Stranger Things, season 1, episode 3: "Holly, Jolly" (21 Laps Entertainment, Monkey Massacre, Georgia Film and Television Office, Netflix, 2016)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, May 23) I’d planned to watch the Midsomer Murders episode “The Witches of Angel’s Rise,” but as soon as it started my husband Charles recognized it as one we’d seen (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/11/midsomer-murders-witches-of-angels-rise.html) and he suggested that instead we get out the DVD boxed set of the first season of the Netflix series Stranger Things and pick up where we’d left off. That was the third of eight series-one episodes, “Holly, Jolly,” which was called that because it’s set around Christmastime and features central character Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) buying scads of Christmas lights in a vain attempt (or maybe a not-so-vain attempt) to communicate with her missing son Will. The episode opened with one of the most amazingly imaginative scenes I’ve seen recently: a young man, Steve Harrington (Joe Keery), is having sex with an age-peer girlfriend while a mysterious white ghoul-like monster is devouring a woman named Barbara in the swimming pool of the Byers home. Director Shawn Levy (this was the first episode in which series creators Matt and Ross Duffer let other people do the directing and writing – the script is credited to Jessica Mecklenberg, with Jessie Nickson-Lopez credited as “staff writer” – instead of doing it themselves) creatively cuts back and forth between the sex scene and the monster attacking and eating Barbara. The implication is that Steve and his partner don’t do anything to stop the creature because they’re making so much noise having sex they didn’t hear the sounds of the attack.

Alas, it’s pretty much downhill from there, though at least there are some clever gimmicks, including what Joyce does with all those Christmas lights. She paints letters on the wall of her living room and strings the lights under them so each light corresponds to a letter. Thus she makes her living-room wall a D.I.Y. Ouija board and contacts Will, or his spirit, or whatever. Earlier she’s used a variant that could only answer yes-or-no questions and elicited the information from Will that he’s alive but not safe. When she hooks up the D.I.Y. Ouija board, she asks his location and then asks what she should do – and the lights on the board spell “R-U-N,” which is good advice because the episode ends with the white monster coming after her. There’s also more information about the mystery character “Eleven” (Millie Bobby Brown), including the revelation that she was subjected to psychic experimentation by a team led by Dr. Martin Brenner (Matthew Modine) in the secret Department of Energy laboratory outside Hawkins, Indiana, where the story takes place. Eleven starts having flashbacks; when she sees a Coca-Cola commercial on television she recalls a similar experiment in which they put a Coke can in front of her and she crushed it with her mind without touching it. (When I saw the Coke can I joked to Charles, “Now they need to put in a Pepsi can so she can do the taste test.”) There’s also a neat scene in which various kids Eleven’s apparent age are trying to get her to levitate a toy spaceship and fly it around the room. She refuses when they’re there, but later on she does it when she’s alone.

And there’s a powerful scene in which Hawkins police chief Jim Hopper (David Harbour, who seems to have strayed in from a Coen Brothers’ movie) and a team of his officers attempt to crash the secret research facility out of town and get stopped at the gate by a disarmingly cute Black sergeant who tells them they have to get approval from a government bureaucrat whose whereabouts are uncertain. They go in anyway and … well, it’s not clear, at least in this episode, what they find, but it’s presumably shocking. One review of “Holly, Jolly” on imdb.com hailed this as the episode in which the show finally started to get good after a disappointing beginning: “[T]he third one really kicked the things going. The roller-coaster ride of emotions. Episode kicks off with [an] intense scene where we see what happened to the Barb, then the quick fall back into peaceful small-town atmosphere, that even elevates the shock level of the opening scene (can't get over that opening). The tension starts to rise when Eleven decides to help the boys to look for Will, chief Hopper starts to take his act together and finally begins proper investigation. Glimpses into the past of Eleven, final shocking reveals, and then that tearful ending.” But the Duffer brothers’ continuing refusal to map out a coherent story arc and stick to it, and their maddening flitting from one story line and set of characters to another, just leave me pretty cold and uninvolved in the story (whatever it is).