Review: Stranger Things, "The Turnbow Trap" | Season 5, Episode 3

After a pair of episodes as grim as they were stagnant, I’m pleased to report that, with “The Turnbow Trap,” Stranger Things has belatedly recovered its sense of fun.

That tonal shift toward levity and adventure can be seen in the way the show approaches virtually every one of its plotlines this episode (all except Hopper and Eleven’s military adventures in the Upside Down, and even that plot gives the father-daughter duo more agency than they’ve had lately). It's important for a couple reasons, but it most obviously helps inoculate the show against feeling one-note and exhausting the way it consistently has so far in its fifth season. 

But just as importantly, a bouncier, lighter-on-its-feet Stranger Things is one that nurtures the realist, teen movie side of its heritage. What I’ve called before show’s Apatowian tendency—its debt to Freaks and Geeks in particular and grounded, emotionally astute teen dramas in general—requires a wide emotional gamut from its characters to help its viewers understand just how gargantuan teens’ feelings can be. And while you’d be forgiven for forgetting this given how middle-aged some of the actors are looking, these are textually a bunch of teenagers. They’re kids. And while the show’s made it plenty clear that these kids are angsty, it seems to finally be remembering that, being kids, emotional realism demands that they also be absolute dumbasses.

“The Turnbow Trap” gives us that immature, overly-confident characterization through a device straight out of the Eighties films the Duffers adore: a big, complex plan that has many more points of failure than the kids are willing to admit. The best way to track Vecna to his lair—a proposal by Mike in a rare moment of leadership—will be to spike a demogorgon with one of the show’s beloved telemetry tags, and the best way to get that tag in the demogorgon, in turn, will be to drug and kidnap an entire family and destroy their house with power tools. The whole sequence is jaunty and engaging and mostly jargon-free, with the kids’ implements of monster destruction (water balloons full of flammable liquid, a board with a bunch of nails in it) pretty self-evident in their respective purposes. The show goes a little broad with the evil family of Republican property developers that the Wheeler/Byers/Sinclair Coalition will be hog-tying, but it’s a hell of a lot better problem for the writing to have than, say, the unrelenting misery we got last episode. And I found the way Mike and Lucas had to navigate Erica’s internecine dodgeball-related middle school drama thoroughly charming.

(I’ll take a second to note here that I have seen a lot of hate for Erica online, and I just don’t get it! I mean, I know that a bratty little sister character is anathema to a lot of people, full stop, but come on. Erica’s got a clear personality, has grown over the seasons into someone more mature without losing the central spark of her character, and fills a nerd archetype that none of the original Stranger Things kids fit into back in the day: the prissy know-it-all dork. Plus, while Priah Ferguson is, like her costars, way too old for her role at this point, she does at least read pretty young on-screen, which is more than you can say for, you know, Will Byers.)

Even when “The Turnbow Trap” isn’t explicitly goofing around, it’s injecting a dorky, awkward sensibility into the proceedings that’s very welcome. For one thing, it gives the actors who have so far this season have been saddled with the straight-faced delivery of endless exposition dumps and proper-noun salads the chance to show their range a bit. One of my favorite lines in the episode was a blink-and-you-miss it beat in which the demogorgon turns on a terrified Mike, who’s armed only with a shovel. Lucas, standing across the room from Mike, could easily sneak around the pit in the floor and give him an assist; instead, in an ineffably teenage-boy way, he offers a breathless shout of “comeonMikekillitkillitkillit!” while jumping up and down a little.

Will, who I’ve had trouble connecting with all season in large part because of Noah Schnapp’s often-wooden performance, has a similar gangly-kid moment when he’s stealing drugs from the hospital with Nancy. He awkwardly asks her a question about gay dating, gets razzed about his bowl cut, and then very obviously gets the wrong idea from her about how to tell if someone’s into you, to the degree that I’m almost certain he’s going to give Mike an unwanted smooch at some point in the season’s second episode drop and then blame it on his gay mom’s stupid wrong advice. In both cases, actors who’ve been struggling with their role as exposition machines (Schnapp) or been given almost nothing to do (Caleb McLaughlin as Lucas) seize the tiny moments the script has given them to actually, for once, act like real, stupid teenagers.

This is all important because it means this episode is, unlike "The Vanishing of Holly Wheeler," enjoyable. But it’s also helping correct the means-to-an-end characterization I talked about in yesterday’s review. While that piece was mostly focused on how little attention the show had given Holly Wheeler as a person to root for rather than a mindless object in a plot, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, after four seasons of rapidly escalating stakes, that attitude had started to metastasize to how the show saw the rest of its cast.

Stranger Things is and has always been a show with an incredible cast, a solid writing team, and—let’s be honest—a flat, unimaginative approach to the supernatural. Virtually no one is watching Stranger Things to see how they’ll redesign the demogorgon this season; they—we—are watching it for the characters. Episodes like “The Turnbow Trap,” on the micro and macro scale, remind us as viewers that those characters are more than names in a plot description. They are people with obsessions and failings and moments of overconfidence and clumsiness and emotional regression. To be human is to be a hero occasionally and a dipshit most of the time; it’s good to see Stranger Things remember that.

Speaking of Holly Wheeler, though: “The Turnabout Trap,” in another act of grace, gives her the first inklings of characterization. She’s being kept in Vecna’s psychic plane (I’m not sure how many psychic planes deep we are at this point, honestly) under the guise of protection from “the monsters.” There, in an illusion (I’m assuming?) of Vecna’s childhood home, she blasts pop music from a pink plastic boombox as she plays dress-up, eventually putting together an outfit that matches the D&D figurine Mike gave her in the season’s opener. And when a mysterious note in very girly handwriting tells her to go out to the forbidden woods, she decides to be brave because she wants to be like that figurine, a clear and sweet nod to her idolizing her older brother. I have my qualms here—it’s pretty basic characterization for a little kid character, I’m not sold on Nell Fisher’s performance yet, and the show obviously should have done this character work before Holly was kidnapped—but it’s hard to overstate what a step up it is from the complete nothing we got from Holly yesterday in what was ostensibly her titular episode.

And, to top it all off, we end the show with Holly meeting Max in Vecna’s Brain Realm. I’ve missed Max dearly while she’s been comatose, in no small part because Sadie Sink has consistently actually looked like a teenager while her costars now seem like they should be playing junior financial analysts, but also because Max has always been a vehicle for the sort of emotional realism I praised above. She’s a still, deep lake, a character equally at home in goofs and in angst. I’m very glad to have her back, and, for the first time this season, I’m actually excited to watch the next episode.

Stray observations

• A brief style note on Vecna, who, like a Tolstoy protagonist, has way too many names: for consistency, I’m just going to call him Vecna in these reviews. I know it is his least formal name and the only one he wouldn’t even recognize as his own (does he even know the kids call him that?), but he’s evil and he doesn’t deserve common courtesy, is my take.
• Throughout this episode, my wife kept saying, “Robin’s gonna love the Nineties,” and I could not agree more.
• I didn’t have time to mention this above, but oh my God, Jonathan and Nancy should NOT get engaged!! No!! You guys are like nineteen or something! I joked in my last review about the affinity between Stranger Things and Twilight but I didn’t mean it like that!! I genuinely think this plot is a consequence of Natalia Dyer and Charlie Heaton being in their early thirties and, thus, everyone involved in making the show forgetting how old their characters are actually supposed to be.
• Re: Robin’s bowl cut comment, I would like to propose a unified theory of Byers haircuts. Obviously, Joyce cuts everyone’s hair, and she knows only three haircuts: the Little Kid Bowl Cut (Will in s1-s4), the Big Kid Bowl Cut (Jonathan, Will in s5), and her own haircut (Joyce, Eleven in s4 before they shave her head). Between seasons one and four, Will’s bowl cut shrinks until it looks more like a monastic tonsure; I hypothesize that this is because his head kept growing and Joyce never bought a second bowl to use. Hence, he has now graduated to the Big Kid Bowl Cut (which is really more of a shaggy indie-boy cut) because the bowl no longer fits on Will's head at all.
• I love that Robin makes air quotes while talking to people over the radio.
• Help me out here, commenters: in the history of Stranger Things, has anyone ever successfully had a date at Enzo’s? 
• This episode’s Strangest Thing goes to Eleven for her admirable job hucking a can of beef jerky directly at her dad’s kidneys. Congratulations, Eleven! As always, please note your own Strangest Things below in the comments (which I hope to actually be able to check today now that my relatives have left!!).