(“From now on, we tell each other everything,” Nancy says to her brother, immediately before they both lie about their true feelings for Jonathan and Elle, respectively.) There are no questions left to answer, no secrets left to keep. In the lead-up to the season finale, “The Bathtub” also offers the satisfying union of characters - Mike and the gang, Hopper and Joyce, Nancy and Jonathan - who have operated independently until now. Though Joyce doesn’t know Elle, her assurances are as close to real parental affection as the girl has experienced. Elle hasn’t known Joyce for long before she volunteers to plumb the Upside Down for her, but Winona Ryder and Millie Bobby Brown make their immediate bond persuasive. Accepting genuine kindnesses has been difficult for Elle to do, and her reluctance extends to the very beginning of this episode, when Mike cleans her face like the orphaned Newt in Aliens. She’s never known the world outside the lab-rat limits of Brenner’s experiment. She clung to Brenner like the “papa” he’s pretended to be for her she’s easy to exploit because she doesn’t know what real parental love feels like. But Stranger Things has followed Elle through a touching progression - first with Mike and his friends, now with Joyce and the others - where she’s come to understand that people can care about her without pulling the strings.
She’s still looking for her son, after all, and it’s not an easy choice to value Elle’s safety when the mission to find Will is of utmost importance to her. Joyce has an even stronger motivation to push Elle than Brenner did. Now everyone’s struggling to contain the threat. In the process, Elle opened “the gate” in Hawkins. He pushed her to go further into what she calls “the Upside Down,” under the false assurance that she could make contact with the faceless creature without harming herself. She’s about to enter a terrifying place, one that seems to neutralize her telekinetic powers, and she needs someone to pull her out of it when she gets in trouble. (It’s hard also not to think of the precogs in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, but that’s another story.) The issue with Elle, as it is with the teenagers in Craven’s film, is trust. It’s hard not to think of A Nightmare on Elm Street when watching Elle climb into a makeshift sensory deprivation tank in “The Bathtub,” the breathless penultimate episode of Stranger Things. Yet they must sleep, as all humans do, so they try to develop survival strategies, like having someone in the waking world ready to pull them back into consciousness.
#WATCH STRANGER THINGS SEASON 1 EPISODE 7 SERIAL#
By falling asleep, its characters open up a portal through which a serial killer can attack them at their most vulnerable state. With Freddy Krueger, its razor-gloved killer seeking revenge from beyond the grave, the film toys with an irresistible idea: Nightmares are not just contained in sleep, but capable of invading the real world. Released amid a wave of cheapo slasher films that flooded theaters after John Carpenter’s Halloween, Wes Craven’s 1984 horror classic, A Nightmare on Elm Street, stood out for submerging the slice-and-dice subgenre in a vivid dreamscape.
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