Stranger Things Season 1, Episode 2 Review – “Chapter Two: The Weirdo on Maple Street”

Stranger Things Season 1, Episode 2 “Chapter Two: The Weirdo on Maple Street”
Written by The Duffer Brothers
Directed by The Duffer Brothers
Premiered July 15, 2016 on Netflix

Stranger Things‘ first episodes benefit from the confidence of writers who know exactly the story they are trying to tell. Following an incredibly strong pilot, “Chapter Two: The Weirdo on Maple Street” is another focused hour, observing the ripple effects of the (still-mostly unknown) events catalyzing Eleven’s escape and Will’s disappearance, and how it begins to upend a family, a group of friendships, a small Indiana town… and of course, sets a mad scientist and his team racing against a local sheriff, a disheveled mother, and a trio of nerdy pre-teens, as they try to solve the slowly unraveling, increasingly dangerous mystery unfolding at the heart of Hawkins.

After finding Eleven while looking for Will at the close of “The Vanishing of Will Byers”, the party returns to Mike’s house to find a place for her to hide – and as we learn later in the episode, Will is also hiding somewhere… that just isn’t here, a place represented by the pure black of the D&D board Eleven turns over to describe his presumed predicament. And from those two children, one seen and one unseen, “The Weirdo from Maple Street” beings to spiral outwards, laying on a barrage of 80s homages (from Poltergeist to E.T.) as it begins to widen its lens.

With Will, “The Weirdo from Maple Street” uses some sparse flashbacks and a rather intense focus on his older brother, as he tries to keep his mother’s sanity intact, the household running, and the police away from his father Lonnie’s house, where he presumes Will has gone. With Jonathan, it’s all sad, all day, as we learn of the fighting that was the background of his and Will’s childhood, the isolation he felt at school not being a prototypical ‘normal’ kid (being into photography and The Clash, after all) – and of course, the shit heel of a father he has, who is dating someone closer to Jonathan’s age, and doesn’t really seem to give a shit about where his younger, odder child might’ve gone.

The Byers family story doesn’t get any better with Joyce – though it does get a little bit brighter, in the form of some seemingly-malfunctioning lights inside the Byers home. Where Jonathan is the funnel for the show’s homage to high school horror stories, Joyce serves the same role for drastically increasing the show’s underlying tensions, through some careful, patient direction, and Winona Ryder’s anxiety-riddled, powerhouse performance as Joyce, who refuses to come to terms with the circumstances of her son’s departure – to the point that, by the end of the episode, she is convinced he is trying to speak to her through the lights in her house.

Thankfully, “The Weirdo on Maple Street” is able to transcend just being misery porn for the entire hour-long running time – even though much of the running time is dedicated not only to the existential struggles of the Byers as they try to find Will, but also in teasing out a bit of Eleven’s backstory (we see her screaming and crying, being led away from Brenner into solitary confinement, a flashback she has hiding in Mike’s closet) and also giving our Sad Sheriff a little bit more time in the spotlight.

It does so with a mix of intriguing, allusive shots nodding towards the unknown, and the idea that something is lurking just on the other side of what we all can see – and that’s not just because at one point, Joyce sees what looks like someone trying to break through the layer of paint covering her dining room wall. Some of this comes from Brenner, whose light presence and intimidating musical cues instill a sense of immediate, human dread the dripping shed blobs and big-teethed monster that kidnaps Barb at the end can’t really capture.

Brenner’s incredible reach – he hears Joyce’s phone call the next morning, and breaks into the Byers home with an investigative team while she’s out trying to buy a new phone and a pack of Camels – and connections to Eleven ground some of the tension of Stranger Things in the ways the supernatural allusions don’t quite capture. It’s one thing to see Eleven thrown down the Demogorgon token on the table, or seemingly slam and lock Mike’s bedroom door with her mind (causing her nose to bleed, of course) – it’s another thing to watch Brenner start to invade Hawkins like a white-haired virus, extracting information and portraying the kind of unhinged authority that clearly makes him a dangerous presence, not just to El, but to the community she’s suddenly found herself surrounded in.

Of course, “The Weirdo with Maple Street ” is famously the episode where Nancy loses her virginity while Barb gets kidnapped by a monster from another dimension. While it ends in a bit of a goofy place (at a house party, with Jonathan creepily snapping photos from the woods after he hears a scream that turns out to be playful). One of the tensions Stranger Things consistently explores is how relationships change; how marriages dissolve after a child’s death, how people fall in love, and how best friends sometimes grow apart from each other.

There would be more acute explorations of this in later seasons, but in “The Weirdo on Maple Street”, it’s hard not to empathize with Barb as she watches her friend become an 80’s movie cliche. There’s a bit of Freaks and Geeks to the way Stranger Things lays out its high school stories, and there’s more than a little bit of Lindsay Weir in Nancy – though in this case, Grandma doesn’t have to die for Nancy to feel like she’s trapped in her own identity, the good girl who does her homework on time, never gets in trouble – and certainly never sneaks off to hang out with the school man slut.

We learn a lot of that through Barb’s reactions to Nancy’s behavior and decisions, which allows Stranger Things to fill in a lot of the emotional blanks in their friendship – as it does with Hopper and his brooding loneliness, Jonathan’s close bond with his mother and brother. And that’s perhaps the greatest strength of “The Weirdo of Maple Street” – not in its text, which is carefully scripted and beautifully scored, no doubt, but in its subtext, both in its allusions to the supernatural horrors lurking on the edges of Hawkins, and how it sketches out the relationships and lives within this small midwestern town, just as they all slowly – and often, unknowingly – begin to unravel.

While there isn’t a particular element of “The Weirdo of Maple Street” that stands out among the others, it is, as a whole, abundantly effective in setting a particular tone, in establishing that something real awful is headed towards a group of (mostly) nice people – and its not just the impending puberties of The Party, or what happens to Barb and Nancy’s friendship at Steve’s little Tuesday shindig. One drop of blood in the water, one finger pointed at a photo, and one boy missing in an parallel dimension – that’s really all it takes for Stranger Things to hit the ground running, though the collection of terrific performances and wonderful sense of tone certainly doesn’t hurt.

Grade: B+

Other thoughts/observations:

• Boy, I forgot how cold Lucas’s reception of Eleven was – he calls her weirdo constantly, and wants absolutely nothing to do with trying to protect her.
  
• In case anyone forgot, the woman Hopper is seen having a one-night stand with is named Sandra (shout out to the subtitles). Spoiler: we won’t see her again.
  
• We also learn Joyce has worked at the same pharmacy for the past decade, and has a nice boss (who also clearly doesn’t pay her enough).
  
• Joyce touches a nerve when she asks Hopper if he’d recognize the sound of his daughter’s breathing.
  
• “A promise is something you can never break.” Ahh, remember when Mike was just a nice little boy?
  
• the Eggo mythology begins, when Mike brings Eleven a couple Eggos he sneaks from the kitchen.
  
• When we first see Barb and Natalie in this episode, Barb is talking about “when alpha particles go through gold foil, they become unoccupied space”. This is actually not true; during the famous Gold Foil experiment in 1911, Ernest Rutherford actually discovered that a small percentage of particles bounced off the foil. This completely changed the accepted atomic model of the time. This eventually came to be known as the nuclear model.
  
• Mike talks about Yoda’s psychokinetic abilities. Foreshadowing!
  
• Eleven also gets to have her “Ross in the Laz-y-boy” moment in Mike’s living room.
  
• Officer Callahan reckons he could survive a big fall into the lake outside Hawkins; Hopper reminds him that at that height, water turns into cement. What seems calm and safe, suddenly becomes deadly – more foreshadowing, baby!
  
• Hopper has a bit of Main Character Syndrome, though one can’t blame him: “You ever feel cursed?… Last person missing [in Hawkins] was 1923. Last murder was fall of ’61.”
  
• Though it technically wasn’t released until 1987, The Bangles’ cover of Paul Simon’s “Hazy Shade of Winter” makes for a great episode closer.