Last episode, we saw Max (Sadie Sink) narrowly escape from Vecna's clutches through the magical powers of Kate Bush. But in Episode 5 of Stranger Things Season 4, the Duffer Brothers don't give us much time to recover. Let's dive right into "Chapter Five: The Nina Project," starting with Team Lenora.
The California gang is speeding down the road in Argyle's (Eduardo Franco) van, with the agent who saved their lives quickly bleeding out in the back of the van. Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), Mike (Finn Wolfhard), and Will (Noah Schnapp) are frantically attempting to apply pressure to the gunshot wound when the agent tells them not to take him to a hospital. Instead, they have to warn Dr. Owens (Paul Reiser) because Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) is in serious danger. He says that they can reach Owens through "Nina." He hands them a pen and gets ready to give them her number, but he dies before he can tell them.
With the military hot on their heels, Argyle abruptly veers off the road and manages to lose them. They pull off in the middle of nowhere in the desert and bury the agent's body. Argyle, the only one in this group who is a rookie when it comes to being shot at, watching people die, running from the government, etcetera, is on the verge of a nervous breakdown as he struggles to process Mike's "superpowered girlfriend, bad government dudes, [and the] Upside Down planet dimension thing." Jonathan manages to talk him down by, what else, Purple Palm Tree Delight. (We are pretty sure at this point that it's weed cut with literal magical fairy dust.)
Will tries to offer emotional support to Mike, who is full of regrets. If the agent had lived one more second, maybe they'd know where El is. If he had just said something different to El (you know, the big "L" word he suddenly won't say anymore), maybe she would have wanted to go with him. Will tells him that it can be scary opening up to people, especially to the people you care about the most, because what if they don't like the truth? We suspect that Will has something he needs to say to Mike – and what is in that mysterious painting? – but what exactly he has to say is still a mystery.
Meanwhile, Argyle (now considerably calmer since he's had his Palm Tree Delight), is making a tombstone out of a pizza box for "Unknown Hero Agent Man." He is trying to write it with the pen the agent gave them, but it seems to have run out of ink. Something seems to suddenly click in Mike's brain. Why would Unknown Hero Agent Man give them a pen with no ink? He grabs the pen from Argyle and unscrews it. As he suspected, a tiny paper falls out with a phone number. They find a payphone and realize the number they're calling isn't a phone: it's a computer. Mike says they need a hacker, but unfortunately, the only hacker he knows is in Salt Lake City, Utah. (Turn around…look at what you see…..) Yep, you guessed it: Suzie, Dusty-Bun's iconic girlfriend (Gabriella Pizzolo). Mike says if they leave now, they can get there by morning. Suzi saved the world once, and who knows? Maybe she can save it again.
In Russia, things are not looking quite so hopeful. The guards beat the ever-living crap out of Hopper (David Harbour) and drag him to an outside cell in the freezing cold with a bunch of other inmates, one of whom Hopper is surprised to see: Enzo (Tom Wlaschiha). Enzo tells him that his eyes do not deceive him: Yuri (Nikola Djuricko) betrayed them. Hopper is furious and punches him, screaming at him that he swore they could trust him.
The next day, Hopper tells Enzo about his past. When he was 18, he joined the army and tested well enough that they put him in the Chemical Corps. They were mixing up 55-gallon drums of Agent Orange with only kitchen gloves and no mask, constantly inhaling the fumes. They told them it wasn't chemical warfare, just some harmless "herbicide to kill plants." But when they returned from the war and tried to live a "normal" life and start a family, it was as if they were cursed. Their kids were born stillborn or with horrible defects. The horror clung to them. Hopper says that he and his wife Diane (Jerri Tubbs) wanted a baby, and even though he knew the risks, he hid them. Their daughter Sara (Elle Graham) was born healthy, but she died from cancer. Diane left him, and he hid himself in drugs and alcohol. When El and Joyce came into his life, he convinced himself that they needed him. But it wasn't true, Hop says. They didn't need him. He needed them. Hopper proceeds to shatter what's left of our hearts as he says, "The minute I sent for Joyce, I sentenced her to death. Just like I did with Sara. Everyone I love, I hurt. See I was wrong this whole time. I wasn't cursed. I am the curse." Suddenly he and Enzo hear a distant snarling nearby, the rumored "monster from America."
Meanwhile, Joyce (Winona Ryder) and Murray (Brett Gelman), our favorite action-comedy duo, are tied up on Yuri's plane. Joyce kicks over a crate of peanut butter and grabs one of the broken shards of glass with her foot and uses it to cut both her and Murray free. Yuri pulls a gun on Joyce, but he is in for a rude awakening because Murray is a black belt in karate. Sure, he's never fought in a real-world scenario, and he's only ever sparred with students under the age of 16. But he beat 15-year-old Jeremiah, a most "ferocious fighter!" Yuri is no Jeremiah, it turns out, because Murray manages to kick his ass. Unfortunately, he knocks him out, leaving Joyce and Murray (who obviously have no idea how to fly a plane) to somehow land the plane. And rest assured: it is a rough landing. Literally falling out of the sky, they manage to pull up enough that they crash-land in a forest of trees.
Moving over to Team Hawkins, Max (Sadie Sink) is attempting to draw what she saw in the Upside Down. She tells Nancy (Natalia Dyer) that Vecna seemed surprised when she walked through the red fog, (or as Steve poetically calls it, "red soup mind world") as if he didn't want her there. As she's looking at the drawings, Nancy's eyes suddenly light up with recognition. In one of Max's drawings, there's a stained-glass window. Nancy starts piecing together the drawing like a puzzle: it is Victor Creel's (Robert Englund) house.
Max, Nancy, Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Steve (Joe Keery), Robin (Maya Hawke), and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) break into the Creel house, which is now run-down and abandoned. They see the same grandfather clock in Vecna's visions, but still can't figure out what this wizard's deal is with clocks. They split up into groups of two. Steve and Dustin are comedy gold, of course, but Steve makes it wildly apparent he wishes he could've teamed up with Nancy (the pair have a charged moment while Nancy is picking spiderwebs out of his magnificent hair). Lucas and Max, who is listening to Kate Bush on a 46-minute loop, share a sweet moment (we agree with Lucas – it's so nice to see our girl Max laugh again). The group comes back together when they notice the flickering lights throughout the house. Just like how Joyce knew Will was on the other side because of the Christmas lights, the group realizes that Vecna must be there with them right now, but in the Upside Down. They follow the lights until they arrive in the attic. In the Upside Down, Vecna is charging, preparing to take his next victim: Patrick (Myles Truitt), who is still helping Jason (Mason Dye) hunt down Eddie (Joseph Quinn).
Jason and Patrick, unfortunately for Eddie, have narrowed down their list of places to search and pay a visit to (oh no!) Reefer Rick's. Eddie makes a desperate attempt to escape and takes a rowboat out to the lake. He is frantically rowing while Jason and Patrick dive in and swim after him. Patrick suddenly hears the sound of a clock, and his body is yanked underwater before, to Eddie and Jason's horror, he flies out of the water and hovers in the air. Of course, you know what happens next. His bones start to snap, and in Victor Creel's house, the lights in the attic start shattering.
Finally, that brings us to our superhero Eleven, 12 hours earlier. El and Owens pull into a top-secret science lab in the desert of Ruth, Nevada in an abandoned ICBM (fancy bomb) shelter. Now, it's been repurposed to hold something even more powerful than a bomb: Eleven. El is sort of like a celebrity down here, according to Owens, for all the scientists who have given up their lives because they believe that she is the cure the world needs.
Owens introduces El to Nina, who we learn is not a who, but a what. Nina is a computer program. What exactly it is, is yet to be seen. Because according to (surprise!) a very much alive Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine), "If we told you, it would ruin the surprise." El, horrified at what now seems very much like a trap, turns and runs – as any of us would. The guards grab her and hold her down while they give her an injection to her neck, knocking her out.
Eleven wakes up in a very familiar room in a very familiar (we'd go so far as to say, iconic) hospital gown. The walls are bare except for a drawing of stick figures: her and Papa, holding hands in the Rainbow Room. El suddenly clutches her head and realizes her head is shaven again. She is back in her worst nightmare: Hawkins Lab. She walks into the Rainbow Room and an orderly (newcomer Jamie Campbell Bower), gives her a weirdly unnerving smile as he greets her: "Well, well, well. Look who finally decided to join us. Someone's a sleepyhead this morning."
El books it the hell out of there, but every door she opens leads her right back to the Rainbow Room. She looks into the camera and screams to be let out. She hears Dr. Brenner's voice over the intercom. He explains what exactly "Nina" is: "In 1786, Nicolas Dalayrac wrote an opera called Nina. It's the story about a young woman whose lover was killed in a duel. Nina was so traumatized that she buried the memory. It was as if it never happened. Every day she would return to the train station, to await her lover's return. A return that would never be. If only Nina could know the truth." It dawns on El: this isn't real. It's merely a memory. Dr. Brenner tells her it's up to her to find her own way out. In the lab, we see El floating in a pod while Owens and Brenner monitor her. Nina, it seems, is a machine designed to help El discover the truth.
El starts to reluctantly accept her new reality as she allows the memory to take form. In the memory, she trains with the other kids, but she is much further behind the others. They laugh at her as she struggles to make a circle of light bulbs light up – she barely manages a flicker. She wipes a drip of blood from her nose and looks down to realize that both her hands are covered in blood, Lady Macbeth style. Petrified, she suddenly hears screaming faintly in the distance. She runs down the hallway and sees mangled bodies. In real life, El is going into arrest. After they revive her, she breaks free and tries once again to escape this hellhole. The guards grab her and hold her down when El screams, and they fly backward and hit the wall, knocked unconscious. El realizes what she's done and of course, is ready to take her newly revived powers and hightail it out of there. Unfortunately, as she stretches out her hand toward Dr. Brenner, nothing happens. He asks her, "You didn't think it would be that easy, did you?" The door opens behind El, a silent gesture: she can choose now whether she wants to stay. But it's clear that without Brenner, her powers might not ever come back fully. She tentatively takes his outstretched hand. "Papa?" she says. "Daughter," he responds back, as she takes his hand, and they walk back into the facility. It looks like Hawkins will soon see the return of its superhero, but the road ahead is not going to be pleasant.