QuantumMechanic

This one came from my sister and I’m torn between thinking it’s the best thing ever and that it would be a horrible letdown. In an ultimate homage to two great 80s TV shows, the end of final episode of season 5 fades out to reveal that a bunch of 2022 GenX friends have just finished playing the sci-fi/horror RPG we’ve been watching for five seasons.

Which clear on multiple levels: 0) Didn't the opening of the first episode of this season say "September 1979"? And then we saw the outcome of the massacre, placing it in 1979. 1) We see repeated shots from immediately after the Eleven/One fight (you can tell because of the broken window (and all the dead people)) where the injured Brenner is yelling "Eleven, what have you done??" So Brenner is clearly not dead in 1979. 2) In 1986 he tells El "Will you revisit the past one more time with me?" He then picks the September 1979 video tape to play to El, further indicating that the massacre was in 1979 since the whole point of the 1986 Project Nina "therapy" is to have El relive her past memories so she can re-discover what specific trigger memory she used to access her powers.

El getting captured and brought to Nevada, Joyce going to Alaska, and Vecna killing the teens are all co-temporaneous in 1986. Vecna's creation was in 1979. It does get a little confusing because as part of the memory conceit they have El seeing herself in her memories as the grown-up El, except when she sees herself in a mirror and a couple of other scenes where we see the 9yo or 10yo El. But all the stuff in Project Nina is being driven by Brenner playing videotapes of 1979 stuff to her.

Some stream of consciousness thoughts about this episode and the season as a whole, in no particular order... I can't remember the the first season well enough -- does Nancy know who Brenner is? It appears that her view into Henry Creel's memories shows the (young) Brenner and she hears the name. But would she link that to El? How much of El's backstory does she know in terms of the lab and stuff. Since the One monologue was a single ongoing thing whose visuals cut back and forth between Nancy's and El's POV, what was each told? Did both hear the entire monologue? I come down on the side that the Upside Down as a dimension was always there and El "merely" threw One into it. And while I bet One formed a bunch of stuff on it (like his Hawkins house and probably other Hawkins stuff) it wasn't a completely formless void when he was thrown in. I'm pretty sure I saw land and mountains and stuff in the lightning flashes as he was falling. I think (but am far less sure than of other things) that One created the Mindflayer. That he loves spiders and the MF is very spider-adjacent seems a little too much to be a mere coincidence. Unless...hmmm...the MF somehow was able to make a low-level connection to Henry Creel and influence him. So One has been in there since 1979. Why did he wait 7 years to start attacking people in our world? Why can he open portals now? Why didn't he start popping open portals to send over demogorgons to attack? (I mean I know/strongly suspect the real answer is that One/Vecna is something ginned up late in the game and wasn't in mind at all in the earlier seasons.) Was there any "native" life in the UD? Or is One responsible for it all? (Ties into the question of whether he created the MF or not.) Will El's void-walking (which was to practice her remote spying) in Season 1 be retconned into Brenner hoping to get a new portal open to the UD? The vol 2 previous showed a shot of Brenner looking pretty damned interested in the "healed" wall (which while a wall again still had a bunch of residual black tracing on it). I think either Jonathan or Steve is going to die. If so, I hope it's Jonathan. Hopefully One will harvest the head jock. He certainly has enough hate and anguish and trauma to be a candidate. As an A1000 owner it was great to see the machine with Suzie. Too bad the first time it was shown it was using clearly a PC font. At least the second time it was shown (during the location lookup) you see some legit-looking Workbench icons even though the colors were all wrong. I want my blue and orange! Murray is the only thing making the ponderous, time-wasting Russia subplot even remotely worth watching. I find myself not caring about the California crew at all. Mike has turned into an annoying cipher and Will just mopes. And the less said about Jonathan the better. Sadie Sink has been AMAZING this year. It's would probably be a retcon (because I don't believe they had even thought up Vecna in Season 3), but did Vecna empower the MF construct in our world to scramble El's mind so she'd lose her powers? In addition to feeding himself, are the portals Vecna is opening sufficient to allow the MF "smoke" in our world to reconstitute the MF avatar here? The vol 2 preview seems to indicate that's a distinct possibility. And is that his plan? Why did Vecna give Nancy the look into his memories? To gloat? I'm glad we're only getting a little of Erica this year. She's OK in very small doses but is pretty annoying beyond that. I'm definitely concerned about Steve coughing as they arrived at the UD version of Eddie's trailer. He's the only one who did. I guess the gravestone thing in the teaser trailer was just a continuity glitch. The trailer had two glimpses of Max at Billy's grave. One time the gravestone said "Billy". The other time (which was when they showed her levitating) the gravestone said "William". And we saw "William" in the actual aired gravestone scene. I have to think One/Vecna will be the Big Bad for Season 5, which I imagine will end with his final defeat at the hands of El which may once and for all end the threat of the UD to Earth (aside from governments trying to open portals some more, that is). I wouldn't put it past the Duffers to have her die taking out One, though.

In the early to mid 1980s, for people not at college or the right kind of tech companies, the only “computer networks” they would have known about were Compuserve and FIDOnet BBSes.

With respect to why he didn’t remove it himself, I’m pretty sure One said that the implant “weakens me”. So it damps his TK and I can imagine being to worried about trying to cut it out. Plus he might not have had the opportunity to even try. It does seem strange he didn’t kill Brenner when he killed all those other people.

Or for us older people, "Serpentine, Max! Serpentine!"

After this episode I’m kinda worried about . Back in the teaser trailer for the season there was a shot of just like what happened to Vecna’s victims so far. And

So Eleven killed most of her “siblings” and most/all of the staff?? Does she remember any of this? Been hiding it all this time or has blanked it out? Well, I suppose it may well be a fakeout. And I guess Hopper made friends with a guard? How else would that get out. He certainly couldn’t send it himself!

Hmmm, that “coincides with” language. Sounds like may be more like a minisode (think “Night of the Doctor”) than an actual episode?

They moved it from August to October? Or did Davies misspeak?

“I’m going back to the tiny cat coven!” 🤣

And there’s some interesting stuff (that they didn’t visit) in the “paintings” in the True Mind of Belos/Philip. Like it looks that he may have killed his own brother and that his brother may have had a relationship with a Boiling Isles witch. (Presumably that’s why Philip killed him?)

Yeah really! Ridiculous to compare Yaz to River, for example. And totally agree about the episode being quite dire. Lots of wonky editing, too. I was kinda hoping the critter would turn out to be a/the skarasen :)

Max levitating?? Also (not original with me), when Max is sitting in front of her brother's grave it says "Billy Hargrove". But in the levitation scene it says "William Hargrove".

Maybe she meant she never had *raw* onion before. Because I can’t believe she’s never had anything with onion in it. Like never had chicken soup??

The final three teams will go on to the last leg. Whoever comes first in the last leg wins the $1mil prize. The previous legs only matter in that they collectively determine who the final three teams are. Well, they also matter in that the final leg usually has some memory task that relates to past legs (past memory challenges have stuff like "Here are a bunch of flags, both of countries you've been to and countries you haven't. Put the flags of the countries you visited in the order you visited them." Another one (IIRC) was drawings of objects the pit stop greeters had with them, and again to put them in the order you visited those places. Of course, these days teams all (presumably!) keep notebooks where they write this stuff down when they finish a leg (I don't believe they can take notes during the leg) and cram study on during the flight to the start of the final leg.

This is the first time in a lonnnnnnnnng time that I have not actively hated at least one of the final 5 teams. So that's a pleasant plus. I do wish the tasks were more challenging, though. Oh, and Arun and Natalia had better not fluke their way into the final three.

I believe Penn is 47 and Kim is 44.

I was thinking that, so I looked it up. Turns out the lake is only 889 feet above sea level.

I respectfully disagree. Long before this TV show ever existed I read Six of Crows and A Crooked Kingdom without having read (or even knowing about) the rest of the Grishaverse and it was fine. Those two books stand up quite well on their own.

Matt Groening's pre-Simpsons comic strip Life in Hell had two fez-wearing characters named Akbar and Jeff. ("At night the ice weasels come...")

The part that cracked me up was Shrederator's driver's self-awareness. "If we lose we lose. But if we win people will be saying 'You lost to Captain Shrederator?!?'". So he knows what people (correctly!) think of the bot. Though what an upset! But I wonder if there was something wrong with Tombstone right from the start. There seemed to be sparks and stuff from the rear of Tombstone almost from the starting gun.

According to the Holdernesses a task was cut out of the broadcast -- teams had to go up and down the Orbit Slide. The plans was originally to have teams slide down but it was too wet and they were told to just go back down the stairs or whatever.

Interesting. In Kim & Penn's recap they said the clue for the mail roadblock had a name and postal code on it. https://youtu.be/MZmvfBvNww8?t=1818