) departs to get Derek, leaving clear instructions for Holly to not go into the woods (as well as a new boom box and Tiffany tape). Left to her own devices, Holly explores the house, rocking out to the ur-'80s bubblegum pop tune "I Think We're Alone Now", gradually dressing herself to resemble the "Holly the Heroic" miniature Mike gave her in episode one. After someone frantically rings the doorbell and leaves a note and map claiming to be Henry asking her to join him, Holly plunges deep into the forest Henry told her to stay away from, eventually running across none other than a conscious, ambulatory Max.
Home Alone
And then it's showtime.
Erica turns up at the Turnbow house bearing pie, on the pretext of making up with Tina, Derek's older sister and Erica's former best friend, for a dodgeball-related faux pas (honestly, I'd watch an entire episode about Tina and Erica's phys ed falling out). The pie is, of course, laced with the drugs stolen by Robin and Will, and when Tina refuses to eat any, Erica is forced/gets to knock Tina out directly once the rest of her family collapses. In swoops the rest of the team; the Turnbows are bound and get pillowcases put over their heads, then rolled up in rugs and dragged out to the van for Joyce, Will and Robin to drive away.
Everyone else moves inside and proceeds to utterly obliterate the Turnbow home as they prepare a series of traps straight out of Kevin McCallister's playbook. Steve even takes a chainsaw to the living room floor, cutting out a square slightly smaller than the area of the rug which proceeds to drop into the basement, utterly destroying the elder Turnbow's wine cellar. Then they put barb wire on top of the rubble.
Just like in Home Alone, the intricacy, precision, and collateral damage inflicted by the traps are utterly ludicrous the moment you slow down and think about them, but also delightfully fun to watch in action. As patently ridiculous as the Turnbow Trap is — this is a group of teenagers, many of them minors, overseen by one adult, who have broken into a home, drugged and assaulted the residents, kidnapped them, and then wreaked not inconsiderable havoc on their home (including the destruction of what had to be a very expensive wine collection) — it's also the highlight of the season thus far.
In an inverse to much of the rest of the season, watching the trap unfold allows the audience to catch up to the characters for a change. Luring the Demogorgon to Derek's room with a CPR dummy, Lucas proceeds to hit it with a series of water balloons filled with accelerants. He then leads the Demogorgon out into the hallway, leaping over the trip wire that proceeds to slam a nail-studded two-by-four into the Demogorgon's chest. Downstairs, Lucas leaps over the rug covering the hole in the floor; when the Demogorgon tumbles in and grabs the edges, Mike whacks it repeatedly with a pickaxe. It lands in the pile of barb wire, and then Jonathan, waiting in the basement with Nancy, lights it on fire before Nancy fires the tracker into it.
The plan — such as it is — works; the Demogorgon flees back into the Upside Down, and Steve and Dustin are able to track it. But it takes a sudden turn in the other direction, and when Derek suddenly wakes up and wriggles free of his blindfold, Will realizes why: with Derek conscious and able to see his surroundings, Vecna knows where he is.
Which means Vecna is heading straight to Derek — and to Will.
Thoughts and Musings
- Between the titular trap and Hopper & Eleven's fight with the Wolf Pack inside the Upside Down, this is one of the most action-heavy episodes of the season yet
- Even before Holly starts dressing herself in various fairy tale garb, her whole storyline feels like she's trapped in an inverted children's story; Henry is telling her she's special and together they're going to save everyone and in the meantime she has the run of a cool old house to herself. If we didn't know Henry was up to no good and this was all a cover, it could be the opening of any number of young adult fantasy novels.
- Dustin is keeping his graveyard run-in with the bullies a secret from Lucas and Mike as well as Steve.
- Don't listen to Murray, Jonathan; you and Nancy absolutely should not get married (apparently he's decided that instead of telling her he doesn't want to go to college with her they'll just get married instead).
- The boys' old middle school science teacher Mr. Clarke (Randy Havens) returns, after being absent from Season 4.
- Also, he's talking about wormholes/Einstein-Rosen bridges in class; the time-travel trolling is at epic levels at this point.
- Robin is like Spider-Man — her responsibilities as a secret fighter of evil is impacting her personal life, as she has to hide from Vicky because she can't tell her the real reason she needs to break their date. Of course, I would say the same thing to Robin that I often yelled at Spider-Man: just tell her the truth!
- Okay, we got one "mystery person turns out to be Vecna a.k.a. the most obvious choice" reveal already; hopefully that's setting up a more surprising reveal for the "who's behind the door in Doctor Kay's base?" mystery than…Vecna.
- "I Think We're Alone Now" was released in August of 1987, just a few months before the events of the episode.
- Max' presence in the same space as Holly puts a kibosh on the "they actually time-traveled" idea, as they're clearly inside Vecna's mindspace and Holly is most likely physically wrapped up in vines on the other side of the Goop Wall at the moment.
Stephen King Rules
The director of this episode is Frank Darabont who, in addition to helping launch the Walking Dead TV series, was the go-to director for Stephen King adaptations in the '90s and '00s, having directed The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and The Mist. He came out of retirement to direct this episode (and one other this season).
Who Won The Episode?
Even though the ending doesn't bode well for him, Will makes some significant strides in "The Turnbow Trap", finally pushing back (directly) against his mother's overprotectiveness and finding someone to discuss (however obliquely) his sexuality with in Robin.
Also, hat tip to Steve, who really seemed to get a kick out of taking a chainsaw to the Turnbow's floor, and Erica, who is just as much a delight as ever.
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