Stranger Things Season 3 Recap: Episodes 3 to 5, Scene by Scene

El Stranger Things season 3 recap: episodes 3 to 5

Season 3 of Stranger Things arrived on Netflix on July 4, 2019, with eight episodes, and the middle stretch is where it stops being a summer-in-the-mall comedy and becomes a body-horror story. Episodes 3 and 4 were directed by Shawn Levy, with William Bridges and Kate Trefry writing them in turn. Episode 5 was directed by Uta Briesewitz from a script by Paul Dichter. Together they set up everything the finale cashes in.

Readers who type “el stranger things season 3” into a search box are most often looking for what happens to Eleven in these episodes, so that thread comes first. She spends the stretch learning to use her power on her own terms. Max, newly her best friend, tells her to make her own rules, and El takes the advice literally: she blindfolds herself, slips into the dark void where she can spy on people, and goes looking for the truth about Billy.

Around her, the season runs on several threads at once. Hopper and Joyce break into the old Hawkins lab and then run from a Russian who looks like a movie action hero. Steve, Dustin, Robin and Erica try to break into a secret room under Starcourt Mall. Nancy and Jonathan chase a story that the Hawkins Post will not print. All of them converge in a hospital at the end of episode 5.

The recap below goes episode by episode and keeps to the order of events on screen.

Episode 3, “The Case of the Missing Lifeguard”

The episode opens at Hopper's cabin, where Max is sleeping over and talking about boys with Eleven. Eleven, hurt that her ex-boyfriend Mike is moping, uses her power to spy on him in his basement, where Mike and Lucas are sulking over the girls and insulting them as an illogical species. She repeats the line to Max, which stings. The two girls then make a spin-the-bottle game from names. Eleven's spin lands on Billy, and in the void she finds Billy beside his damaged car, speaking to a muffled lifeguard in the same words from the last episode. Billy turns and, in the real world, senses her.

Meanwhile Mike and Lucas ruin Will's attempt at a day of Dungeons & Dragons. Mike cuts the campaign short by sacrificing their characters, and when Will protests, Mike says it is not his fault that Will does not like girls. Will walks off in the rain and ends up destroying the fort at Castle Byers. It is a small scene that carries real weight, and it lands harder because the show has been quietly setting Will apart from the group all season.

Elsewhere, Joyce shows Hopper her demagnetized magnets and insists the lab has reopened. He is still sore about being stood up by her and does not listen, so Joyce takes his wire cutters and his car and goes to the lab herself. Hopper follows. Inside, they find the holes in the walls filled in, and Joyce has a flashback to Bob's death. Hopper tells her that he can keep Hawkins safe, and then something moves in the building. A large Russian beats him unconscious and escapes on a motorcycle.

At the pool, Max and Eleven track down the owner of a bloodstained lifeguard whistle, Heather, and follow her to her house. Heather turns out to be the daughter of Tom Holloway, who is Nancy and Jonathan's boss. Billy is at the dinner table. He lies smoothly, Heather backs him up, and Eleven finally has her first face-to-face meeting with the boy who haunts her visions. Once the girls leave, Heather strikes her father with a wine bottle and uses chloroform from Billy to knock him out. Her mother has been drugged. It is now clear that Billy is delivering people to something.

Episode 4, “The Sauna Test”

The title refers to the kids' plan, but most of the episode builds toward it from several sides. At the steelworks, Billy and Heather watch as the five-legged creature forces its tendrils onto Tom and Janet Holloway, and the next day Tom, sweaty and cut, fires Nancy and Jonathan from the Post. He dismisses Mrs. Driscoll, the woman who has been eating fertilizer in her basement, as a paranoid schizophrenic.

Hopper wakes up on his couch with Joyce playing nurse, then goes after the man who beat him. He and Joyce lean on Mayor Kline, who is eventually threatened with a cigar clipper and admits that the Russian works for Starcourt and that the mall has been buying up land in southeast Hawkins. Joyce works out that the machine must be sitting in one of those parcels, and Hopper, charmed, offers her a job at the station.

At the mall, the Starcourt crew finds that every air duct leads to the sealed room. Dustin does not fit, but Erica does. After a negotiation worthy of a lawyer, in which she calls the plan child endangerment and holds out for free ice cream for life, she crawls through, opens the door from inside and starts what she names Operation Child Endangerment. Steve, Robin, Dustin and Erica then open a crate, find a vial of glowing green liquid, press a green button, and the floor drops them down an elevator shaft.

At the community pool, Will recognizes the Mind Flayer's presence in his neck. The group has worked out that the monster hates heat, and the plan is to lure Billy into the sauna. Mike plays bait through a radio strapped to a lifeguard dummy, Eleven shoves Billy inside, and Will cranks the temperature. Billy begs Max for help, then confesses that a shadow made him do things. Will warns them, Billy breaks the window, a sling stone from Lucas hits him, and he is possessed in full view: an ashen look, a deeper, distorted voice. The fight that follows ends when Mike hits Billy with a metal bar and Eleven throws him through a brick wall. Billy runs off.

In the last scene, Billy admits that Eleven could have killed him, and Heather agrees, then adds the line that sticks: not them, not us. The camera pulls back to show a small crowd of infected townspeople and the creature standing among them, which is now an army.

Episode 5, “The Flayed”

The fifth episode is the busiest of the three. Steve, Robin, Dustin and Erica spend a night in the elevator shaft, argue, find a way out, and sneak into a hidden Russian base. Steve takes down the lone communications officer in a scuffle, to Dustin's applause, and they find a giant drill powered by those green vials. It is boring into the Upside Down. The Russians, the kids realize, picked Hawkins on purpose.

Hopper and Joyce follow the land deeds to the Hess farm, where a hidden door under a bed leads to another lab. They find the scientist from the opening of the season and rescue him from the large Russian assassin. The chase that follows includes a missed gun toss, a missed key toss and a car that explodes. They learn the scientist's name is Alexei, eat at a 7-Eleven, steal a convertible and take him to Murray in Illinois, who meets the door with a shotgun.

Back in Hawkins, Nancy pulls together everything she knows and tells the kids that what happened to Will is happening to Mrs. Driscoll. Eleven suspects Heather, and Nancy realizes who Heather is. The group heads to the hospital where Mrs. Driscoll is held, hoping to follow her once she is freed. Nancy and Jonathan find the possessed Tom Holloway waiting for them, along with Bruce, and a long fight ensues. Each man feels the other's pain, and when the two die almost at once their bodies melt into goo and crawl together into a new, larger creature. The episode ends on that image.

Episodes 3 to 5 at a glance

Episodes 3 to 5 review: why the middle of season 3 works

These three episodes make the season. The set-up is the good-against-bad pairing of Eleven and Billy, and the writers let it develop slowly. Eleven's investigation, driven by her friendship with Max, gives her something to do besides worrying about Mike. The tenderness between the two girls is one of the best things in the season, and it shows what Max has been missing.

The tone shift is the other triumph. The first two episodes are bright and jokey, and this stretch turns toward the kind of body horror that 1980s horror directors would have recognized, with echoes of John Carpenter and of invasion-of-the-body-snatchers stories. The melting of Tom and Bruce into a single creature is the clearest example, and it is still disgusting.

Not everything is as sharp. Hopper's bickering with Joyce goes on too long, the scenes at the mall are funnier than they are tense, and the Russian assassin is more of a cartoon than a threat. But Erica carrying the vent scene, Steve finally winning a fight, and Dustin telling Steve that if he dies, Dustin dies too, all earn their place. Verdict: episode 4 is the strongest of the three, and the sauna sequence is the one to rewatch.

One practical note for anyone coming back to the season. The nostalgia is thick, with Madonna, Wham! and a lot of product placement, and it works better when you stop counting references and watch the people. Search for el stranger things season 3 and you will find that most of what viewers remember from this stretch is a girl with a blindfold, and that is the right instinct.

Sources

• Stranger Things season 3, Wikipedia — episode list, cast and air dates