Stranger Things Recap: Episode 6 “The Monster”

Recapping episode 6 “The Monster” of the Netflix Original series Stranger Things

Nancy is able to follow Jonathan’s voice and escape the monster to get back to the real world and out of the alternate dimension. Jonathan and Nancy are spooked and she has him sleep in her bed, but it’s out of fear, but her boyfriend Steve saw them in bed through her window anyways.

Hopper describes seeing a child’s bed in the lab and a drawing on the wall, but he is describing Eleven’s bed and not Will’s because Will was a great artist and these were nothing but stick figures. Hopper now thinks to himself that he may have found another missing kid while looking for Will.

Mike apologizes to Lucas at the urging of Dustin who tells him best friends have to make up. They still don’t know where Eleven vanished to. The viewer sees her all alone in the woods where she slept on the ground. Next, we flash back to Brenner telling her she is going to make contact with the monster and that she doesn’t need to run away because it can’t hurt her.

Flash forward and Eleven goes into a grocery store to get some waffles and breaks the sliding glass doors as she leaves which incidentally leaves a trail for Dustin and Mike to follow with the hopes of tracking her down.

Meanwhile, Hopper and Joyce are trying to track down Will and that leads them to Mrs. Ives who we learned earlier sued Brenner for taking her daughter and performing LSD mind expansion experiments. She is in a catatonic state and only sits in front of the TV and doesn’t talk. Her sister does the talking for her and explains she was a subject in Brenner’s testing and would take LSD and get in a salt water bath to expand the mind.

She didn’t know it, but she was pregnant at the time and was told she had a miscarriage in the third trimester. Mrs. Ives believes her daughter will come back and have special abilities. Mrs. Ives is Eleven’s mom and we learn her real name is Jane. She was in utero while Brenner conducted experiments on her mom. Eleven was born into the lab. It was the only world she ever knew until she escaped the night of Will’s disappearance.

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Jonathan and Nancy gear up for monster hunting but before they can get back to the woods, Steve confronts him and Nancy after seeing them together. Jonathan ends up beating the crap out of Steve and gets arrested.

Lucas is riding his bike and finds true north and that it lies beyond the gates of Hawkins Lab (we knew that, but now he does) but before he can tell Mike and Dustin, they find themselves confronted by their school bullies. One bully puts a knife to Dustin’s throat and threatens to cut out his teeth unless Mike jumps into the quarry.

We cut away to Eleven in her bathtub where she is supposed to make contact with the monster. She touches it ever so slightly but is deathly terrified and screams from the tank in horror. Cut back to Mike who is prepared to take the dive into the quarry that will surely kill him, but Eleven uses her powers to freeze Mike in the air and bring him back to safe ground. El gave the bullies a taste of their own medicine before they ran off with Dustin saying she’ll kill them if they mess with them again.

Eleven apologizes to Mike for opening the gate. She thinks she’s the monster. Mike says she’s not because she saved him. She did something good, but she thinks she’s a monster. Brenner made her into a monster who killed for sport, but away from his clutches, she can do good.

But she and the boys aren’t out of danger yet as Brenner’s henchmen are closing in on them as they look to bring Eleven back to the lab and under their control.