Stranger Things season 1 episode 7: "The Bathtub", recap and analysis

The bike getaway and the overturned van

The episode opens quietly, in the Wheelers' basement, on Mike and Eleven talking in low voices. The alarm comes right after, by walkie-talkie: Lucas, who is not there, yells that the lab men know about Eleven and that they are coming. Mike, Dustin, and Eleven go out through the basement, grab their bikes, and take off. Lucas, for his part, gives them a meeting point on the radio — the corner of Elm and Cherry — and catches up with them by bike in the middle of the chase. The run fits into a few streets of houses, shot at handlebar height, until a van comes across to block their road.

Eleven raises her hand. The van lifts off, passes over the bikes, and lands on its roof behind them. The four kids stop short in front of the wreck. Dustin is the first to ask the question — whether they really saw what she just did to that van — and it is Lucas who delivers the verdict, in one word he repeats: huge. What shoved the roadblock aside is neither an adult nor a weapon, but a twelve-year-old girl whose nose starts bleeding again.

1. The alarm

   Lucas warns them by walkie-talkie: they know about Eleven

2. The departure

   out through the basement, three bikes, no preparation

3. The gathering

   Lucas catches up with them on the way, at the corner of Elm and Cherry

4. The roadblock

   a van moves across the street

5. The gesture

   it passes over the group and crashes behind them

The Eleven figure, blindfold over the eyes.

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Lucas's apology, then the fall back to the junkyard

Nobody leaves right away. It is there, standing in the street, in front of the van on its roof, that Lucas takes back what he had said — and it was not Mike he had called a traitor, it was Eleven, two episodes earlier. His apology fits in three sentences: everything he said about her, he was wrong, he is sorry. The answer comes from Eleven, with the rule the party had taught her from the start: friends do not lie. Then she apologizes in turn, Mike does the same, and the titles drop on that.

The fallback comes next. The four hide in the junkyard where the party had split two episodes earlier. They spread out a map there to look for the lab entrance, see that the place is guarded like a fortress and that none of them can go home anymore. A helicopter passes over the junkyard, and they have to throw themselves under the shell of an old school bus until the noise moves off. The story gets, in two sequences, what its finale will need: a group that stands.

At the police station, three investigations lock together

Meanwhile, Jonathan is held at the station, handcuffed, for hitting a cop; the deputies also searched his car and pulled out the weapons Nancy and he had bought, and she is there with him. Joyce and the police chief arrive to untangle the case. For the first time since the start, the three investigations run in parallel — a mother's, two teenagers', the police chief's — are told out loud in the same room.

A visitor tips the scene: Troy's mother shows up to demand apologies and the deputies' badge numbers, because of her son's broken arm. But it is Troy himself who, pushed by her, describes the little girl: the shaved head, the nose that bleeds, and things she can do — make you fly, for example. The police chief catches on the detail of the hair, then asks the only question that interests him: was she alone? No, the boy answers, she always hangs around with the same ones. No name is spoken in the room, and the police chief needs nothing more to know where to go looking for the kids.

The pool: Eleven's idea, a phone call to Mr. Clarke

Everyone meets at the Byers house. Joyce asks Eleven to reach Will, Nancy to find Barbara; the attempt fails, the house is not enough. Eleven herself gives the solution, in two words: the bath. At the lab, they used to put her in a tank of salt water to amplify what she perceives. To the police chief's questions, she also confirms a decisive landmark: the door is underground, near a large water tank.

One still has to be built. Dustin calls Mr. Clarke, their science teacher, who picks up in the middle of his evening — he is watching The Thing, the 1982 film, with a guest — and ends up explaining the principle. The figure comes down then: it takes 1 500 pounds of salt, close to six hundred and eighty kilos, and a volume of water nobody has at home. Next stop, the middle school.

1. The failed test

   at the Byers house, perception reaches neither Will nor Barbara

2. The idea

   Eleven says the word herself: the bath, like the lab tank

3. The phone call

   Mr. Clarke explains sensory deprivation from his living room

4. The quantity

   1 500 pounds of salt, and a container big enough

5. The place

   the middle-school gym, and a kiddie pool

Joyce at the edge of the pool

The gym becomes a makeshift lab: a kiddie pool set on the floor, bags of salt emptied in a chain, hoses, and the light switched off once the pool is ready. Eleven gets into the water with a blindfold over her eyes. The scene takes up the setup of the ones imposed on her behind the lab walls, with one difference: this time she is the one who proposed it, and her friends are the ones who carried the bags.

The rest hangs on one person. Joyce ties the blindfold herself, sits at the edge, tells her she will stay the whole time and that one word will be enough if the dark gets too frightening. The story had so far shown a child who is dunked, measured, and noted. It shows here someone who asks for her consent — and that person is a mother who came to find her own son.

• Joyceshe ties the blindfold, promises to stay the whole time, and does not leave the child
• Elevenshe proposes the experiment instead of undergoing it
• Dustinhe gets the method by picking up a phone
• The police chiefhe supplies the cover, the transport, and the forced entry into the middle school

The basement party, shelf version.

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What Eleven finds in the dark

The black, silent space comes back, and the sequence plays in two beats. First Barbara. Eleven finds her in the setting of the party where she disappeared, and there is nothing to negotiate: she is dead. Nancy learns it standing up, in the middle of a middle-school gym, five episodes after the party where her friend vanished.

Then Will. He is alive, sheltered in the wooden fort built behind the family house, on the other side. Eleven passes the words both ways: she names the fort, Joyce tells him she is coming and that he should not move, and the child's answer fits in one word, soon. His mother comes out of it with a precise place and the idea that there is still time.

The vise tightens

The last part splits the characters for the finale. Nancy and Jonathan go back to the station to recover the weapons that had been confiscated, then finish preparing their trap. Joyce and the police chief, for their part, are no longer trying to convince anyone: they take the road to the lab and go in, where armed guards are waiting for them. The episode leaves them there.

The last shot is for Will. Sitting in his fort, on the wrong side, he sings under his breath to hold on, until something comes closer. Cut. The construction is classic — the next-to-last chapter gathers and launches, the last one concludes — and it is carried out here without a minute of fat, in the shortest format of the whole series.

Details, references, and the episode sheet

The title hides nothing. The bath is the gym's kiddie pool; it is also the tank Eleven remembers. Two identical pools for two opposite uses: one was used to extract something from a child, the other serves her to find someone.

Two details are worth the detour. The film Mr. Clarke is watching, The Thing, tells of a creature hiding in the middle of an isolated group, while his students are looking for a way to get close to theirs. And the Saturday-night phone call is won with the teacher's own words: Dustin reminds him that you never leave a door of curiosity shut, and Mr. Clarke, past ten o'clock, ends up giving the steps.

Seventh of the eight episodes of season one, put online in a block on July 15, 2016.

The poster to hang above the desk.

Dans la boutiquePink dress Eleven with socks118,90 €Voir le produit

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