Stranger Things season 4 episode 7: "The Massacre at Hawkins Lab," recap and analysis

The file on the seventh chapter

The full title is « Chapitre Sept : Le Massacre du laboratoire d'Hawkins », translation of "Chapter Seven: The Massacre at Hawkins Lab." Matt and Ross Duffer wrote and directed it themselves, like chapters 1, 2, 8, and 9 of this season. It runs 98 minutes.

It closes the first volume. The season came out in two parts: seven chapters on May 27, 2022, two on July 1. The audience therefore stayed five weeks on this stopping point. On the day it came out, this seventh chapter was the longest the show had produced; the finale took it back five weeks later, with its 139 minutes.

Its title had hidden nothing. The nine titles had been announced on November 6, 2021, six months before the release: a massacre at the lab had been on the program for months, without anyone knowing which one it was. It is a habit of the show, whose titles serve as clues and never as explanations.

Recap of Stranger Things season 4 episode 7, in order

The chapter picks up where the previous one stops, under Lovers' Lake. Steve Harrington, dragged to the other side by a vine, is being devoured by the Demobats. Nancy, Robin, and Eddie free him with oar blows. He gets out covered in bites.

The swarm comes back too numerous and condemns the gate at the bottom of the lake, the one Dustin had nicknamed the "Watergate." The four walk back toward the town, on this side of the mirror. At the Wheelers', Nancy looks in her room for the weapons she keeps there: they are not there. Nothing that happened after November 6, 1983 exists here. The world opposite stopped on the day of Will Byers's disappearance.

In the real house, at the same moment, Dustin, Lucas, Max, and Erica hold a council. Dustin has understood the killer's mechanism: each murder tears the fabric between the two worlds and leaves a door open at the exact place of the death. Steve hears his voice through the ceiling. Contact is made through electricity: a lamp flickers, the word S-O-S appears, and the two groups talk to each other letter by letter.

The nearest way out is the gate in Eddie Munson's trailer, where Chrissy Cunningham died a few days earlier. In town, the trailer is sealed; the four teenagers knot sheets into a ladder, pass them through the tear in the ceiling, and drag a mattress underneath. On the other side, you climb. Steve, Robin, and Eddie fall back into the trailer, alive.

Nancy, for her part, does not climb. The clock starts to strike, her gaze empties, and the monster takes her. She finds herself at the edge of the pool where Barbara Holland had disappeared, two and a half years earlier, then in the Creel house, in front of a family from the fifties and a twelve-year-old boy.

Meanwhile, in Nevada, Eleven goes back into the memory Dr. Brenner had made her forget. And in Kamchatka, Hopper and Dmitri are pushed into the prison arena. The three stories end in the same edit: Eleven recognizes a tattoo on a forearm, Nancy moves down the corridor of the Creel house, Hopper and Joyce find each other.

The three threads, taken separately

Hawkins and the other side. This is the longest thread and the most useful. It brings the proof that the mirror dimension is frozen on November 6, 1983, Dustin's theory about the doors opened by each murder, and a usable way out. It costs Nancy.

The detail of the missing weapons is one of the season's best-planted ideas: the guns Nancy keeps at home were bought after the frozen date, and on this side, those years never happened.

Nevada. Eleven is lying in the Nina Project tank, under Dr. Brenner's watch, and her mind goes back to the day of the massacre. The sequence is long, and it is the heart of the chapter: the rainbow room, the other numbered children, subject Two who torments her, and the orderly who comforts her when nobody else does.

This thread repairs a story injustice. For years, Eleven believed she had killed the children of the lab herself, and Brenner let her believe it. The memory says the opposite: she was manipulated.

Russia. Hopper and Dmitri, called Enzo, spend their last night in the cell talking about their children, then are thrown into the arena with the other prisoners. The creature let loose on them kills several before Hopper finishes it with a flaming spear. At the same moment, Murray passes himself off as the smuggler Yuri, puts the guards out of action, and Joyce opens the doors from the console.

One point is worth setting down, because the confusion is common: the arena beast is not Vecna, and it is not the Mind Flayer either. It is a Demogorgon, a predator without a face and without a plan, captured by the Soviets. Three distinct entities, which this chapter shows a few minutes apart without ever confusing them.

One thread does not come back: Mike, Will, Jonathan, and Argyle have no scene here. Their van is driving toward the desert off screen, and the story finds them again in the next chapter. This tightening to three fronts gives the chapter its pace.

The key moment: the night at the lab

It all hangs on one rolled-up sleeve. The kindly orderly the chapters five and six presented under the name Peter Ballard uncovers his forearm: 001. He is not an employee of the program, he is its first subject. His name is Henry Creel, he killed his mother and his sister at twelve, and his father is serving the sentence in his place.

The revelation plays in three beats in the same sequence: Peter is Henry, Henry is One, One becomes the creature the town will end up calling Vecna. Jamie Campbell Bower shot this turn in long shots,.

What the night changes goes beyond the chapter. The story had shown an animal predator, then an immense shadow, without ever giving them a voice. It now has an adversary with a name, a family, and a grudge. And the very first gate receives a date and someone responsible.

1. The rainbow room A child alone among the numbers

   Eleven is eight. She is the most gifted in the program and the most isolated: subject Two and the other numbered children torment her in the bright-colored playroom.

2. The orderly The only adult who talks to her

   A man in a white coat comforts her and encourages her to use her abilities. The previous chapters had presented him under the name Peter Ballard.

3. The confidence A chip in the neck

   He explains to her that an implant keeps him from being himself and asks her to rid him of it. Eleven agrees, without knowing what she is setting free.

4. The gesture The implant gives way

   The chip comes out. The man recovers at once abilities that Dr. Brenner had curbed in order to keep him near the children.

5. The massacre The white corridors, one by one

   Guards, staff, then numbered children: he lifts them, breaks their bodies, and leaves them on the floor. Eleven comes to in the middle of the victims.

6. The tattoo 001 on the forearm

   He rolls up his sleeve. The number says everything: he was never a caretaker, he is the first child of the program.

7. The duel The memory of Terry Ives

   He offers her to leave with him. She refuses. The confrontation is fought in levitation, and Eleven gets the upper hand thanks to a memory of her mother.

8. The gate Thrown to the other side

   She pushes him through a wall that gives onto an unknown dimension. The lightning there burns his body. The creature is born there, and the first gate too.

What the chapter sets up for what follows

Nancy is left in a trance, and the monster has not finished talking to her. It is through her that the group will learn, in the next chapter, what the season's deaths are worth: four victims, four doors, a town that is opening. The group is no longer running after a killer, but after a countdown.

For Eleven, the memory is the key. She had not come to the desert looking for the truth but for her abilities: she leaves with both. The next chapter, "Papa," follows on with the army's assault on the site and the break with Dr. Brenner.

Two places become strategic. The tear in the ceiling of Eddie's trailer is now a door the group knows how to cross in both directions. And the Creel house, which Nancy has just walked through in spirit, becomes the ground of the final confrontation. As for Max, named the fourth target, she knows whom she is dealing with.

The two remaining chapters, "Papa" and "The Piggyback," arrived on July 1, 2022. The second runs 139 minutes, longer than a feature film, and it will take both of them to close what the seventh opens.

The details and references to spot

The credits were lying. For two chapters, Jamie Campbell Bower was credited under the name Peter Ballard, orderly. The trick was also aimed at viewers who read the credits.

The monster is an actor. Makeup artist Barrie Gower designed a prosthetic costume in eighteen pieces, applied in about seven hours: most of the creature is a practical effect, and not a computer image. Henry as a child is played by Raphael Luce, thirteen at the shoot.

The prison is real. The Soviet sequences were shot in Lithuania, in a former penitentiary in Vilnius.

The rainbow room. This bright-colored set where the numbered children play is the most disturbing one in the lab: a daycare for test subjects, which serves here as the theater of the massacre.

The light bulbs. The conversation through the lights replays, in reverse, the painted alphabet Joyce Byers put on her living-room wall two and a half years earlier.

The loop. The very first images of the season, those corridors strewn with children's bodies, are the end of the night told here. The first chapter showed the result; the seventh shows the cause.

The song. "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)," by Journey, accompanies the passage from one world to the other. Like almost every track of the season, it predates March 1986.

Frequently asked questions

Read next