"There are some things worse than ghosts."
— Max
The morning after Chrissy's death, Lucas wakes up with a hangover. Mike makes it to California, where he, El, and Will go roller skating, with disastrous consequences. Eddie has gone missing, and it's up to Dustin, Max, Robin, and Steve to try to locate him. Nancy takes it on herself to investigate the strange occurrences at the trailer park, and finds out about a grim local legend.
This episode contains examples of:
- Awesomeness by Analysis: The gang need to find where Eddie is hiding so they can find the truth and clear his name. Once Max digs up that Eddie gets his wares from someone called Reefer Rick, Robin goes through the video store's accounts, and eliminates Ricks by the type of movies they rent until she finds the one who always gets stereotypical stoner flicks.
- Body Horror: Fred's death is shown in even greater detail than Chrissy's. His limbs break and twist in unnatural ways, his face is disfigured into a horrific gape and his eyes are crushed in their sockets before he drops to the ground in a mangled mess.
- Bullying a Dragon: Angela bullies El one too many times - not knowing that the latter has faced down scarier things than her and lived. She finally pushes it too far in making fun of Hop's (apparent) death, and gets a roller skate to her face in response.
- Burn Baby Burn: In order to rile up his gang for the Witch Hunt on Eddie, Jason burns a photograph of Eddie posing with the other members of the D&D club.
- The Bus Came Back: Location variety. Benny's Diner makes a return. Since Benny's death, it's been boarded up and abandoned. The basketball team has turned it into a makeshift (and filthy) clubhouse. Powell is pissed when he sees what they have done with it, but tables arresting them for vandalism/trespassing/underage drinking because he's focused on Chrissy's murder.
- Bystander Syndrome: Angela's clique make a public display of their very heinous bullying of El right in the middle of the roller rink. All the other roller skaters, presumably many of them adults, gather in a circle to watch it play out, and no one objects except El herself, Mike, and Will.
- Cassandra Truth: Discussed and averted. Eddie assumes Dustin, Max, Steve, and Robin won't believe his account of what happened to Chrissy because of how unnatural it was, but they instantly believe him because they immediately recognize the signs of foul play from the Upside Down.
- Catapult Nightmare: Early on we see Max waking up this way from one of her Trauma Induced Nightmares.
- Challenging the Bully: El finally musters the will to confront Angela after she can't take any more of the humiliation. It doesn't end pleasantly for either of them.
- Crazy-Prepared: Murray brought a device to California that allows for location masking of telephone calls. He admits that, because he and Joyce are calling Russia, it probably won't be able to mask them from KGB scrutiny for more than about a minute.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: Hopper is brutally tortured by the Russians, starting with beatings, followed by asphyxiation.
- Cruel Mercy: The Russian official who sends Hop to Kamchatka explicitly states the latter "does not deserve the peace of death", and calls Kamchatka "Hell".
- Dude, Not Funny!: When the basketball team hear the news that a Hawkins High student has been murdered (Chrissy's name hasn't been released yet), one of them jokes to Chrissy's boyfriend that maybe she didn't stand him up after all, the joke being that she actually missed their party because she's the victim. Another teammate snaps at him for this...as sirens come closer, turning it into a very macabre case of Joke and Receive.
- Dumbass Has a Point: Twice:
- Played straight and then averted with Argyle. Firstly, despite being quite stoned, he tells Jonathan directly that his lying to Nancy about not going to her college of choice, and generally just trying to avoid the problem, will inevitably blow up in his face. He then undercuts it by suggesting that the best solution for Jonathan is to just get high.
- While searching Reefer Rick's boat shed, Steve decides to take an oar off the wall and poke the objects covered with a tarp, reasoning that Eddie could be hiding under it. Dustin, Max, and Robin all mock this as preposterous hiding place and a ridiculous visual, but Steve turns out to be correct that Eddie was hiding there. The oar just wasn't long enough to keep Eddie out of arms reach of Steve.
- "Eureka!" Moment: Robin gets the idea to track down Rick's address using the video store database when Steve mentions the huge selection the store offers.
- Evil-Detecting Dog: The dog by the trailer in Eddie and Max's neighborhood starts barking furiously when Fred is lured into the forest by Vecna.
- Facial Horror: Angela's face gets cut up after Eleven violently breaks her nose with a roller skate.
- Food Slap: The torment of Eleven at the roller rink concludes with one of the bullies deliberately spilling a milkshake on her dress, causing her to fall to the floor.
- The Freelance Shame Squad: Everyone in the roller rink watches Angela and company humiliate Eleven. Although we don't see their reaction, the fact that not one of them lifts a finger to help suggests that a good portion of them are enjoying her humiliation. They do, however, react with scandalized horror when El lashes out at Angela.
- Hope Spot: Just when it seems people are ready to put last year's tragedy behind them by celebrating the high school's first basketball victory in years, Chrissy's murder has brought the pain back again.
- Jerkass: Angela, her friends, and everyone at the roller rink who takes part on viciously bullying El, some of whom are adults.
- Important Haircut: Hopper's head is involuntarily shaved by his captors, as part of his dehumanization process before being sent to Kamchatka.
- Jump Scare: At Rick's place, when Eddie jumps out of a boat from under a tarp and attacks Steve.
- Landing Gear Shot: A couple of shots of airplanes landing are used to indicate that characters have arrived in California.
- Mood Lighting: After Angela and her gang's humiliation of her, Eleven is shown crying in a storage room, with the blue lighting reflecting her mood.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Two:
- Eleven reacts this way after attacking Angela.
- Fred is implied to have accidentally let someone burn to death in a fiery car accident, and is forced to relive it during Vecna's torment of him.
- Never Found the Body: Discussed. Joyce is convinced that Hop is still alive, not least because his body was never found. Murray counters that this is because his body evaporated.
- Peek-a-Boo Corpse: In his final moment, Fred falls into an open grave and looks around to discover a decomposed corpse next to him.
- Percussive Maintenance: One member of the basketball team fixes their flickering TV by hitting it.
- Percussive Therapy: Jonathan and Argyle like to blow off steam by hitting golf balls into the cars in the local desert junkyard.
- Plot Armor: The blast at the end of Season 3 that disintegrated people who were farther away from the machine somehow missed Hopper, who was right next to it.
- Rank Up: Calvin Powell, Hopper's former deputy, has been promoted to Hawkins Chief of Police following the latter's "death". He hasn't quite gotten proper interrogation techniques down, as his leading questions make the basketball team think that Eddie is the murderer. To his credit, he does soon realize he is in over his head and calls in government help.
- Relative Button: El is able to take getting bullied, but when Angela insults Hopper, it's what drives her to lash out physically.
- Rewind, Replay, Repeat: Joyce and Murray record their phone conversation with Enzo and then analyze the tape for clues.
- Right for the Wrong Reasons: The military deduces Eleven survived, but they do so on the assumption that she is responsible for Vecna's killings, as Vecna's killing method is not at all different from how Eleven killed Brenner's agents at the end of Season one.
- Running Away to Cry:
- After finding out about Chrissy's death, Jason runs away from his pals into the wood to cry and release a Skyward Scream.
- El runs away after her public humiliation at the roller rink and hides in a storage room to cry.
- Saved by the Platform Below: The opening flashback reveals that Hopper jumped off the drill rack during the explosion and landed on a platform not too far below which saved his life.
- Self-Serving Memory: Angela accuses El of snitching on her bullying, when the reason she got in trouble was because it was fairly obvious to the principal what had actually happened despite El denying it.
- Sinister Suffocation: Part of the Russian's torture of Hopper involve a technique called the "Elephant", which involves restraining the victim and forcing them to wear a gas mask with oxygen supplied by a hose, which the interrogators then kink at intermittent times to smother Hopper. This nearly kills him.
- So Was X: When Max expresses her suspicion about Eddie, Dustin notes that Eddie was the only friendly person they met when coming to high school. Max counters that Ted Bundy was also considered a nice guy.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Eleven hitting Angela with a roller skate may seem relatively cathartic...until we see Angela's face split open and bleeding, leading to her sobbing and crying. It nevertheless leaves everyone shocked, even Eleven whose face screams My God, What Have I Done? as she has flashbacks to the Hawkins Lab massacre.
- Teens Are Monsters: Angela and her squad bullying El is bad enough, but then she has the audacity to insult the memory of Hop.
- Third Wheel: Will complains about feeling like the third wheel to Mike and Eleven.
- Tranquil Fury: El is eerily silent before calling out Angela’s name and hitting her in the face with the roller skate.
- Turn the Other Cheek: El tries to do this with Angela, but Angela just taunts her even more. Then it gets ugly.
- Violence Is Disturbing: As awful as Angela was to Eleven, the sight of Angela sobbing on the floor with a profusely bleeding gash on her head nevertheless leaves Eleven feeling shaken rather than cathartic.
- Vomit Indiscretion Shot: We see Lucas throwing up courtesy of his first-ever hangover.
