Stranger Things 5 Episode 2 Review – “Chapter Two: The Vanishing of Holly Wheeler”

“Chapter Two: The Vanishing of Holly Wheeler” is a strange – and often bad – episode of Stranger Things, a limply-paced, incredibly repetitive hour of shoddy dialogue and underwhelming character dynamics that fails to move both plot and character forward with any sense of conviction. After its shockingly violent opening scene, “The Vanishing of Holly Wheeler” settles into a strange rhythm of wooden performances and stagnant narratives, spending most of its hour sitting around telling the audience of its theories and stories, rather than doing the actual work to show these ideas and journeys as they exist in reality – and because of that, making what should be a dramatic crescendo feel like an incredible flattening of its narrative and characters, poorly setting the table for the final two episodes of Volume I.

“The Vanishing of Holly Wheeler” at least opens on a dramatic high note; Ted and a wine-drunk Karen’s attempts to save Holly from the Demogorgon (where it is eventually revealed that Mr. Whatsit is Henry Creel – but we’ll come back to that) at least provides a visceral thrill, though it reminds the audience that Karen and Ted’s dynamic has not changed since “The Vanishing of Will Byers”. But even this becomes a strange sequence under the pen and camera of The Duffer Brothers, who cut away from Karen’s fight with the Demogorgon mid-fight to Nancy and Eleven’s discovery of them post-attack, following a trail of blood before cutting back to the same footage it just showed, then offering up the resolution to Karen’s fight, before cutting back to Nancy as she tells Eleven to run through a portal that opened in the kitchen (though I thought a portal had opened in Holly’s bedroom… apparently one in the kitchen too? And right by Hopper, no less?).

This strange decision to obfuscate such a small plot detail seems benign, until you step back and consider it as part of the episode’s whole – which for most scenes, is a character saying “well, if my theory is right” and then proceeding to explain a crackpot theory that Great Scott, just might work!

*which, side note: given we have replaced all of the D&D references with A Wrinkle in Time and Back to the Future references… means there’s at least a decent chance there is time travel in this season, no? Let’s put a pin in that – for now, back to the episode!

This “I have a theory” happens with multiple characters; by the time the episode ends, everyone from Lucas (whose only scene is talking to Max with his godawful haircut) to Joyce and Will have a theory, all of which tare expressed in the most stilted, awkward dialogue the show’s ever had. The worst of this, of course, comes from Will, who awkwardly explains his psychic connection to Vecna in two scenes littered with bad dialogue and another lacking performance from Noah Schnapp; once one of the show’s strongest child performers, the writing around Will (his slumped shoulders in seasons three and forlorn glances in season four) always boils him down to one or two basic characteristics, which the performer simply repeats over and over again. The writing never allows for anything dynamic or evolutionary in his performance, and in an episode that relies heavily on his character being able to express specific, technical details of the plot (in an episode already explaining too much of its plot), it sticks out like a sore thumb, one of a few signs of the show’s general creative regression that leads to this episode’s numerous glaring issues.

Meanwhile, Robin has turned into a quirky, awkward nightmare; I don’t know why this show decided she needed to be the quirky comic relief, but it sells her character incredibly short – and again, makes parts of Stranger Things 5 feel like its actively working against itself. Robin, once one of the show’s smartest, sharpest characters, has somehow been reduced to a stammering pile of stimming behaviors (not to mention a lesbian who doesn’t actually get to kiss girls, though that’s another conversation for another day). Like Joyce sitting behind a desk making quirky faces for this entire episode, Robin’s recalibration hollows out her character in incredibly disappointing ways, who is reduced to a Quirk Monster who stammers through a pair of terrible scenes, first with Joyce, and then later with Will, as the two walk through the woods looking for signs of Vecna.

The rest of “The Vanishing of Holly Wheeler” mostly splits its attention between two places; Eleven and Hopper’s walk through the Upside Down, and the misadventures of the Hawkins Hitmaker, as Steve and Jonathan meet up with a bloody Dustin, and the three of them argue with each other as they drive around Hawkins. Both of these stories have their individual issues, but the Jonathan/Steve conflict is much simpler; nobody cares, something that becomes painfully obvious when Jonathan has no interest in going to see Nancy upon Steve’s suggestion, instead berating him for passively-aggressively trying to gain her attention, or take opportunities to make Jonathan look weak.

If anything, this scene just reminds us how little this series has given Jonathan to do in the past few seasons, as his anxieties about his mother and brother have mostly shifted to his relationship with Nancy; there’s certainly nothing new to their dynamic in this season, which leaves us in the same position we were when Jonathan was hitting golf balls with Argyle back in season four. It’s just a limp story – and instead of offering Jonathan some semblance of personal growth, which it has for Steve over the years (though he’s still a womanizer, nearly jeopardizing their chances to get the truck jumpstarted in the first place), he instead becomes an even more passive part of his own story – which is a theme for the OG Byers family members, as Joyce continues to do nothing but hug Hopper and make screwy faces at other characters this season.

The other story, Hopper and Eleven walking through the Upside Down (remember in season one, when that was a really dangerous thing to do?), mostly just rehashes story that’s come before; Hopper clings to Eleven as an embodiment of his dead daughter, reminding her that he’s scared for her to take on Vecna and possibly lose. On its face, this is not a terrible scene; it re-establishes a relationship that has mostly been offscreen for the past two seasons, and helps reconnect Hopper back to the season one version of him this series forgot about a long time ago. But this happens with the two of them sitting down (Eleven tending to Hopper’s wound using the lessons Max taught her back in “The Bite”), and tries to utilize Hopper’s mental flashbacks from “The Upside Down” as its emotional hook; the combination makes the scene feel incredibly repetitive and flat – and honestly, a quietly weeping Hopper feels like a betrayal of the character’s core, which makes those random season one flashback sequences feel even more dissonant in the moment.

Where it all leads – Hopper/Eleven discovering a bit wet wall in the Upside Down, right as Henry brings Holly into (what appears to be a) fully restored version of the Creel House – is appropriately cryptic, at least for an episode that postulates a number of theories, and then just kind of lets them sit there. Presumably, Henry has taken Holly somewhere walled off inside the Upside Down (where Hop and Eleven have now arrived), but it is really anyone’s guess, since the episode ends on a still-impaired Karen slowly writing out “HENRY” on a piece of paper to her two children as Henry welcomes Holly into his cursed childhood home.

The descent from the opening scene of “The Vanishing of Holly Wheeler” to its closing images are a stark one; in between, Stranger Things 5 squanders much of the momentum in its premiere episode, as it once again stretches out its timeline for a series of underwhelming stories, all of which point to characters once again being left in limbo in favor of more exposition and theorizing – which was never the show’s strong suit, making it no surprise this feels like a wall-to-wall subpar episode of Stranger Things.

Grade: C-

Other thoughts/observations:

• Ted hooking golf balls in the dark is such a fun little moment.
  
• Hopper does scold Eleven for going out into public – and for good reason, because it turns out Dr. Kay’s cameras around Hawkins caught her, and now they know she’s in the Upside Down.
  
• Lt. Sullivan’s ability to walk into a room about eight seconds before a scene ends is immaculate. What an empty vector his character remains!
  
• So Will is basically an antenna who can pick up the signals of Vecna through the Upside Down. Interesting.
  
• Nancy dressing up as a candy striper is the least surprising choice ever.
  
• A lot has been said about the acting this season, and it’s hard to tell whether it is the performers, or the dialogue and how it is paced in each episode. Every character. Talks. Like This so. We Can Draw…. Out the Plot.
  
• “Not emotion. Instinct.”
  
• Another bad habit rearing its head: characters discovering things off-camera right before it cuts away to another scene. I get doing this once in awhile, but five or six times an episode, it gets older faster than hearing the phrase “I’ve got a theory”.
  
• “Mr. Sandman” is the musical cue? I get this is yet another Back to the Future reference (its what is playing in the town square when Marty realizes he’s in 1955), but it feels like a particularly uninspired choice.