Hopper should make some 'don't be stupid' rules for himself because once again he's got himself into mortal danger and no one even knows where he is... thankfully Mike and Joyce are... well they don't really do anything but they do know Bob and Bob is good at puzzles so he has to be a superhero and figure out that the scribbles all over Joyce's house are a map of Hawkins... thanks Bob... and at the X is treasure and that treasure is Hopper's sexy dad bod that Joyce can't stop thinking about so hard that she repeatedly forgets Bob exists lol
Nancy and Jonathon run off and get a hotel (a double room though... boo this isn't like our fanfics) then the next day they go give Murray a recap of season 1 as Lucas tricks Max into listening to him do the same, she likes it but thinks it's a little derivative which is so meta and self-deprecating of the writers and I love that... Murray thinks it's a little much for people to handle, umm ya think? That's why this show has taken over so many of our lives Murray...
And if season 1 wasn't too much for you, this one sure was for me when Eleven goes to find her Mama and finds out that her abuser who kidnapped her and several other children also fried her Mama's brain so much that she's stuck in a continuous loop nightmare of the most traumatic thing that ever happened to her... in case we all forgot what a monster Brenner is...
Speaking of monsters, Billy continues to be a racist a-hole and even the actual creature who ate a cat doesn't compare to how evil those two entitled white men are honestly
But yes Dustin has to lie to his poor sad mom about mews and trick Dart into the cellar and no one is answering his 'code red' besides the capitalism-lovin brat that people love for some reason I don't understand because she annoys me most of the time, to be honest
The other entitled white man we don't like on this show who doesn't really do anything wrong but is quite useless as Dustin points out, Ted Wheeler tells Dustin his kids nor anyone else's kids matter to him really and so Dustin has to enlist the help of Steve who is bringing Nancy flowers for saying she doesn't love him which is a weird flex and even Steve questions why he is the one apologizing... whatever she loves Jonathon anyway, but thankfully this kicks off a great bromance but we'll get to that later because by the end of the episode, Hopper is fine and Will is very much not, as per usual something is wrong with "my boy" as Joyce would say