Series creators the Duffer Brothers have clearly put a lot of nuance and care into building this dynamic, and a discovery from Reddit user keulenshwinger shows the extent of their subtlety.
It centers around a blue bracelet on Hopper’s wrist, which many users began noticing in season two of the series. Here’s a shot of it from episode six of the latest season.
The thing is, it’s been there the whole time. More importantly, Harbour himself posited, it has a purpose. The actor told users on Twitter to go back to the first season with a keen eye.
Chronologically, it begins with a blue band seen in his daughter Sara’s hair in a flashback of the season one finale.
That band reappears later, when Hopper is visiting Sara in the hospital. Given that she’s lost all of her hair, however, Hopper wears the band on his right wrist.
Ah, but that’s not the first we saw of the band. Let’s jump back to the first episode of the series and our very first glimpse of Hopper. Shirtless and blinking awake after a bender, there sits the band on the same wrist.
In an especially subtle bit of business, you can see him purposefully fidgeting with it during an intense call with his ex-wife in episode five of the first season. Their split, it’s easy to infer, came in the wake of Sara’s death, so it’s natural she would be on his mind.
So we know he wears it throughout the majority of season two based on the first photo above. When it reappears in the closing moments of the season, however, it’s not on his wrist.
The Duffers gave us a scene where Hopper and Eleven reconciled after a seismic (and telekinetic) shouting match between the two. In it, Hopper even opens up about Sara. And though the Duffers could’ve easily shown us the moment when Hopper passed the band down to Eleven, there’s something much more satisfying about the strengthening of their bond manifesting with such subtlety.
How many other shows about alternate dimensions and Dungeons & Dragons monsters operate with such emotional subtlety? Haters to the left.
