The doors

are already open

Hawkins looks like a quiet town where the trouble is at most a broken bike by the side of the road. Until one day it turned out:

the city has a second side.

Too little is known about the Underside before November 1983, and that's what scares me the most. In the Hawkin Laboratory, girl number Eleven is lowered into silence:

Her ability is to see far away. So far away that it becomes a weapon.

Dr. Brenner uses it as a locator.:

And one day, «far away» becomes too close. It is not a man who appears in the black void.

Demogorgon.

sensory deprivation,

water,

glasses,

emptiness.

other people's faces,

people's conversations,

other people's secrets.

— There were seven.

– Huh?

– Seven fell on the dice. The Demogorgon caught up with me.

Bicycle headlights cut through the fog.

Will Byers is coming home.

The road is familiar, but the air is thick, and it feels like someone is standing in it.

Joyce's phone rings at home. She hears crackling, static, and it seems to her that Will's voice is breaking through the crackle.

She finds a way to contact her son.

He is alive.

Somewhere.

Not here.

Will disappears, as if he 's been

ripped

out of the frame.

And then the police announce that Will’s body has been found in the quarry.
It’s only later that Hopper realizes there’s a mannequin in the morgue,

too well made to be an accident.

Mike, Dustin and Lucas are still kids, but they already understand:

She says little, but enough: there is a place she calls

«the reverse side».

adults lie.

They don't believe the reports, but the feeling: if Will disappeared in a different way than people disappear, then the rules are different.

Going in search of a friend, they find a girl with a shaved head and a look in the forest:

«I've seen

things you

shouldn't know.

The guys are trying to calculate the anomaly with a compass — the arrow behaves as if the north has moved.

Eleven gets scared: She remembers the camera, the void, and the creature. She knocks the compasses out of the way so that the boys won't find the Gate.

Lucas notices.

is getting

too loud.

He's angry.

He accuses.

Mike gets between them, and the quarrel becomes

physical.

Eleven intervenes and Lucas falls unconscious.

The silence

In parallel, Nancy and Jonathan follow the trail of a wounded deer — and the trail ends.

Nancy finds a portal and does something that you can't do in horror movies: she enters.

The inside meets her with familiar shapes, but...

everything is rotting, spores, and utter darkness.

She sees a monster occupied by a deer and understands: This is not a «horror story.» It's an ecosystem.

And she just became

part of

the food chain.

The school's inflatable pool becomes a spaceship for telepathy: a salt solution keeps the body on the surface, and consciousness sinks inside.

Eleven sees the truth that no one wanted:

There's no way

to save

Barb. But Will is still holding on.

In his little hut, which was once a safe place.

Meanwhile, Nancy and Jonathan lure the Demogorgon. Steve shows up and gets into a fight he didn't sign up for. They manage to fight back, but the monster escapes back.

Hopper and Joyce go to the lab to enter through the main portal.

They find Will unconscious, with something alien inside, and pull him back out—literally plucking him from another world.

At the school, the agents find the children and Eleven. She destroys them — and attracts the monster with the same smell of death.

Eleven holds Demogorgon in place with the last of his strength and disappears with him —

like a spark,

like a closed door... that didn't really close.

like dust,

– Goodbye, Mike.

He wants to tell her a thousand more things, to explain how much she has changed him, how she has changed them all, but the words are delayed by how quickly her silhouette disappears.

Christmas Eve. Will goes into the bathroom and coughs up a slug in the sink.

The wrong side is not gone. She just learned to wait.

Dr. Owens tries to explain the inexplicable with medicine, but the Inside has its own diagnosis:

visions,

seizures,

cold.

Meanwhile, Hopper hides Eleven. She is alive, but the price of salvation has not yet been announced.

A year passes. October. Halloween has always been a celebration of masks here, but now masks are not needed: fear is coming out.

In the fields, whole sections of pumpkins begin to rot, as quickly as if someone had touched them with a cold hand.

The city is infected again.

Meanwhile, tunnels are spreading under the city, like a network of veins.

It's like a map being drawn in the dark.

This is the Wrong Side,

laid

under the city.

Hopper follows the trail of rotting fields and falls into it himself: down into this sticky maze, where the walls seem to breathe, and the air smells of rot and cold.

He gets lost for a few hours and comes back with proof.: these are not «rumors», not a «bad harvest».

Will becomes part of this scheme: he sees tunnels in fits and starts and draws them over and over again until the drawings add up to a map.

He loses himself and already speaks angrily in his voice.

The monster isn't just scary.

He uses it.

Through Will, he hears, feels, and watches—as if the child has become a wire.

Odie has been living in another cage all this time, a quiet wooden one in the middle of the forest. And this silence breaks more than the enemy.

She learns that there is a place in the world where she will have to go alone anyway: to understand who she is and where she comes from.

So she leaves. He finds his sister. He tries to convince himself that anger is power,

and loneliness is protection.

But at the most important moment, he chooses something else:

not revenge,

not an escape,

and the return.

To close the rift and not kill Will, you have to split up and play against the monster using its own rules:

Joyce, Jonathan, and Nancy take Will to Hopper's cabin and «burn out» someone else's body with heat, forcing the Shadow to come out while it is still attached to him. The children descend into the tunnels and set them on fire to distract the pack and lead the demodogs away from the laboratory. Odie and Hopper approach the Gate.

They don't look like a door, they're a wound:

vibrant glow,

quivering edges.

Shrinking.

It's closing.

Slowly, with the last of his strength, Eleven pulls the edges of the Gate together, pushing the Shadow back to where it comes from,

until the fault completely converges.

– you just try it on until you feel like it belongs to you.

– Is this mine?

– how do I know what I like?

—Yes. No Hopper. no Mike. yours.

The gate is closed. On paper. In the reports.In the words of adults who sometimes tell the wrong thing. But the fear doesn't disappear — he just changes his clothes.

Eleven is learning to live without a room. He learns to choose — even if the choice is only between two jackets. She's learning to be ordinary.

Not a hero.

Not with a weapon.

By myself.

Summer in Hawkins looks perfect: the new Starcourt, ice cream, neon, music, the feeling that you can finally just live. But the city is «breaking the electricity» again.

Compass is lying again. And then Billy disappears, and he doesn't come back quite himself.

This time, evil is not a loner. It's building an army— of people. From their flesh, their fear, their loneliness.

The battle is coming to Starcourt —

Billy overcomes the alien in himself for a second, because Odie manages to get through to Billy — and he chooses to be human

for at least one second.

under neon,

under the fire sirens.

to the music,

is costing him

his life.

And that second

Brenner.

Where the others see a monster, Eleven sees another nightmare:

And a number that explains too much. The first.

childhood,

laboratory,

the past,

First, those who are left alone with their pain die.

Then Max realizes that she has the same symptoms.

And there is less time

than it seems.

It feels like someone is flipping through your memory, choosing the page where you will break.

Four times.

The ringing

An old watch.

Now the darkness doesn't come from the outside, it opens up from the inside, like a memory that you've been keeping under lock and key for too long.

In the library. Clippings. In old newspapers that smell of dust and someone else's past. And out of those pages comes a name that shouldn't have come back:

A house on the outskirts, a family that died overnight, and a familiar sign before the tragedy — a clock.

Victor survived, but he's been saying the same thing ever since:

it wasn't done by a human.

While some are trying to survive, others are collecting footprints.

Victor's son. The first. The earliest «experiment» by Brenner. The one who survived that night and disappeared. Because it wasn't the police who took him away. The lab took him away.

It grew from the same source as the power of Eleven. From the laboratory. From a childhood that was turned into a weapon.

Therefore, their plan is no longer about «running away» or «waiting it out.» He's about hitting the wound where

Therefore, the Wrong Side stretches there.

Therefore, it is there that he builds his lair.

in the Creel house.

it's vulnerable —

Eleven tries to protect Max from afar — through salt, silence, and a mental connection.

Nancy, Robin, and Steve walk inside out to Creel's house.

Max

becomes

the bait.

Dustin and Eddie distract the Demops at the trailer where Christie's first murder took place.

Meanwhile, Hopper, Joyce, and Murray are destroying Demogorgons in Russia, helping to weaken the entire system from the inside out.

Eddie, a man who has been running away all his life, suddenly decides to stay.

He raises the sound as if music can become a wall —

and this wall

really works.

— What is her favorite song?

Max

rises into

the air.

They thought they would make it. That they can hold Max while the others get to Vecna. But Vecna arrives earlier, and does what she does best: she gets into places where a person has no protection.

Vecna puts pressure on her guilt and longing,

on what she tried

not to feel.

And the harder she resists, the closer the clock sounds.

The continuation is inevitable.

The battle is like a psychological duel, where the weapons are memories, guilt, love and fear.

She's here.

Vecna breaks Max, Odie does the impossible: brings her back to life, but the price is too high.

The earth is cracking. Hawkins opens up like a wound. The underside is no longer «there».