I will try not to duplicate what Bradley J. Birzer and Jack Butler wrote in their assessments of the fourth season of Stranger Things . . .
Spoilers ahead!
The good news is the fourth season was epic and served up a long buffet table of satisfying moments. The bad news is that the lengthy and overstuffed season proves that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing – and that this fun, charming show is starting to get too big and unwieldy, and maybe starting to run off the tracks . . .
I expected this season to show some growing pains; when filming gets delayed for six months because of the pandemic, and nearly three years pass between seasons, teenage actors are going to sprout a few inches. I can cut the show slack over Finn Wolfhard looking really tall for a high school freshman and Caleb McLaughlin looking like he’s ready to get drafted into the NBA.
Credit the Duffer brothers for their willingness to try something new, even if not every new change worked. Your mileage may vary, but to me, the longer episodes turned into a slog. The storytelling pattern of building up to a cliffhanger in one storyline and then suddenly switching to another storyline became more annoying and frustrating than dramatic and exciting. Nor was it possible to pretend that all the subplots were equally interesting; Mike, Jonathan, Will and Argyle disappeared for about two episodes because they were just driving across the country.
The greatest strength of Stranger Things is the varied cast of likable, relatable, well-acted characters. The Duffer brothers were almost showing off with that first episode scene of Chrissy, the popular but troubled cheerleader, trying to buy drugs from Eddie, the heavy-metal troublemaker. Here we have a scene with two new characters, with only a minimal connection to our protagonists, and once again those 80s stock characters defy the stereotypes – Eddie’s a kind and empathetic guy, Chrissy’s sweet and vulnerable, and by the end of the scene, we’ve warmed to each character enormously. (And then, of course, because this is Hawkins, terrible things happen to them.)
This pattern of introducing a seemingly stereotypical character and then flipping everything upside down (no pun intended) is Stranger Things’ most reliable trick. Heavy-drinking small town sheriff Hopper is actually a good detective, popular handsome guy Steve wants to be a better person, Joyce is way more resilient than she initially seems, good-girl-next-door Nancy’s tough as nails when it counts, and goofy nerd Dustin is usually the most level-headed and clear-thinking character in any crisis. I would watch a show about the town of Hawkins even when it isn’t being besieged by terrible monsters.
And maybe that’s one of the problems with this season. As this year’s storylines ventured well beyond the town to far-flung Russia and California, Stranger Things seemed to become less easily distinguished from those typically overstuffed Hollywood blockbusters at the multiplex: crashing helicopters! Crashing planes! Secret underground U.S. military bases! Secret Russian prisons! Long trips through the increasingly-less-mysterious Upside Down! Murray’s got a flamethrower!
We’ve come a long way from that first season masterpiece, where the budgetary limits kept the antagonist offscreen for long stretches – it was like Jaws on land, where a mysterious, predatory monster could strike at any time. We’ve had a serious threat inflation over the past few seasons; in the first season, just one Demogorgon seemed like a nearly insurmountable menace. Now we’ve got Vecna, demo-bats, the vines, the Soviets and their experiments, Russian Demogorgons who are connected to the Mind Flayer, the maniacal vigilante basketball team, Brenner, rogue military units…
This was the first season where I felt like the kids were genuinely bratty ingrates to their parents; it makes little sense for the perpetually-at-wit’s-end Joyce to be read into the town’s sinister secrets, but for the Wheelers, Dustin’s mom, or the Sinclairs to be considered too old and closed-minded to understand. And during the whole “the team suits up and gets ready for battle” montage, for the first time, our heroes looked ridiculously naïve and in denial about the severity of the threat they were about to confront. Vecna is telekinetically snapping bones and making teenagers bleed from their eyeballs without breaking a sweat, and the team is convinced a shotgun will stop him – while simultaneously believing the local cops or any other armed government authority will only get in the way.
The “Satanic panic” storyline made the reverse point of what the Duffers likely intended. In real life, the “Satanic panic” featured allegedly responsible adults becoming insanely paranoid about relatively harmless teenage activities like Dungeons and Dragons or heavy metal music. In Stranger Things, the town really is being menaced by malevolent demon-like extra-dimensional creatures who target teenagers! As much as we’re supposed to hate Jason, the near-psychotic leader of that maniacal vigilante basketball team, he’s right on the facts! If the Devil isn’t in Hawkins, Vecna is close enough.
I’ll give the Duffers a little credit for paying off that season two scene of a former Hawkins lab employee claiming that Brenner was still alive. But no one is even going to try to explain how Brenner survived that extremely fatal-looking Demogorgon attack in season one, huh? We watched lovable Bob Newby get ripped up like a chew toy for Rottweillers, but that Demogorgon just gave Brenner a little scratch, huh? Okay.
The California boys may have been the most extraneous thread in the narrative, but the Brenner subplot worked the least. As good an actor as Matthew Modine is, there’s no way we, the audience, are ever going to trust, like, or begrudgingly respect Brenner. All the way back to the first couple episodes of season one, we could see he was callous, abusive and manipulative to Eleven! Putting Eleven (and for that matter, Paul Reiser’s often-hilarious Dr. Owens) in situations where they begrudgingly trust Brenner makes those characters look naïve and foolish.
Finally, it’s tough to shake the feeling that the Duffer Brothers wrote themselves into a corner, similar to the way that Hopper’s fate at the end of season three meant that much of season four would have to focus on his rescue from the Soviet Union. With the awkward split between the characters’ ages and the actors’ ages, it made sense to jump ahead at least a year or two – to let Hawkins enjoy a respite and check back in on the town’s mysterious events in 1988 or so. (I did like the creators’ idea that the story had to end before the release of Beetlejuice in theaters in March 1988, because that’s the kind of movie the characters would watch, and they would realize that young actress Winona Ryder looks so much like a young Joyce Byers.) Instead, this season’s cliffhanger ending makes the threat seem immediate, and season five appears likely to begin very shortly after the closing scene and the ominous final image of the nightmarish Upside Down spilling out into the Rightside-Up world.
It all looks like we’re headed to a big, series-finale climax, but . . . what if bigger isn’t better?