Stranger Things
The Disappearance of Holly Wheeler
Season 5
Episode 2
Editor’s Rating
Who can blame Will for still being treated like a little kid? He can help the cause in ways no one else in the Party can.
Photo: COURTESY OF NETFLIX
The Demogorgon is loose in the Wheeler house. I repeat, the Demogorgon is loose in the Wheeler house. I believe the Party would refer to this as a code red. The reddest code red they’ve had in awhile. Stranger Things season five is not messing around, it seems.
“The Disappearance of Holly Wheeler” begins exactly where the premiere episode leaves off: with the Demogorgon crashing through Holly’s bedroom ceiling. Ted is crushing golf balls outside and Karen and her chardonnay are prepping a bubble bath while jamming to ABBA, and both activities leave them unable to hear their daughter screaming for her life as the Demo attempts to pull her into the Upside Down. Thanks to a slippery boot, Holly gets away and runs into her mother’s bathroom, but it’s not long before the Demo comes knocking. Miraculously, Karen is able to hold herself and Holly underneath the bubbles in her bath — now, I’m not a bath person, but this seems impossible, no? Physically speaking, I mean. Regardless, good for them. If the bubble bath were my only hiding option in a life-or-death situation, I would’ve been dead immediately. Thankfully, this maneuver confuses the Demo long enough for Ted to walk into the house after noticing flickering lights. Well, not thankfully for Ted, I guess, who, despite attacking the Demogorgon with his club, gets sliced up and tossed across the room.
At least the distraction gives Karen and Holly enough time to run down to the first floor — but the Demogorgon is too fast. There’s no way out. But lest you think Karen will crumple in fear, please remember that she is the mother of the show’s resident badass; where do you think Nancy got all that fire from? She reaches for the only weapon she has available, her wine bottle, smashing it and stabbing the monster with it over and over. She even gets her own Ripley-esque moment: “Stay away from my daughter!” she screams — Karen Wheeler, the queen that you are.
The Wheeler matriarch puts up a good fight, but she’s no match for the Demo, who guts her and slits her throat for good measure, before busting through another wall back into the Upside Down with Holly in tow. Nancy and El run into the kitchen to find Karen barely alive on the kitchen floor. I really thought she was a goner — and Ted, too! — but it seems Stranger Things remains averse to killing off characters even in its final season. (Will I regret tempting fate with this note by the end of the season? Probably.) El is able to run through the Demo’s gate after Holly right before it closes, leaving Nancy sobbing over her mother, trying to stop the bleeding. Both Wheeler parents make it to the hospital alive — Ted’s put into an induced coma and Karen’s in surgery, leaving behind a shocked and terrified Nancy and Mike. This whole sequence is so intense and emotionally gutting (no offense, Karen) and exactly why you stick with a show for five seasons — I don’t know if an attack on the Wheelers would have been this emotional if it went down in the first half of the series. But this? This hurts.
The good news is that there are three separate teams on the hunt for Holly. El and Hopper — who bump into each other not long after El comes through the gate — are able to track the Demogorgon thanks to its trail of blood after its repeated run-ins with Karen and her bottle of wine. (In season one, Hopper and Joyce found Will by following the trail of an injured demogorgon, so this feels right.) The trail leads them to, well, technically a dead end, but an informative one: In the middle of Upside Down Hawkins, there is now a massive wall built from vines, pus-filled sacs, and other disgusting Upside Down materials. There’s no telling how high or wide this thing is. They do, however, find one of Holly’s boots at the base of it, which prompts El to theorize that maybe the reason she can’t find Holly in the Void, the same way she can’t find Vecna, is because they’re both behind that wall and, for some reason, it’s blocking her powers. She’s convinced that the Demogorgon was sent to bring Holly to Vecna, and wherever she’s being kept is behind that wall.
The two groups on the Rightside Up make some interesting discoveries, too. Back at the Squawk, Joyce, Robin, and Will are recollecting themselves after the power surge and Will’s voyage into the Demogorgon. Joyce is obviously concerned and even more so as a frightened Will describes what happened as just like the “now memories” he had in season two, but much, much worse. He felt like he was the Demogorgon. For some reason he’s just now tapped back into the hive mind, but it’s more intense than ever. Robin likens Will to a human radio receiver — he has an antenna in his head, and Vecna uses Mind Flayer particles like radio waves, so as those waves get closer, the signal gets stronger. It’s why those goosies are the perfect alarm system — the feeling Will gets is stronger the closer Vecna and his pets are. Joyce has basically ruled that Will is not allowed to leave her sight or put himself in any kind of danger, even as everyone else is doing that on the reg, and Will is clearly frustrated. He wants to use this radio receiver for good. His first thought? He should go back to where he had that other vision, the spinning sky one, and see if he can connect to the hive mind and pick up a signal there. It could help them find Holly. Joyce nixes the idea immediately. They’re going to wait until they can get in touch with Hopper, and that’s final.
Well, it’s final until Robin steps in. She tricks Joyce, who clearly has not seen Back to the Future, with her best Doc Brown impression and a lie about needing two people to fix the flux capacitor in order to steal Will away. She likes his plan and she, too, thinks they should connect his brain “into an interdimensional monster and save little Wheeler.” They take off for the woods where Will had the sky-spinning vision, and a new Stranger Things duo is born.
Meanwhile, at the hospital, the Wheelers and Lucas are reeling from what’s happened. Nancy is understandably feeling some immense guilt: Vecna warned her he would come after her family and they did nothing about it. But Lucas makes a good point: If this were about Vecna wanting them to suffer, why didn’t he finish the job? Why did he send the Demogorgon instead of doing it himself? Why not kill Holly instead of kidnapping her? Punishment and suffering don’t seem to be the main goal, and add that on top of the fact that it not only feels a lot like when Will was taken — which happened around the same date in ’83 — and there are just too many coincidences. Mike, too, realizes something that is simply too strange to be a coincidence: On the same day Holly’s imaginary friend Mr. Whatsit tells her that monsters in Hawkins want to take her and he can protect her, a monster in Hawkins takes her? It sounds crazy, but what doesn’t to these kids anymore: What if Mr. Whatsit isn’t imaginary at all, and what if he knows what happened to Holly? Mike and Nancy need to talk to the one person who has some more intel on this Mr. Whatsit: their mother.
Back in the woods, Robin vaguely comes out to Will, which is especially nice for him to hear, even if Robin doesn’t realize why just yet. When Robin notices that they’ve come across the mandala Mrs. Harris made all of her fifth-grade classes build, it jogs Will’s memory: In his spinning vision, he could hear kids laughing. He races up to the nearby elementary school, and once he sets eyes on the playground merry-go-round, it all clicks. Everyone in the hive mind is connected, even Vecna. Vecna attacks his victims by entering their mind. What if, when Will had that spinning vision, he wasn’t seeing through a demogorgon’s eyes, but Vecna’s, and Vecna was in the mind of his next victim … a kid who was spinning on this merry-go-round, Holly. Will can see exactly what Vecna is up to.
Mike and Nancy have to disguise themselves as a patient (with a weird-ass limp) and a candy striper, but they get themselves a face-to-face with their mother. (There’s a lot of great team-ups on this show, but I have a soft spot for siblings Nancy and Mike working together.) Karen can’t talk, but she can write, and she’s able to tell them that Holly described her friend as always wearing a vest and a pocket watch, and that he was tall. Holly also knew Mr. Whatsit’s real name: Henry. Immediately, Mike and Nancy know their little sister’s imaginary friend wasn’t imaginary at all, it was Henry Creel. It was Vecna.
At this point, kids are arriving for school, and as they walk by Will, he gets his goosebumps; he can feel Vecna gearing up to claim another victim. And that feeling seems to be right on the money because we watch as Henry Creel in his nice brown suit brings Holly into the Creel House — but not the creepy version we’ve seen before, this is the Creel House in its heyday, sparkling and gorgeous —where he tells her that yes, of course, he’ll be bringing all of her friends here to be safe from the monsters, too. Her friends first and then her family, he promises. “I have room for everyone here,” he tells her. Vecna’s plan is much bigger than just Holly Wheeler.
• El had no other choice, but Hopper’s anger at his daughter for getting in a car and driving over to the Wheelers’ disguised in nothing but a hoodie is proved warranted: Now the military has a CCTV picture of her on the move, and Dr. Kay knows El’s in the Upside Down. She’s closer to capturing her than ever before.
• When Hopper and El need to break from their demogorgon hunt so she can clean out his bullet wound from the cargo van shootout, it gives them time for a heart-to-heart. Hopper admits that it’s not that he doesn’t trust Eleven to take on Vecna, but he’s scared for her. He’s already lost so much and he doesn’t want to lose her. If Hop’s already giving big, emotional speeches and having flashbacks to his dead daughter, does this mean he’s a goner this season? After this man survived the Russian monster prison?! Killing him off would honestly be so rude at this point.
• Dustin comes across Steve and Jonathan in the van and he is as beaten, broken, and bloodied as you’d imagine, but instead of confiding in Steve about the truth, he picks a fight. Watching Dustin and Steve fight is painful, and the only thing getting me through it is knowing that surely, eventually, they’ll have an emotional reconciliation. For now, they aren’t speaking to each other.
• When Steve suggests they check on Nancy at the hospital, Jonathan shuts him down and lays into him for clearly trying to win her back. Steve isn’t having any of it, though. Nancy is his friend, and maybe Jonathan should focus more on his relationship than on what Steve’s doing, because from where he’s sitting, “the only one more miserable [than Jonathan] in that relationship is Nance.” Go off, Steve!
• The scene in which we find Nancy sobbing, scrubbing her hands still covered in her mother’s blood, just overwhelmed with grief and guilt and fear, really did me in. Natalia Dyer is an unsung hero of this series for sure.
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