Stranger Things: Chapter 6: The Dive

May 28, 2022 1:14 PM - Season 4, Episode 6

Behind the Iron Curtain, a risky rescue mission gets underway. The California crew seeks help from a hacker. Steve takes one for the team.
posted by oh yeah! (22 comments total)

I rushed through the seven available episodes into late last night, so they definitely blurred together to some degree, but this one stood out to me as feeling very much like hitting the specific feel and charms of earlier seasons, with the creepiness matched with Goonies-esque derring-do and mystery-solving. I'm sure I'll have more thoughts as I get around to this one again, but the idea of the gate at the bottom of the lake is so brilliant for this sort of thing.
posted by Navelgazer at 1:34 PM on May 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

This was the episode that I was finally just so tired of the Joyce/Murray/Hopper story line. It had been building for me throughout the season, but finally I was just wondering what on earth this stuff is doing here. The lol Soviets stuff was boring to me already as a kid in the 80s, and the tone feels off compared to the rest of the show. They could have left it all out entirely and had 60 minute episodes instead of 80 minute episodes, and it wouldn't have affected the rest of the show at all.

I guess part of it is just that the kids are grown up and don't need adults around anymore, and yet "the adults" are their two most famous and highest paid cast members so they have to give them something to do?
posted by hydropsyche at 9:41 AM on May 29, 2022 [7 favorites]

Yeah I haven't completely hated the Russian sojourn. I mean it's dumb, but I like Hopper and I like Jaqen H'ghar. It never felt necessary though, and when they pulled the rug on the escape I died inside. The worst aspect of it is that the Russians don't really appear to be doing anything plot relevant at all; Hopper's not getting entangled in anything meaningful. Fine -- it could be a prison break plot. But then they just threw it away.
posted by fleacircus at 3:28 PM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

So I am pretty used to these sounds outside my window at night, but I really could have done without it tonight. Earlier in the evening there was one in the ceiling over the laundry room, but that was before I'd watched two episodes of Stranger Things in a row and I just screamed back at it.
posted by Athanassiel at 6:55 AM on May 30, 2022 [2 favorites]

What a way to end the episode!
posted by jazon at 8:47 PM on May 30, 2022

I really dug the synth track introducing the Russia segment.
posted by porpoise at 10:21 PM on May 30, 2022 [1 favorite]

HTML, CSS, and Javascript?!
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 4:47 PM on May 31, 2022 [7 favorites]

The Russia storyline has annoyed me since last season. The whole ridiculous "Soviet underground base in the Midwest" thing aside, they just haven't done anything interesting with it at all.

The house full of semi-feral kids was pretty hilarious, even if (or rather because) it seemed completely out of line with what I'd imagine some pious '80s LDS household to be like. Suzie's computer bullshit was egregious as hell, however. I think they could have taken a little more time to show her using something resembling an actual 1986 machine/operating system and not spewing suspiciously modern terminology, but eh, whatever.

The Satanic panic angle is increasingly terrifying.

Vecna's motivation is still unclear to me. I do like the visual nod to the Hand of Vecna.
posted by heteronym at 5:47 AM on June 1, 2022 [7 favorites]

That computer was actually showing something that looked for all the world like an Amiga Workbench interface, completely period-appropriate! The rest was more of a mixed bag: getting an IP address was feasible, and I can totally see the government failing to keep its (not quite that specific though) location out of WHOIS. I wouldn't expect anyone to use the term "data mining" though. And getting a terminal full of markup gobbledygook because you don't have the right type of software to interpret it was also pretty frustratingly realistic, but that specific type of markup was super modern. HTML itself wouldn't exist for several more years.
posted by traveler_ at 6:29 AM on June 1, 2022 [13 favorites]

I’m a little confused about Yuri’s bounty hunter reward for Joyce and Murray because that wasn’t really a thing. It would be easier to kidnap a random tourist from Red Square if that were the case. They’re not nuclear scientists. I suppose if the Soviets still needed to extract some information from Hopper, threatening Joyce with torture would work but since he is slated to be in the next batch of monster snack, his usefulness has come to an end. A successful escape is inevitable; I just hope that Jaqen H'ghar makes it out with them. What’s one more character added to the stateside drama?
posted by TWinbrook8 at 8:21 AM on June 1, 2022

@TWinbrook8: I believe that Joyce and Murray were particularly valuable prisoners (as opposed to random Red Square tourist) because they were known to be involved with the events bringing down the Russian base in Hawkins in Season 3. Yuri said that an escaped prisoner is valuable (Hopper) a traitorous guard more valuable (Enzo) but most valuable is Americans wanted by the KGB.
posted by Navelgazer at 8:45 AM on June 1, 2022 [4 favorites]

The bullying scene with Eleven's peers intensified the bullying scene at the skating rink for me.
posted by kingless at 11:27 AM on June 1, 2022 [9 favorites]

Thanks for pointing that out, traveler_! I stand corrected re: the OS. I never got to use an Amiga, and when I did start have passing access to computers a year or two after this season of Stranger Things is set, I only remember (since I wasn't even 10) really basic interfaces. Hell, even a few years after that, the GUIs I knew were pretty ugly. Here's to you, Tandy Deskmate.

You also did a better job than I did of explaining why the junk output, and some of Suzie's jargon, seemed out of place.

Poor Eleven seems to be spending all season getting fucked with, and hardly anything else. I feel terrible for her.
posted by heteronym at 1:33 PM on June 1, 2022

The bullying scene with Eleven's peers intensified the bullying scene at the skating rink for me

That skating rink scene was and remains the most terrifying part of the series thus far.
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 3:23 AM on June 2, 2022 [12 favorites]

Listen, it was the 80s. Bullying the quiet girl with the psychic murder powers was just what everyone was doing back then.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 11:37 PM on June 4, 2022 [19 favorites]

I’m slightly confused by the parents reaction after the town hall. Are we supposed to think that they’re worried that their kids are in a satanic cult? Or are we supposed to think they’re worried that they’re kids are in danger because everyone else thinks they’re in a satanic cult? I assumed the latter at first but want sure by the end.
posted by chill at 4:19 AM on June 11, 2022

chill, I think that was left deliberately ambiguous. And maybe some of them haven't even decided how they feel between those two options yet. (Which might explain why none of the parents got in their cars and pursued the kids as they biked away—nor, presumably, permitted the Hawkins cops to commandeer one of their cars?) And definitely they're setting up Mike's dad to throw in with the Satanic Panickers at some critically plot-complicating moment.
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 5:49 AM on June 11, 2022

I think the parents all are scared their kids are in a cult; it seems much more appropriate for a show of the era. Maybe the core parents don't think that but the rest of the town does.
posted by The corpse in the library at 5:57 AM on June 11, 2022

And definitely they're setting up Mike's dad to throw in with the Satanic Panickers at some critically plot-complicating moment.

This is character-assassination of Ted Wheeler to suggest that he could ever have a measurable effect on anything.
posted by Navelgazer at 12:13 PM on June 11, 2022 [12 favorites]

The thing that I chuckled at with the computer was that they got the power back on and it IMMEDIATELY came back up. 80s computers took several minutes to boot up. They would have all been sitting there looking at a loading screen by the time Dad walked back up the stairs.
posted by Fleebnork at 9:44 AM on June 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

So, if you put the coordinates that Susie pulls out for NINA into Google Maps, you'll discover that a) it's a real place known as the Nevada National Security Site and b) it's about a half mile WNW from the "Apple II House". That puts it in the lower left of an area that saw fifteen nuclear explosions over the course of a three-month period in early 1955, a series of tests known as Operation Teapot.

The murder of Victor's family was in 1959, just a few years later.

I seem to recall some speculation in season one that the Upside Down was a dimension in which there'd been a nuclear war. Maybe Operation Teapot opened a rift of some kind, destroying what would become the Upside Down and creating monsters bent on revenge?
posted by hanov3r at 3:29 PM on June 21, 2022 [5 favorites]

Ok - WHOIS was in use on Arpanet from 1982 onwards.

But - there is no way that there was any IP address geolocation in 1986. No one maintained a lookup database (which were not accurate until Google/Bing street-view map data started hoovering up WiFi network locations and triangulating with GPS coordinates of known IP addresses, then combine that with mobile cellular devices) and LOC wasn't added to DNS until 1996. That code looked like HTML/javascript markup - HTML didn't exist until 1991. And no way that computer booted that fast, or the network speed of a coupled-phone-modem was that fast. (GPS wasn't even fully operational until 88/89)

And - not an Amiga - as those had actual colour screens, not an orange screen GUI. I was thinking more like an Atari ST with GEM.
posted by rozcakj at 5:19 PM on August 1, 2022