Stranger Things Season 5, Episode 2
"The Vanishing of Holly Wheeler"
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
One of the interesting tensions that emerges when tackling this series from the perspective of it being a TV show is when we get an episode that seems to work against that idea. Which is to say, "The Vanishing of Holly Wheeler" probably works better when viewed in a binge with the rest of the initial four episode drop. It's a breath-catching episode after the big event that opens it, and as such, feels more like the beginning of a second act of a movie than the latest installment of a serial narrative. It also suffers from doing a lot of work to get the characters to where the audience already is. At the same time, it does some things really well, in particular bringing to a head some character conflicts that are long overdue for a resolution and quickly dispatching some that feel like tedious retreads.
Aliens Comes To Hawkins
"The Vanishing of Holly Wheeler" opens immediately where the previous episode left off, with the demogorgon bursting into Holly Wheeler's (Nell Fisher) bedroom (I hope her awesome American Tail movie poster survived the attack). As she madly scrambles to escape its weird flower mouth, cut to her parents — Ted (Joe Chrest), on the lawn, driving golf balls into…the neighbor's yard? The road? Either way, it doesn't seem safe; and Karen (Cara Buono), rocking out to Abba's "Fernando" as she prepares to polish off her umpteenth bottle of wine with a relaxing bubble bath.
But to their credit, both parents do what they can when Holly's plight becomes known. Karen and Holly hiding in the bathtub is a delightfully tense sequence, with shades of various Jurassic Park franchise set pieces (which isn't the only Spielberg story this sequence is aping), and while Ted doesn't do a whole lot, give him credit for swinging a mean golf club when it mattered, all while delivering even more '80s dad bon mots.
Racing downstairs with Holly, Karen goes full Ellen Ripley, shattering a wine bottle and slashing at the demogorgon as the episode cuts to Nancy (Natalia Dyer) and Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), racing to the Wheeler household. Karen manages to get in a few good licks (she gets frighteningly close to that maw of teeth in the process) but in the end, it's not enough to either stop the demogorgon from escaping with Holly or to stop Karen getting bloodily eviscerated in the process. The weird time dilation stuff, cutting between Karen's defense and Nancy's arrival out of sequence, feels unnecessary, but both Nancy's horror at the sight of her bloodied, gashed mother and the cool, business-like way Eleven immediately leaps through the closing gate in pursuit of the demogorgon are excellent cappers to the scene.
The Beginning of the End
Cut to the hospital, where Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and Nancy begin a vigil for their critically injured parents. Dyer gets a great scene where Nancy tries to scrub her mother's blood off her hands while walking right up to the line of completely losing her shit without crossing it. All of the hospital bits with Mike and Nancy serve as follow-ups to their dueling scenes of breaking down the Crawl plan in the previous episode; again, it's nice to see these two interacting and being siblings together after spending so much of the series apart. They both also ultimately come to the realization that they should have told their parents and Holly more about the threat of Vecna and the Upside Down — as someone who gets regularly irritated in these kinds of stories when the protagonist keeps their secret life hidden from their loved ones for far too long, I appreciated this beat. It sure seems like the point where the earth cracked open and Upside Down dandruff snow started falling would have been a good time to loop in their loved ones.
Lucas (Calbe McLaughlin) also stops by, adding a further air of the ominous to the mix by pointing out they're just three days away from the four year anniversary of Will's disappearance, a.k.a. the start of the series (note: when the core members of your cast have aged noticeably to the point where it's a joke in the zeitgeist, maybe don't underscore just how little time has passed in the story relative to the real world). Lucas thinks we've hit the beginning of the end, the kind of end-series pronouncements that always give me, as Steve would say, the "goosies." Lucas also drops in on Max (Sadie Sink), in a heart-wrenching scene that McLaughlin knocks out of the park as he declares his belief that the party needs to be complete in order to defeat Vecna and basically begs the comatose Max to give him a sign she's going to come back to him.
Elsewhere, Steve (Joe Keery) and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) finally have it out in one of the episode's first examples of "finally addressing a dynamic that needs to be put to rest" as they hang a lampshade on their macho competition for Nancy's attention. What's great about this showdown is how they're both somewhat right and somewhat wrong: Jonathan is likely correct that Nancy would want them focusing on whatever they can do to help Holly, not stopping by the hospital to comfort her with flowers, and the audience also knows that Steve cares about Nancy way more than just as a friend. At the same time, Steve is right that Jonathan is kind of a crappy boyfriend who could work harder at his relationship with Nancy.
Also, Dustin (Gaten Mataraazo) is alive! He stumbles out of the woods and into the Hopper Trackermobile, but Steve is less than sympathetic despite Dustin's mangled face. They have it out as well, and like the argument between Steve and Jonathan, it works because they're both a little right and wrong: the mostly correct notion that Dustin's split focus is endangering all their efforts is repeated, but at the same time, Steve probably could stand to be a little more sympathetic given how messed up Dustin is.
Meanwhile, in the Upside Down, Eleven starts tracking the demogorgon and comes across Hopper (David Harbour). Their reunion quickly devolves into the usual, "I'm trying to protect you/you're holding me back" squabble, but again, the episode smartly uses this as an opportunity to seemingly move past that dynamic. Having been injured in the demogorgon attack on the convoy, Eleven tends to his wound, which gives Hopper the opportunity to monologue about his time in Vietnam and the death of his daughter, which informs his overprotectiveness of Eleven. This added perspective, along with Hopper seeing more of Eleven holding her own in the Upside Down, hopefully means we'll be moving past this particular beat for the characters.
With a better understanding of each other's perspective in hand, the pair continue their search for Holly/the demogorgon, only to come across an impenetrable, sky-high barrier a la the Wall from Game of Thrones, except this wall is made from gunk and meat instead of rock and ice.
H-E-N-R-Y
Speaking of shows where a less martially-inclined character finds himself able to project his consciousness into the minds of others, back at the Squawk, Robin reasons that Will's connection to Vecna could be useful in finding Holly, and busts him out from under Joyce's overprotective wings (in the process, if not dismantling another of the show's retread character conflicts, at least pushing back against it). The pair dance around Will having spotted Robin smooching her girlfriend last episode, then ultimately realize that when Will got all dizzy, it was because Holly was on the playground of her school at a time when Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) was targeting her. It's an example of the show getting to a place much of the audience already was — we know Will is connected to Vecna is some way, and the cut from Will's vertigo to Holly on the merry-go-round established their connection pretty clearly, but the Duffer Brothers help make this medicine go down by giving Robin and Will a chance to interact with one another.
Similarly, back at the hospital, Mike figures out (after he stumbles across the edition of A Wrinkle of Time with the cover that haunted my school libraries as a kid) what the audience already guessed because we've seen TV before, that Mr. Whatsit probably isn't imaginary. This leads to a fun sequence in which Nancy gets to be more than the third side of a love triangle as she and Mike work together to sneak into their mother's room and force her into consciousness in order to find out what she knows about Holly's new friend.
Once again, the Duffer Brothers wring as much drama as possible out of the ensuing reveal — despite it being pretty obvious from the start where it's going and the hilariously long time (even for a severely injured person) it takes Karen to write the name "Henry." The crosscutting between the hospital, Will and Robin's deductions, and the flashbacks to Mr. Whatsit talking with Holly before leading her into the Creel house, all as the pulsing music swells, is downright operatic. The Duffers know how to conclude an episode on a high note.
The question now is, what does Vecna want with Holly and, "all her little friends"? And where — or when — are they exactly?
Thoughts and Musings
- The series has long-teased time travel through various pop culture references, and this episode features a few significant Back to the Future-based ones, from Robin's exclamation of "Great Scott!" to her invocation of the Flux Capacitor as the (fake) thing that needs to get fixed in order to get Will out of the Squawk bunker, to the "Mister Sandman" needle drop as Vecna leads Holly inside the Creel house at the very end — the exact song that was playing as Marty entered the Hill Valley of 1955. If that all doesn't add up to physical time travel, it's gotta at least add up to some trippy mind-based time travel a la (again) Game of Thrones.
- The title of this episode is, of course, an homage to "The Vanishing of Will Byers", the series' first episode. It was also announced just as "The Vanishing of…", obviously to disguise the name of the character in the title to preserve the surprise.
- That said, while Holly's "disappearance" is dramatically conducted and obviously a big deal to the characters in the show (particularly the Wheeler family) it doesn't pack quite the same punch as Will's disappearance, largely because even in his short time pre-disappearance, Will made an impression as an actual character and in his absence, was consistently defined by his relationships to the people he left behind, whereas Holly has largely been a non-character up til now.
- I didn't clock it last episode, but Hopper mentioning the "Henderson tunnel" made me realize all the tunnels he and Eleven are using are the tunnels left behind from Season 2, which makes me feel better about the whole thing (since it doesn't require Hopper to have conducted a massive civil engineering project while maintaining his "I'm dead" cover and not attracting the attention of the military in town).
- Speaking of the military, we get another scene with Linda Hamilton's Doctor Kay, as she's told by one of her "Wolf Pack" soldiers that Eleven has surfaced and is in the Upside Down.
- It's also worth noting something else I totally missed last episode: Doctor Kay and her team are all in a base inside the Upside Down, being supplied by the forces on the other side of the gate in the Big Mac.
- This episode confirms the slight retcon in Ted and Karen Wheeler's ages established by the Stranger Things stage show The First Shadow, which put them in high school at the same time despite Season Four suggesting Ted was significantly older than Karen.
- Given the way this show likes to tease character deaths then pull back (ie Steve and Max last season), it's worth asking: should Ted and/or Karen have died in this episode? On the one hand, they're barely more developed characters than Holly (especially Ted), whose deaths would only be impactful due to how they affect other characters. On the other hand, killing them here would definitely add to the "the end is nigh/we're in the endgame now" vibe of the young season and re-inject some suspense into the fates of other characters.
- Last recap I complained about Mr. Whatsit being Vecna because it was such an obvious reveal; I do appreciate they didn't hold that reveal for very long, and I will say, if it turns out that Mr Whatsit isn't just Vecna, but a time-traveling Vecna, then I'm fully on board.
Steven King Spielberg Rules
Like King, Steven Spielberg and his production company Amblin Entertainment made significant contributions to the "kid on bikes" genre of stories which are woven into the DNA of Stranger Things. The opening of "The Vanishing of Holly Weaver," with its other dimensional monster crashing into a suburban home to capture the precocious young daughter of the family, has big Poltergeist vibes, the 1982 film produced by Spielberg/Amblin.
Who Won The Episode?
While Nancy arguably deserves the nod for keeping a level head and hatching a plan to rescue her sister while spending the episode covered in her mother's blood, I'll give this to Karen Wheeler, if only because this episode is likely Cara Buono's swan song on the show (she'll likely survive and turn up again, but probably won't ever have anything as big to do as her fight with the demogorogn here), and she made the most of her moment in the spotlight.
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