‘Stranger Things 4’ Episode 6 Recap: The Dive

Well, that escalated quickly. Patrick’s death at Vecna’s invisible hand is the third in a day (!), and we all know three makes a trend. More importantly, it’s the first of the deaths that’s been witnessed by more than just Eddie. Cop cars scream up to the lake to find Captain Jason holding Patrick’s body on the shore, where they take his statement, which is that Eddie is Satan’s vessel, despite the fact that he was just sitting in a boat displaying very poor rowing form when all this went down. The cops are skeptical, and Jason gets that murder sparkle in his eye again, asking, “How are you going to stop the devil if you don’t believe he’s real?” Meanwhile, the camera travels down, down, down into the lake, where a big fish minding its own business is violently snatched and yanked off-screen by what looks suspiciously like a Vecna tentacle. Yikes.

Let’s dive in and see what happens in Stranger Things 4 Chapter 6, shall we?

Into the woods

Turns out that Joyce and Murray haven’t crashed and burned after all, just crashed — and Yuri’s the prisoner now, tied to a tree. Nice! He says he’ll help them get to Hopper for the right price, and Murray bargains with him before pulling the rug out from under him. Gotcha! They wouldn’t kill him, Murray says, but they could just….leave him. Which would result in his death. Yuri takes their point, if not Murray’s honestly pretty good Yuri impression, and relents. He takes them to his church warehouse, the same place Hopper was caught, and is mad that someone (Hopper) got into his peanut butter, but excited to show off his flamethrower. Joyce and Murray tell him about their plan to get into the prison: Yuri will play the “silent role” of Murray, and Murray will disguise himself as Yuri, which means his Russian accent work is really going to come in handy.

Hop to it

Hopper and Antonov, alongside the other prisoners, think they’re about to face the monster, but instead they’re led to a sumptuous feast. The others chow down and rejoice, gabbing about how they’re being fed so they’re strong to fight the monster, but Hopper, swigging vodka, knows what’s up. He tells them about the Demigorgon’s general bloodthirsty tendencies, and asks them if they know why captive predators are fed live prey. “We’re not here to train this monster. We’re here to keep it entertained.” This, understandably, really kills the vibe. I think that’s what they call a party foul, Hop.

On the way back to their cell, Hopper provokes Antonov and starts a fight, beating on him until the guards pull them apart. After, when a hurt (physically and, one would presume, emotionally because it seemed like they were really bonding there for a sec) Antonov asks Hopper if it was worth it to get them in even more trouble, Hop reveals that he swiped a lighter off the guard who held him back, and that the Demigorgon hates fire. He also pocketed the vodka from the feast. “You asked me if it was worth it? The answer to your question? Yeah. I think it was worth it.” He starts laughing and then whines that his ribs are broken.

Save the drama for your Papa

Back at Project Nina, or the Remedial Telekinesis School For Emotionally Damaged Youths, as I like to think of it, Papa explains to Eleven that he thinks she had something akin to a stroke the last time she saved the world and lost her powers. And just like stroke patients can re-learn functions they lost, so can Eleven, which they plan to do by having her relive her memories with the tapes from her younger time in the lab. Eleven is, understandably, not so sure about this, asking him about the flashes she’s gotten of herself with bloodstained hands. She wants to know what that’s all about, and Papa is like uhhhh…more on that later. “You have demons in your past,” he says. Back into the past she goes, while Sam frets to Papa that they “should have just told her the truth.” The sound of my eyebrows raising is just deafening.

In the MemoryLab Rainbow Room, El is struggling with a game, trying to drop a disk into a specific numbered slot. The orderly comes up to her and makes small talk, telling her that she reminds him of someone he used to know well, then taps the number 1 on the game. Eleven is stunned, having been told that One doesn’t exist, but Papa sometimes lies, the orderly says. Where One is now is “a story for another day,” but that his friend had changed when he “found his strength in a memory from his past. Something that made him sad, but also angry. Do you have a memory like that?” He brings up a memory of Eleven’s mother visiting her and screaming for her, calling her by her birth name of Jane. When Eleven says that Papa told her her mother is dead, the orderly quietly brings up the whole “Papa lies” thing again.

Speak of the devil — no, wait, that’s Eddie. Kidding! But Papa walks into the room in the memory and talks the kids through a special game they’re going to play, facing off against one another and trying to knock the other kid out of their circle on the floor using their mind. It’s simple: To win, stay in your circle. The prize is a coveted extra hour in the Rainbow Room. Two is dominating, launching blindfolded kids out of their circles one by one until only Eleven is left to try. As the orderly ties on her blindfold, he wishes her good luck. She starts to slide a little, then hears an echo of the orderly asking about strong memories. She thinks of her mother and launches Number Two’s ass straight out of the circle to win. “Well, well. Looks like we have a new winner,” Papa says, glancing sidelong at the shifty-looking orderly, who El later sees being beaten in secret by Papa’s cronies in Test Room 1.

Naturally, Number Two isn’t going to let Eleven enjoy her victory in peace. He and the other kids accost her in the Rainbow Room, pointing out that the cameras are off and no one is going to swoop in to save her. They surround her, and it’s a sci-fi mirror of the Angela incident at Rink-O-Mania, the kids circled around taunting her, pushing her with their minds and beating her up. “Tell Papa we did this, and we will kill you,” Two warns her. Before she wakes up in the real world, she catches a glimpse of Baby Eleven in the mirror, covered in blood, and the aftermath of the massacre, all of them dead. She answers Papa’s praise with weeping: “I killed them, didn’t I, Papa? I killed them all.”

Show me the Beast!

The basketbros, and especially Captain Jason, continue to be riled the heck up. Eddie has snagged a radio and escaped, and the police are naming names, both that Patrick’s name has been added to the death toll and that Eddie is the prime suspect, so they’re not the only ones on the hunt for him. At a police town hall, Jason marches in and goes full Gaston, stopping just short of telling the villagers to screw their courage to the sticking place: He grabs the mic and preaches about the cult of the Hellfire Club. Erica speaks up that it’s a “club for nerds” before her mother shushes her. The crowd is hype about Jason’s whole bloodthirsty mob plan -. “You heard the kid!” — and John Doe has the upper hand. They march out.

Utah man, Susie!

The pizza gang rolls up to Susie’s house, and not a moment too soon, according to Argyle’s complaints about his butt falling asleep. Mike and Dustin warn him that Susie’s family is pretty religious, so they need to be on their best behavior. Which means that when they walk into absolute melee, starting with a shirtless child in jorts shooting them with a bow and arrow, some very intense child cookery, an auteur-level film shoot, and an Ally Sheedy type trying to wrangle the first feral child — all of them siblings of Susie’s, none of them too concerned about where she might be — they’re a little surprised. Except for Argyle, of course, who is immediately smitten with the teen girl, Eden. When she tells them that Susie is upstairs and calls her a “selfish four-eyed shit,” Argyle dreamily promises to shove her on Eden’s behalf. They find Susie on the roof, naturally, fiddling with an antennae.

They feed her a lie about needing her help with finding info and the location of the Nina Project using the phone number, telling her that it’s a new video game system that they want to gift Dustin. American-tendo, they say, blowing her mind by telling her it’s 16-bit. She’d love to help, but alas, alack, her dad confiscated her computer when he found out that not only had she hacked Dustin’s grade, but that she was — gasp! — dating an Agnostic. As the feral jorts child below (Cornelius, apparently) bellows, she hatches a plan. Basically, it’s to lure her father out of his office and have her siblings employ their theatrics while Susie and Co. liberate the information from the computer in the office. As Susie nails down the address for the Nina Project, waving off questions like “what’s the internet,” her dad is fighting literal fires downstairs. Mission successful, they head back to the van, where, naturally, Susie is shocked to find that Argyle and Eden have been smoking up a storm. Ah, kids.

Where’s your Ed at?

Which brings us, finally, back to the Hawkins gaggle, Steve and Dustin bickering over how to get to Skull Rock, where Eddie is hiding. Dustin is waving his compass around, Robin is hinting to Nancy that she should get back together with Steve, Lucas is feeling bad for not noticing Max’s trauma, and Steve reigns victorious. “In your cocky little face, man!” he crows at an actual child, Dustin, when they reach Skull Rock. Except that it turns out Dustin was at least a leeeeetle bit right, because his compass has gone absolutely haywire the closer to the lake they get. Turns out, Eddie’s watch is stopped at 9:27, when he fell into the lake when Patrick was be-Vecna-ed, and that’s the same time the attic lights blew at Hell House. As Steve complains about not having Eleven and her powers on hand, Dustin yells “BOOM!” and goes into a whole blah blah electromagnetic fields blah explanation — he thinks there must be a gate to the Upside Down nearby, which would be a great way to find and kill Vecna. “It sounds like you’re asking me to follow you into the gates of Mordor,” Eddie says pensively. “Which, if I’m totally straight with you, I think is a really bad idea, but the Shire… the Shire is burning.” Dustin jumps up and down with excitement. “So Mordor it is.” They head out, everyone except Dustin looking confused and Steve muttering, “what is Mordor?”

Turns out, Dustin’s not going to Mordor, nor are Max and Lucas, as Steve, Robin, Eddie and Nancy hilariously row away and leave them onshore at Lover’s Lake, going off to investigate their theory that there’s a gate at each of Vecna’s kill sites, Dustin flipping them off with both hands as they call back to them that bedtime is at 9.

The gate theory seems to be panning out, because the closer the boat gets to the middle of the lake, the wilder the compass is going. Steve brags about being the co-captain of the swim team and strips down to prepare to investigate, the kids on the shore watching through binoculars in horror (Dustin and Lucas) and open lust (Max) at the rug on Steve’s chest. Dustin comments that he’s told Steve to “tame that jungle” to no avail, then quickly getting distracted by the punny realization that “if there’s a gate down there, technically it’s a Watergate!” He is also distracted by, oops, the cops totally catching the on-shore trio. Shoot.

Steve and his chest hair swan dive into the lake and finds a glowing red gash at the bottom. Bingo. He surfaces to tell the others, before a Vecna tentacle (Vecnacle?) also surfaces to grab him and pull him under, through to the Upside Down. Nancy quickly jumps in after him, and Robin follows shortly after, against Eddie’s wishes. Eddie, who wa honestly just in that lake and turned out fine, mutters, “Son of a bitch, this is so stupid,” then reluctantly jumps over the side of the boat too.

In the stormy Upside Down, Steve and his shirtless torso are being attacked by the tentacle-having dragon-Dementors, choking him on the ground to end the episode on a cliffhanger. BONG.

Body count:

No new kills, unless you count the full roast pig that the Russian prison crew chows down on.

Most ’80s moment of the episode:

“What’s the internet?”

Kase Wickman is a writer, editor, Ravenclaw and certified fraidy-cat who lives in New Jersey. If she had powers, she’d never have to wash off mascara again. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram, if you dare.