Stranger Things 2 Episode 3 Review – “Chapter Three: The Pollywog”

Stranger Things Season 2, Episode 3 “Chapter Three: The Pollywog”
Written by Justin Doble
Directed by Shawn Levy
Premiered October 27, 2017 on Netflix

To borrow from Dustin’s scientific analysis, “Chapter Three: The Pollywog” feels like Stranger Things 2 embodying the life journey of little d’Artagnan, as both prepare to exit their larval stages to blossom into something larger, more agile, and more dangerous. In that way, “The Pollywog” feels much like “Chapter Two: Trick or Treat, Freak”, albeit one with a much stronger thematic undercurrent – and though it feels a bit unnecessarily stunted, its distinctly confident ending at least suggests some of this time spent languishing on the narrative hamster wheel is worth the wait.

Which is a good thing; as “The Pollywog” makes clear, many characters – and supernatural entities – are on the verge in Stranger Things 2‘s third hour, which naturally makes for a more propulsive, driven episode than its pair of wandering predecessors, even if it contains the same level of narrative density and much slower pace. Like the third and fourth legs breaking out of little Upside Down tadpole d’Artagnan’s body, “The Pollywog” feels like its many disparate parts are starting to find their footing – and though they’re not fully matured, are at least starting to percolate a bit.

Some of these are smaller notes – Jonathan noticing Bob spending the night at the Byer home, for example – but when “The Pollywog” is really humming, it is pulling directly from Mr. Clarke’s presentation about Phineas Gage, and detailing the proverbial iron bars sticking through the head, and heart, of Hawkins. The most obvious of these, of course, is Dustin’s titular pet, which the group quickly deduce is something from the Upside Down – and Will knows is probably similar to the thing he threw up a year earlier, a realization that kicks off Will’s latest vision of the giant smoke spider, but also provides the thematic underpinning that sprawls out into the many corners of “Chapter Three: The Pollywog”.

Of course, not many of these things are entirely consequential, which is where the episode runs into a bit of trouble; Joyce watching Will’s Halloween video from the (slightly damaged) video camera is a moment that helps give Joyce a bit of direction beyond pure neuroticism, but in the confines of this hour, her madly scrawling the outline of the smoke spider with a crayon mostly just harkens back to her hanging up the lights for Will to talk to her in season one. Its presence here simply stretches out the proceedings – which is a feeling much of this episode has in its first half, especially when it turns its attention to Eleven, who is quickly becoming the most underwhelming part of season two.

Unfortunately, anyone hoping for Eleven’s storyline – which also mirrors her season one stories, with her actions triggering memories of her recent past – to move anywhere in this episode will be sorely disappointed; for the most part, her story is a classic example of a series showing us things we’ve already been told in previous episodes. Part of what the first two episodes did so well was fill in Hopper and Eleven’s developments over the past eleven months, without having the explicitly point out every detail; well, for those wondering what music they listened to while they cleaned up the cabin and Hopper taught Eleven how to hear Morse code, then boy, does this episode have the thoroughly perfunctory, numbingly obvious scenes of Eleven’s slowly building frustrations with Hopper’s stewardship.

While it works in building out a different version of Eleven, one more prone to human emotions she’s never been given the tools to understand, it takes too much time rehashing minute details of her time with Hopper inferred much more efficiently in previous episodes. Instead of giving more room for characters like Steve, Billy, or Max, Stranger Things oddly decides to repeat the formula of season one – but without any of the inherent mystery of Hawkins Lab, Dr. Brenner, or Eleven’s backstory, which makes it feel like a lot of color-desaturated thumb-twiddling, when its time could be spent better building up the season’s central mysteries or new characters.

When it does shift away from the ticking time bomb of teenage Eleven under Hopper’s care, “The Pollywog” is much more effective when it turns its attention back to the two sets of children and their parallel ‘curiosity voyages’. At least, if you can call what Nancy’s on a voyage; as she pines for things to go back to the way things were, Nancy realizes, mostly through her now-broken relationship with Steve, that no matter how many times she has dinner with Barb’s parents or promises to keep her memory alive, she won’t ever be able to change the past or what happened to Barb. With Steve, this leads to some surprisingly levelheaded thinking (sending Steve, ironically, on his own curiosity voyage, as Nancy and Bill humble Steve emotionally and physically, setting him up for what will eventually be one of the show’s more rewarding redemption arcs) – and elsewhere, it leads Nancy to one of the season’s dumber decisions to date, when she cryptically calls Barb’s mom – while everyone at Hawkins Labs continues to listen in, as we saw all last season – and tells her they need to meet to talk about Barb.

The middle schoolers, of course, are dealing with two proverbial monsters in the room; Dustin’s new pet, and Will’s increasingly unstable mental state, which combine to eventually lead him right into (what will eventually be known as) the Mind Flayer’s grip. After Will takes a ride in the Bobmobile and learns a bit about courage, the group convenes to study Dustin’s Upside Down creature – which triggers Will, sending him running through Hawkins Middle (where we already know another rift into the Upside Down exists) and into the episode’s terrifying closing sequence, where Will forcibly ingests the Smoke Monster, all while thinking about his recent conversation with Bob’s attempts to inspire courage in him.

“Chapter Three: The Pollywog” is a bad day for Steve Harrington, but it’s a really bad one for Will, who goes from connecting with Bob and their shared adolescent experiences, to being forcibly bonded with something much more ominous and evil. It’s a bit of an overt picture of Will being literally caught between the forces of good and evil – and to be honest, Stranger Things hasn’t exactly done a convincing job of making Will an inherently interesting character, outside of him being caught as an object in the center of the show’s existential threats. His conversation with Bob may not give his character much to do (one forgets how much Will just kind of stares and listens in this second season) but it gives his character a bit of direction, as he finally, finally decides to stop running and take some agency in his own story – it comes at a cost, but at least makes his character more interesting and less passive than he’s been in the show’s first eleven episodes.

Though too much of “Chapter Three: The Pollywog” is spent navel-gazing at Eleven or laying it on real thick about what a nice, genuine guy Bob is (which – not the worst thing it could do!), there’s a sense in the final five minutes that Stranger Things 2 is done keeping all of its stories and characters at arm’s length (after all – how many more people are left in town to look at dead pumpkins); as it heads into the second act of season two, how it handles that sense of momentum and starts to meld all of these pieces together – in a way that is distinctly different than season one – remains to be seen.

Grade: B

Other thoughts/observations:

• Dustin, to the librarian (who makes her return from season one): “I am on a curiosity voyage, and I need my paddles to travel.”
  
• We don’t need a single second of the Hopper/Eleven montage – but hey, a little Jim Croce never hurt anyone.
  
• Lucas’s assessment of d’Artegnan: “He’s like a living booger!”
  
• Hopper is fed up with Dr. Mad About You: “You keep your shit out of my town. I have done my part, so you do yours.”
  
• Rewatching these first two seasons have been a great reminder of how fun a character Mr. Clarke is.
  
• I’m sure Hopper is not going to regret lying to Eleven about her mother being dead!
  
• Remember that scene that opened “Chapter One: MADMAX”? Ok, just checking.
  
• “El is our mage!”
  
• As predicted, Eleven is not a fan of seeing Max and Mike hanging out alone in the gym, and takes Max’s board out from underneath her, which Mike immediately recognizes as El.
  
• Dustin Ratatouille’s Dart inside his hat to hide him from the rest of the group, who are willing to kill him. I can’t imagine how many times one would need to wash their hair after that.