Stranger Things Episode 4 Review – “Chapter Four: The Body”

Stranger Things Season 1, Episode 4 “The Body”
Written by Justin Doble
Directed by Shawn Levy
Premiered July 15, 2016 on Netflix

With investigations into bodies missing and found alike, “The Body” is an hour of gumshoe work for Stranger Things – one where all of its characters are in pursuit of truths just out of their grasp in the course of this hour. But for an episode without a lot of cogent answers, “The Body” does a great job biding its time, teasing out more details in the backstories of Hopper and Eleven as it inches closer and closer to the bigger reveals awaiting in the second half of season one.

“The Body”, as you can guess, centers itself on the ripple effects of finding Will’s “body” in the Hawkins ravine at the end of “Chapter Three: Holly, Jolly”. Smartly, the episode grounds this not through Joyce – who is fully in manic territory now, as unhinged to the town as she is rational to the audience – but through Hopper, whose veneer of trying to drink and bang his depression away starts to falter as he becomes more and more ingrained into what’s happening at Hawkins Lab with Dr. Brenner. Through Hopper, Stranger Things grounds a feeling of loss not through the misdirection of Will’s death (which, thankfully, none of the main characters buy into at any point), but in the increasingly dogged determination Hopper is showing in discovering what happened to Will, and how it connects to the cotton-filled cadaver the “state” tried to pass off as Will’s remains.

Meanwhile, Nancy is trying to keep herself together, as everyone from Steve to her mother to the local police are seemingly indifferent to Barb’s sudden disappearance. It seems anyone barely cares (even her parents) that Barb’s car has disappeared, or that Nancy definitely saw something in the woods when she went back to Steve’s cannon: as she frustratingly exclaims to her mother, nobody is listening to her – and perhaps the one person who might, Joyce, is too busy smashing holes in her front wall and trying to convince Hopper that Will is talking to her through a clump of Christmas lights.

Nancy’s reality checks come hard and quick in “Chapter Four: The Body”; even Steve is dismissive of Barb’s disappearance, more concerned he’ll get in trouble for having people drinking at his house than what happened to her friend. Her mother also confronts her about not telling the police her and Steve had sex, something Nancy argues with her through gritted teeth. And through this, “The Body” builds some nice parallels with Joyce, two women who are struggling to get people around them to take them seriously; it manifests in wildly different fashion, but there’s something to the image of Joyce taking a pickaxe to her front wall to literally break through all the bullshit.

Neither of them find the answers they want in this episode, but that persistence, even in the face of valid skepticism and criticism, drives the stories of the episode; like Hopper and Mike and Dustin, “Chapter Four: The Body” is driven by the characters unwilling to accept circumstances at face value, a journey wonderfully symbolized by Nancy literally taping the various disparate pieces of Jonathan’s photo together to discover the disturbing creature lying just on the edge of the visible frame, a moment of clarifying validation that speaks to the dangers everyone on Stranger Things observes appears on the edges of their reality.

There are a few breakthrough moments in “Chapter Four: The Body” – but anyone experiencing those is not in for a good time, be it the state cop Hopper beats the piss out of after discovering the cotton-stuffed cadaver, the distressed state the group hears Will in through Mike’s radio, or Brenner’s colleague Dr. Shepard’s first (and last) adventure through the big, wet gash formed at the bottom of Hawkins Lab. With truth sometimes comes pain, something everyone from Nancy’s mother to Joyce has to face; particularly the latter, who briefly sees her son on what appears to be the other side of a thick membrane, on the run from something deadly in a place that he says is “like home, but so dark and empty.”

Those moments are where “Chapter Four: The Body” really shines, showing off how well Stranger Things has incorporated so many archetypal elements of different 1980s genres into one synthesized-soaked mosaic. And as the series looks to the second half of its first season, “The Body” smartly begins to dive a little bit deeper into the festering emotions and underlying darkness that feeds into the larger mythology of Hawkins and The Upside Down. Eleven isn’t excluded from this, either, despite the antagonistic position the rest of the group places her in; her desperation to please those around her is seen again as she locates Will (a skill she learned from working with Brenner, as we see in a flashback) and makes a bully piss his pants, showing how far she’s willing to go to appease others, a clear byproduct of the manipulative abuse she was subjected to in Hawkins Lab.

And for an episode leaning towards a direction more than confidentially stepping forward in one, “Chapter Four: The Body” does a good job using small conflicts – like Lucas’s continued skepticism of everything around them, Nancy’s fight with her mother, or Jonathan’s attempts to hold his sanity together – to keep the episode from ever lagging or feeling like its wasting time. Through these moments, Stranger Things is able to establish strong bits of character and tone, like Dustin’s ability to refocus the group on its common goals, or Joyce’s absolute unwillingness to be denied, even if it comes at the cost of her sanity. It also keeps an episode that doesn’t really have a lot of major reveals or iconic moments to hang its hat on feeling like a memorable chapter in between the larger, more dramatic moments of Stranger Things‘s first season – which in many regards, is just as important at executing as the bigger, louder bits inevitably to come.

Grade: B+

Other thoughts/observations:

• Joy Division needle drops? Joy Division needle drops!
  
• There’s a random Heart of Darkness reference that feels like a nod more than anything of thematic importance. Remember literary references in TV shows?
  
• Eleven calls the bullies “mouth breathers” before making Troy piss himself in front of everyone after the memorial assembly for Will.
  
• love seeing Jonathan doing the darkroom version of “zooming in”. An analog time, the 80s were!
  
• I personally find it hilarious Hawkins Lab and the state would have this big secretive lab, but cheap out on the cadaver holding the whole illusion together. Nah, just get one full of cotton – it’s more affordable!
  
• More E.T. vibes with the kids dressing up Eleven in clothes and a wig.
  
• Hopper saying “fuck it”, beating people up and bringing wire cutters to break into Hawkins Lab, is both a great bit of character and a good excuse to break through some narrative barriers to keep things moving forward in “The Body”.
  
• “Chapter Four: The Body” ends with Lonnie Byers arriving at Joyce’s house. I’m sure that goes just fine!