The Stranger Things Season 4 Finale Leaves Hawkins in a Dark Place

 The Stranger Things Season 4 Finale Leaves Hawkins in a Dark Place.

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This post contains plot details from Stranger Things season 4, volume 2. Turn back now if you want to avoid spoilers. 

Stranger Things has always worn its love for the movies on its sleeve, with its blizzard of 80s cinematic references. By making each of the two final episodes of season 4 as long as a feature film, the Duffer Brothers are definitively claiming their place in the whole “it’s not a TV show, it’s a very long movie” conversation.

On a visual level, the season’s second volume delivers a blockbuster experience, full of epic special effects, though it’s moved much closer to a gory horror movie than to the ET and Goonies-style adventures of its early years. This overarching darkness, combined with the endlessly frenetic pace of the season, can make the long episodes exhausting to watch. The kids of Hawkins are pretty wiped out themselves from trying to annihilate Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower), the slime-covered villain with an army of evil bats and a penchant for levitating his victims. It doesn’t help that the show’s central characters are all spread out across America and Russia, so that we are constantly jumping between the clusters of Vecna-fighters, each engaged in their own existential battle. I can’t be the only one who wished that the Russian contingent—Joyce, Hopper, and Murray—would just disappear into the wilds of Siberia so we’d have one less plotline to keep track of.

The show also upped the expectations of fans who devoured the first part and began projecting all of their fantasies and theories onto these remaining episodes. Some theories felt like an attempt to cushion an anticipated blow: Stranger Things has made a habit of killing off characters, from Barb to Billy, so fans have been anxiously speculating on who it might be this season. Would the increasingly charming Steve Harrington (Joe Keery) bite the dust, or perhaps Will Byers (Noah Schnapp), who seemed to fade into the background with every passing episode this season? Then there was quick-witted Robin Buckley (Maya Hawke), who was quoted in the trailer saying, “I have this terrible feeling it might not work out for us this time.” In the build-up to the finale, it seemed like any member of the cast could get mind-flayed and neck-snapped.

Even so, I wasn’t prepared for the immense melancholy of these last two very long episodes.  The quip-heavy first half of the season gives way to an extended battle that results in the death of a few major characters, not to mention the emotional trouble that’s been brewing. Plucky Max (Sadie Sink) continues dealing with the trauma that’s been haunting her all season (cue “Running Up That Hill”), while Will gets the long-awaited reveal of his sexual longings— sort of. It’s a a moment so subtle you might miss it, hidden in a heartfelt conversation with best friend Mike (Finn Wolfhard) about a canvas he's painted featuring Mike as the heart of their gang. Pretending to speak for El (Millie Bobby Brown), Will says tremulously, "Sometimes when you’re different you feel like a mistake.”  Will has been suffering so silently all season that his rush of tears is startling. Mike remains clueless and so there is no real catharsis for Will, but at least the show is creating room for him to finally come out in the next season.

Meanwhile, Steve is the show’s poster boy for emotional transformation, and he’s damn proud of of his journey from doofus jock to sensitive doofus. Having a heart to heart with ex-sweetheart Nancy on a dangerous journey to the Upside Down, he tells her that he crawled backwards as a baby. “Right out of the gate I’m superconfident but I’m also like an idiot. It’s a brutal combination,” he admits. “But the good news is, if I get a big enough bump on my head I can change.” 

Steve is joined in his unlikely valor this season by Eddie Munson (Joe Quinn), a lovable metalhead and D&D master who becomes a mentor to Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo). One of the most exhilarating scenes in episode eight features him hotwiring a stolen camper van and joyously peeling out with the gang to the strains of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Up Around the Bend.” The citizens of Hawkins are convinced that he’s a satanic killer, but Eddie proves his mettle in a heroic moment that looks like an 80s heavy metal video, as he plays the Metallica song “Master of Puppets.” He does it his way, with a loyal Dustin at his side in a scene that provokes poignant performances from both Quinn and Matarazzo.

Tina Rowden/Netflix.

Stranger Things’ formulaic structure finally began to crack open this season, unleashing a rush of revelations about the origin story of Voldemort-ish Vecna (AKA Henry Creel AKA 001), and the creepy patriarchal figure known as Papa (Matthew Modine), some of which were more satisfying than others. “He was no monster, he was just a man,” Vecna says sneeringly of Papa when speaking to Eleven. “That is why he sought greatness in you and me.” The revelations also left the door open for more speculation: Is there a multiverse element to the Upside Down? Is there a reason that Lucas is reading The Talisman, the Peter Straub and Stephen King novel about parallel worlds, other than the fact that the Duffer Brothers are currently adapting it? As they recently told my colleague Anthony Breznican, that book is “about a boy who crosses into another dimension not to save his friend, but to save his mother. There's so many parallels to Stranger Things.”

I have always loved the most wistful, ebullient elements of the show much more than its mythology. Some of that joyfulness may drain away as it edges toward its final face-off with the Big Bad, though I hope it gives characters like Joyce, Robin and Hopper more of a chance to shine. Special plea: let Millie Bobby Brown out of her infantilizing white romper and shaved head costume once and for all, and let El grow into the mature superhero her friends know she can be.

Vecna tells El that when she banished him to the void, “I became an explorer of a realm unspoiled by mankind”—commander of a hive of sentient particles and monsters that absorb its victims’ memories and essences. It also means that survivors of his wrath can feel him. “I can still remember what he thinks and how he thinks,” says Will mournfully. “And he’s not going to stop, ever, until he’s taken everything.” That leaves the inhabitants of Hawkins—and us—in a very bleak place, evil particles leaking out of the Upside Down, waiting for the apocalypse that lies ahead.