Stranger Things Season 4 Review
Stranger things have happened, but so have better things- by Ben Black
The second volume of the fourth season of Netflix’s fan favourite nostalgia fest Stranger Things has arrived, and with this two episode, four hour anti-climax, comes the show’s biggest strengths and its abundance of weaknesses. I don’t know if it’s a lack of confidence to make meaningful and difficult choices on the showrunner’s part, but the lack of worthwhile stakes that has plagued the show for the entirety of its run has resulted in a cliffhanger without any real questions to go with it.
Stranger Things has always had its valid criticisms, its homage(or as some would say, wholesale rip-off) of 80’s media being the driving force behind the show was always a well that was going to dry up over time. The show has been turbulent in terms of fan reception, but personally I found the third season to be the show’s strongest, playing into a more whimsical and relaxed approach to its references to its period setting, as opposed to the self-seriousness of the first two seasons. So with the coming of the fourth season’s first volume, I found it refreshing that while the constant nostalgia-baiting is still present, the show had finally reached a point that its own mythology had become the driving force.
The beginning of season 4 wastes no time establishing its villain and trajectory of its story, but does waste time in almost every other aspect. Every episode bar one has a runtime in excess of 75 minutes, and spends that time on constantly introducing side quests for characters that could be either consolidated into fewer, more streamlined storylines, or cut altogether. The established characters are also spread so far apart into so many parallel plotlines, each introducing an entire season’s worth of main players, bloating the season into being about 4 hours longer than all of the previous seasons, but only having one more episode than the previous seasons’ episode count of 8.
The most compelling of these plotlines is the most back to basics for the series, being set in the fictional town of Hawkins, and focusing on the teens that we’ve been following from the beginning of the show. The standout of this plotline is Sadie Sink’s Max, and her journey through trauma following the death of her step brother Billy in season 3. The show’s primary villain has made her trauma the focus of his attacks, resulting in the most personal and emotional episode of the show up to that point, Dear Billy, but unfortunately that’s also where the show begins to fall apart.
The following spoils the entire show through to the end of season 4, please stop reading if you wish to remain unspoiled.
Max’s escape at the end of Dear Billy was a relief to the entirety of Stranger Things’ audience, I’m sure, but it is just the first instance of The Duffer Brothers’ biggest weakness throughout the show that’s displayed in season 4: their refusal to have their favourite characters die. I don’t think death has to be the ultimate consequence for characters in fiction, in fact I find killing off main characters for shock value to be tiring, but when a show that features death as abundantly as Stranger Things refuses to kill anyone the audience cares about, the threat of death is moot.
In the final episode of this season, Max is killed in an emotional and brutal fashion, in a moment that works very well because of how the audience has grown to love Max over her three seasons. I was overwhelmed with sadness to see her go, but within two minutes, for reasons I can’t explain, our resident superpowered character Eleven suddenly is given the ability to literally say “no” and bring her back from the dead. Max’s ultimate fate is still very much undecided, the season ending with her in a coma, but for the sake of the show, I’m sad to say she should have been in a grave.
Max isn’t the only character to have been brought back from the dead, with David Harbour’s Jim Hopper making a heroic sacrifice in the final episode of season 3, only to be revealed to be alive in a post credits scene. Similarly to Max, this death would have not felt cheap or like a way to score an easy emotional response from the audience, but a thematically fitting end to a character that we didn’t want to see go and made the importance of their actions all the more impactful.
The characters that do stay permanently dead have a habit of existing as a narrative device to die. In the second season, Sean Astin was brought into portray Bob, a geeky and innocent love interest for Winona Ryder’s Joyce, that as soon as I laid eyes on, I knew he was going to bite it. Similarly is this season’s Eddie Munson, played by Joseph Quinn, introduced only for the purpose of killing him instead of our pre-established characters. The only characters to exist for more than one season to die permanently are Dacre Montgomery’s Billy, and Matthew Modine’s Papa(who actually died in the first season and brought back for the fourth).
I didn’t think the lack of deaths of main characters was a problem for the show until it decided to have its cake and eat it too. Have us feel how the the death affected us, and then turn around tell us we got punked. Stranger Things is hardly the first show to pull this trick, Game of Thrones did the same thing in its sixth season, but unlike Stranger Things, Game of Thrones had very famously established its stakes. The damage to Stranger Things has already been done.
There’s two things the final season of Stranger Things can do regarding deaths. One is to kill off main characters with reckless abandon, which will ultimately end up being seen as nothing more than a desperate response to criticisms like the one I’m presenting now. The other is to stay the course and have all of our heroes go through hell and come out the other side unscathed, akin to John Travolta and Sam Jackson in Pulp Fiction miraculously dodging bullets for five seasons of life or death situations.
For a show that started out as harmless fluff celebrating a bygone era of pop culture, Stranger Things did a lot in its first few seasons to make itself that little bit more than that, but in a disappointing and gutless penultimate season, the show reveals itself to still be an imitation of its potential.
