Stranger Things 2 Episode 4 Review – “Chapter Four: Will the Wise”

Stranger Things 2 Episode 4 – “Chapter Four: Will the Wise”
Written by Paul Dichter
Directed by Shawn Levy
Premiered October 27, 2017 on Netflix

The best representation of “Chatper Four: Will the Wise”, Stranger Things 2‘s largely inconsequential fourth episode, is seen with Hopper in the episode’s third act, where he finally gets tired of all the bullshit, grabs a shovel, and digs his way into the Upside Down. After all, “Will the Wise” is not an episode where a whole lot happens; instead, there is a lot of talking, a heavy dose of ominous synthesizers, and a few images in the third act that inch forward the main narrative ever-so-slightly (including our third Dart-related ending in four episodes), while the rest of “Will the Wise” is spent burrowing further into its themes and stories – none of which are individually reductive or disappointing, but as whole, don’t really add up to a whole lot outside of those aforementioned final moments.

“Chapter Four: Will the Wise”, to its credit, opens with its strongest sequences; Noah Schnapp hasn’t been given a whole lot to do with the role of Will so far in Stranger Things, but in “Will the Wise”, he finally feels like an active participant in his own story, someone who is finally capable of putting his feelings into words – which are quite unsettling, especially when he goes from the vague feelings of having “now-memories” to saying shit like “he likes it cold” when Joyce is drawing a bath to try and bring his temperature up. Paired with Hopper and Eleven’s angry, aggressive fight following her breakout in “Chapter Three: The Pollywog”, it gives the first act a ton of momentum that oddly begins to diffuse once Hopper arrives at the Byers home (Joyce called him eight times before 9am), and the episode shifts to the party’s hunt for Dart and Nancy’s little rendezvous with Jonathan over to Hawkins Lab.

There are certainly compelling moments in the episode’s second act, from Dr. Owens’ thinly-veiled threats to Nancy and Jonathan (and revealing that lighting the tentacles of The Upside Down is not working, and may actually be making the problem worse) or in how Stranger Things 2 continues to effectively build Billy as a secondary antagonist, someone whose terror is much more physical and tangible than the still-amorphous threats of the Upside Down, the Demogorgon, and the smoke monster that Will still feels all around (and inside of) him. But from the repeated scene of Billy and Steve getting into it during gym class (literally could’ve been swapped from the previous episode, it’s so pointless) to watching Joyce and Hopper re-arrange Will’s tentacles drawings for a painfully long time, there’s a distinct feeling that “Will the Wise” is not so much a metaphysical fight for Will’s very soul, than it is a stepping stone between the first and second acts of the season, in ways that betray the show’s established ability to synchronize story and character – and don’t really give it any opportunity to slow down and dig into anything, at least until the show’s final ten minutes.

Once Eleven finds Hopper’s files on her mother and she reached out to her in the void, “Chapter Four: Will the Wise” finally begins to pull itself together and step forward, recentering itself on the core journey of a young girl trying to find a family and understand who she is, against the wishes of just about everyone in existence. That scene, which brings us back to the now-iconic black of the void, is a catalyzing moment for what’s a rather slow, sleepy episode up to that point; from there, it feels like “Will the Wise” and season two starts to get going, moving from Eleven’s existential angst, right into a cascade of reveals that should finally kick some of these sleepy, repetitive stories to life.

Jonathan and Nancy playing back audio they recorded of Dr. Owens in the lab; Dustin discovering d’Artegnan has evolved into a mini-Demogorgon (and has also killed Mew Mew, the family cat); and the most evocative of them all, Hopper breaking through the ground of one of the infected farms and finding himself in a tunnel inside the Upside Down. All of these, but particularly Hopper digging into the Upside Down, feels like tangible reveals for season two, moments where a breakthrough or a reveal is more than just yet another bread crumbs laid out in the first four hours of the season. As the body count shifts from plants to animals to (inevitably) people in Hawkins, Stranger Things 2 desperately needed its tone to convey that shift – and with its third act reveals, it finally feels like “Will the Wise” is getting back in balance with itself.

With such strong bookends, it would be easy to forget how much of “Will the Wise” is just filling space in between those few moments… I mean, do we really need Will to be drawing tentacles for half the episode? Thankfully, there’s just enough character work – especially with characters like Nancy and Max – that it keeps the entire hour from feeling like a waste until it gets to those bigger, catalyzing moments. And with Will and Hopper now both in the throes of the Upside Down (and Owens and his team only provoking the dark forces tunneling below Hawkins), Stranger Things 2 feels poised to kick things into gear just in the nick of time.

Grade: B-

Other thoughts/observations:

• No Eggos or TV? Hopper Daddy ain’t playin’.
  
• In this week’s overt Mr. Clarke monologue, he talks about deploying defensive mechanisms. Now that there’s a four-legged Demodog running around, this might not be a terrible idea.
  
• Hopper’s voicemail message is great: “I’m probably out doing something incredible right now…”
  
• Mike continues to exclude Max, constantly excluding her from conversations in a way that feels incredibly petty, and feels like something Dustin or Lucas would’ve called out pretty explicitly by now.
  
• “There’s plenty of bitches in the sea… I’ll be sure to leave you some.” I gotta admit, Billy is one of the better “80s asshole shitbag teen boy” characters we’ve had in a long time.
  
• Gotta love some Cold War paranoia from Dr. Owens: “What if the Russians could do it?” seems like it was quite the driving force for a lot of projects, realistic or fictional, of the time.
  
• I like that Stranger Things leaves whether Billy hates Lucas because he’s racist, or just because he’s an overprotective asshole.
  
• Nancy: “Let’s burn that lab to the ground.” Another incredibly satisfying bit of character development for her character.