

It’s Mike who’s able to break through to Eleven, confessing his love for her and begging her to fight. As he speaks, we see Eddie be taken down by the swarm, Hopper be leaped on by a Demodog, Steven and Nancy be choked tighter by the vines, Lucas be beaten by Jason while Erica brays idly on the door.

Hawkins will be first, and then the world, and in the ruins of what once was Vecna will build something new in his own image. After being banished to the Upside-Down by Eleven, Vecna wandered, exploring, until he eventually found the Mind Flayer and shaped it with his powers, the spidery means by which he could finally become the predator he believed he was born to be. Eleven implores Vecna to stop by invoking papa’s name, but it only prompts backstory. The fourth kill, the fourth door, will mean the end of Hawkins and the world. He overpowers her, binds her with his ichorous tentacles, and wants her to watch as he strings Max up beside her. Eddie turns to face the swarm as Dustin clambers back into the Upside-Down to help him.īut Eleven isn’t a match for Vecna. From here it’s one major moment of fist-pumping catharsis after another. After the latter climbs up the bedsheets to the Right-Side-Up, the latter cuts down the escape route and tries to buy more time by heading out right into the swarm and cycling off at high speed, hoping they follow him. The swarm also manages to break through the trailer’s vents, forcing Dustin and Eddie to fight them off. And Hopper, Joyce, and Murray return to the prison to discover that the black particles have taken over the Demodogs, and they all need to be corralled into the monster pit, with Hopper playing bait, so that they can be incinerated from above.

Steve, Robin, and Nancy get attacked and held prisoner by the vines in the house.

Jason turns up at the Creel house and tries to force Lucas to wake Max up at gunpoint. Eleven has to navigate some of Max’s earliest memories. Naturally, complications quickly begin to mount. It’s a chaotic hodgepodge of scenes involving flashbacks, visions of Billy, dead ends within the Creel house, boarded-up doors, and swarms of demonic bats, but the whole thing works like gangbusters. Meanwhile, Eleven hovers nearby, trying to reach her, and Eddie lures the bats away by - rather awesomely, especially given the aesthetic - playing Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” on a borrowed electric guitar from the roof of the trailer. Max allows Vecna to enter her mind by confessing her deepest, most shameful thoughts about her brother. You can feel the big moments coming, but “Chapter Nine: The Piggyback” doesn’t forget it’s the small ones that matter the most.Īnyway, the plan gets underway. And Antonov even manages to get through to Yuri by stirring his old heroic tendencies. There’s a fun scene where Argyle finally makes himself useful and allows the kids to set up shop in the pizza place where he works. Hopper and Joyce have a sweet one, as do Max and Lucas, who communicate via notes because Max can’t take her headphones off, and Steve and Nancy. Luckily, the extended episode length affords a lot of space for nice character moments in all this build-up. These things are all occurring while Nancy, Steve, Robin, and the kids carry out their plan, so there’s a lot going on here. realize they can’t get back in time either, so they instead decide to break back into the prison and destroy the particles - the black mist I thought might be the base form of the Mind Flayer - from there. For that, she’ll need a bathtub and a lot of salt to create a sensory deprivation tank to focus her powers. can’t get back to Hawkins in time, so El comes up with the titular idea to piggyback on Vecna’s infiltration of Max’s mind by infiltrating Max’s mind herself and fighting him off remotely. Stranger Things season 4, episode 9 recapĪs it happens, Eleven and co. Hopper, Joyce, and Murray are still in Russia, Max, Lucas, and Erica are in position to carry out Phase 1 of Operation: Kill Vecna, Nancy, Steve, Robin, Dustin, and Eddie have ventured into the Upside-Down for Phases 2 and 3 of that plan - get rid of Vecna’s bats and then flambe him with Molotov cocktails - and Eleven is on her way back to Hawkins with Mike, Will, Jonathan, and Argyle. There was plenty of explosive action in the penultimate outing to get you up to speed, so “Chapter Nine: The Piggyback” picks things up basically right where we left off. So, this is a colossal episode, and rather than deliver a dry 7000-word recap, you’ll excuse me if I focus predominantly on the highlights.
