If you haven't finished watching Stranger Things 2, turn back now!
You can definitely expect spoilers ahead.
The second season of Stranger Things wrapped about as neatly as you could hope for; Hawkins,
Indiana is once again safe from the threat of the Upside-Down, and Mike and Eleven finally
got that dance.
Yeah, we're still hurting inside for Bob…
"And...splash."
The rest of the cast made it through the season with nothing worse than a broken nose and
a few bruised egos.
But those last few episodes came and went like a lightning strike, so let's take a moment
to slow it down and look at some of the finer points of what happened at the end of Stranger
Things 2.
Looming shadow
Let's start by talking about the interdimensional elephant in the room—the Shadow Monster.
The final frames of the last episode essentially act as a promise for Season 3, reminding us
that even though the immediate threat from the shadow monster has been stopped, he's
still out there in the Upside-Down, looming over Hawkins.
It wasn't quite the cliffhanger we got in the first season, with a freshly rescued Will
still tormented by visions and coughing slugs into the sink, but it proves that the Mind
Flayer isn't quite finished with the residents of Hawkins.
As showrunner Ross Duffer explained it:
"They've shut the door on the Mind Flayer, but not only is it still there in the Upside
Down, it's very much aware of the kids, and particularly Eleven.
It had not encountered her and her powers until that final episode.
Now, it knows that she's out there."
So that… um… strange thing is contained, but it's far from defeated.
And if he found a way into our world once, chances are he'll be able to do it again,
gate or no gate.
As we saw several times in Season 1—such as when the demogorgon broke through the wall
of the school—the membrane between the worlds isn't particularly strong where these things
are concerned.
Closing the gate
Thanks to Eleven, the gate between Hawkins and the Upside-Down is definitively closed…
for now.
With the gate closed, all of the Shadow Monster's influence over our world is apparently cut
off as well.
We see the demodogs go limp and drop down the tunnel, and the vines in the tunnel shrivel
up.
That doesn't necessarily mean the Shadow Monster can't find a way back in, but it's a good
start.
Power surge
Over the course of two seasons, we've seen Eleven's power grow steadily, and it's also
apparent that she's much more comfortable with the humdrum everyday acts of telekinesis—she
doesn't get a nosebleed anymore with every little door she slams shut, for example.
But closing the gate clearly pushed Eleven to her limits—and revealed some of the true
power of her abilities.
Like that whole floating thing.
What's unclear is whether Eleven is channeling her rage or exorcising it in that moment.
We know that she's focusing on some of the darkest moments from her past, and earlier
in the season Kali tried to get her to build her anger as the source of her power.
"I want you to find something from your life.
Something that angers you.
"Now channel it."
Is that what she's doing when she fights back the Shadow Monster?
Or is she releasing all that rage once and for all?
Broken hive mind
Whatever the Shadow Monster is, it controls everything around it through a hive mind,
from the demodogs to the vines spreading out beneath Hawkins.
It's a pretty scary setup, as we see near the end of the season.
At a moment's notice, the Shadow Monster can send an army of killer demodogs anywhere in
Hawkins.
But we're also led to believe that it doesn't have perfect control over its minions, either.
When Dustin runs into his pet demodog, Dart, in the tunnels, Dart lets the kids pass, showing
that it can break the Shadow Monster's control over it if it wants to.
That's an important detail that may very well come into play in the third season.
Hopefully, the kids will have plenty of candy bars handy.
Cooking the virus
While Hopper and Eleven head to the Hawkins Lab to shut the gate, Joyce, Jonathan, and
Nancy go to Hopper's cabin with a comatose Will and turn up the heat on the thing living
inside him—literally.
By using all those heaters, Joyce, Jonathan, and Nancy are trying to sweat the virus out
of Will like a fever.
More or less.
"We need to burn it out of him."
It gets pretty brutal, but they're also saving Will's life.
If that thing was still inside Will when Eleven shut the gate, there's a good chance Will
would have died along with the rest of the Shadow Monster's hive mind.
Sure, Hopper was waiting for Jonathan's signal to prevent exactly that, but would he have
waited forever?
Tunnel distraction
Of course, the rest of the kids aren't idle during the climax.
Instead of waiting at the Byers house as ordered, they head out to the pumpkin patch to distract
the Shadow Monster while Eleven and Hopper work their way toward the gate in Hawkins
Lab.
Their plan: just set a bunch of stuff on fire and hope the Shadow Monster sends all the
demodogs their way.
Yeah, not exactly the best plan in the world, but it works—maybe even better than they
expected.
The timing could have been a total coincidence—we'll grant that—but the moment they set the tunnels
on fire just happens to be the same moment the Shadow Monster finally leaves Will.
The truth is out...sort of
During the epilogue, one month after the events of the climax, we see a string of government
trucks leaving a now-locked Hawkins Lab, while a news anchor voiceover explains that the
government admitted to killing Barbara from Season 1.
So Jonathan and Nancy's plan worked--they got the truth about Hawkins Lab out to the
public.
And also like they planned, it wasn't the whole truth.
Not by a long shot.
Instead of announcing that Barbara was killed by a monster that came through an interdimensional
rift at the lab, the news claims that she was accidentally poisoned by an "experimental
chemical asphyxiant."
Because as crazy conspiracy man Murray Bauman explained in Chapter 5: sometimes you have
to water down the truth to make people believe it.
"Just like this drink here.
We make it more tolerable."
The upshot is the same, however: by all appearances, Hawkins Lab is closed for good.
Finally, the citizens of Hawkins get go about their lives without the government spying
on everything they do.
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