With the fate of Hawkins and humanity at large at stake (as usual) as the final two movie-length episodes of Stranger Things 4 commence, the urgency of needing to get somewhere quickly on a plane has never been more significant. And it doesn’t appear as though customer service and/or receiving what you want from a travel experience is much better in 1986 (though surely it must have been) as Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) tries to get someone from an airline on the horn who can finagle them—or even just one of them—a flight back from their desert milieu to bumfuck Indiana.
To his and everyone else’s dismay, the best the person on the other line can do is get them something for the next morning. But it will be too late by then, and oh, how the customer service agent will never know all the power they held in determining the outcome of a literal underground war. But no matter, Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) realizes, explaining with calm, collected assurance to Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Will (Noah Schnapp), Jonathan and Argyle (Eduardo Franco) that, “I have a way. A way to protect Max. From here.” El then gives a crude diagram illustration on the van’s windowpane as she explains, “This is Max. When One attacks, he will be in her mind. But I can do that too… She can carry me to Vecna. I can piggyback.” Ergo the episode’s title, “The Piggyback.”
Something that, in the present climate of air travel, sounds so much more appealing than actually “being there.” Let alone enduring the slog it takes to arrive there. Whoever said, “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey” clearly could have had no idea what modern, short-staffed, “shove ‘em all in there” air travel would be like. For if they did, they never would have dared to utter such cockamamie. And they especially wouldn’t have if they had been made aware of Eleven’s far more seamless form of “getting around.” And in style, too. For what could be more “modish” than being able to travel within the comfort of a pizza kitchen as Eleven slips into the industrial-size freezer (“First ever mind-fight held in a pizza dough freezer,” Argyle notes auspiciously) filled with salt. All she needs for optimal concentration to travel now is a pair of glasses fashioned by Mike out of a pizza box to block out any light around her.
Some will refer to what Eleven is doing as “virtual reality”—but no it’s more than that. More authentic. And yeah, she might not be able to always control where she ends up (like Five with his suitcase in The Umbrella Academy), but it’s still safer, more convenient and far less mentally damaging that traveling in 2022. Not to mention that traveling by mind leaves no massive carbon footprint. Just another way in which Eleven proves herself to be a beneficent soul.
With airlines claiming that the staff shortage (making headlines every day) boils down to short-sighted “planning” as opposed to, oh, paying people a slave wage, the issues surrounding the headache of traveling au moment aren’t likely to be quelled. And honestly, the last thing employers should want is to make their airline fleet feel disgruntled and overworked. Because these are the people in charge of ensuring an aircraft gets from Point A to Point B smoothly.
If they’re angered or upset in any way, a lot of others suffer the consequences. Just look at the pilots who opted to crash the plane with everyone in it because they were suicidal (see: Germanwings Flight 9525 and China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735). And how do most people become suicidal? Well, at the top of the list is being overworked and underpaid. This also includes the various forms of customer service representation on the ground dealing with the endless barrage of complaints from passengers who definitely didn’t get what they paid for.
But with Eleven’s method, none of this would have to be an issue. Just pop yourself in the water of a homemade sensory deprivation tank and black out. Tragically, however, astral projection is only for the elite. Just like private planes that eradicate the hellscape of hoi polloi airport scenarios altogether.
