“Stranger Things” Exhausted Me
Spoilers ahead for Strangers Things in its entirety.
I finished season four of Stranger Things and now I want to take a nap. Not that I didn’t like it. I did. Moments. It’s just that the totality of the thing — from episode one through the two-and-a-half-hour season finale — had me waving the white flag. More isn’t just more in Netflix’s flagship series. It’s everything. I’ve never felt beaten into submission by a television program before, but there’s always a first time, and season four earned that honor.
But look. It’s Stranger Things. You’re going to find something to like. Gaten Matarazzo steals the show again as Dustin; newcomer Joseph Quinn (of the recent Noah Schnapp-Doja Cat flap) is great as dungeon master/metalhead Eddie Munson; Maya Hawke is as acerbic as ever as Robin; and, of course, there’s the show’s unnamed co-star, Kate Bush, whose “Running Up That Hill” found new life 37 years after its initial release. But this season of Stranger is like a reverse bell curve, sagging under the weight of its aspirations about halfway through, then coasting upward for the emotional finish. Sometimes a show can feel so suffused with stuff, so many “big” moments that you expect each ensuing set piece to out-wow the previous. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it goes back to the U.S.S.R. More on that in a bit.
I’m not doing a beat-by-beat plot description here. The title of this piece is “Stranger Things Exhausts Me,” and that’s really what I want to talk about. The strength of the show in seasons past has been its ensemble, and the way it defeats each season’s evil. For reasons that may have to do with COVID, the gang is split into three this season, and while the Duffer Brothers find a cool way to bring them together to (sort of) defeat the baddie from around the world, it doesn’t hold together as it’s done in the past.
Let’s start with the California gang. Having been deposited safely in another Spielbergian ‘burb along with the Byers family, El, Eleven, Jane, whatever you want to call her (Millie Bobby Brown), is suffering through high school, being bullied and forced to take it without her telekinetic powers. She‘s sending mash notes to Mike (Finn Wolfhard), wondering whether the long-distance thing’s going to work out, and being dutifully looked after by Will (Noah Schnapp), who spends most of the series pining after Mike. (I had no recollection of Will being into Mike in the past, but the internet tells me it‘s been there all along, so, mea culpa.) Mike finds his way to California, but things are awkward with Eleven, who’s given up on relating to normal folk; the bullying has taken a toll, and without powers at her disposal, she takes out her frustration by clocking the resident mean girl with a roller skate. Will’s older brother Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) has been accepted to junior college and befriended an amiable stoner named Argyle (Eduardo Franco) who works for a local pizza joint, Surfer Boy. Any dreams Jonathan had of running off to college in Boston with Nancy Wheeler (Natalia Dyer) seem far, far off.
Meanwhile, Joyce (Winona Ryder) receives a Russian doll in the mail from the Soviet Union, and thinks it’s a sign that Hopper (David Harbour), the long-thought-dead Hawkins sheriff, is still with us. She enlists the aid of conspiracy nut Murray Bauman (Brett Gelman), who’s conveniently conversant in Russian, and the two embark on a globetrotting journey to the Red Empire. As we knew from trailers in 2019, Hopper is indeed alive, being held in a Kamchatka prison camp for crimes against the state. These crimes, apparently, relate to the Soviet plot to open a gate to the Upside-Down beneath Hawkins’ Starcourt Mall, which Hopper and Joyce foiled at the conclusion of season three — and which led everyone to believe Hopper was killed in the effort.
True to form, the season four villain is named after a D&D character, here called “Vecna,” the transformed version of one Henry Creel, who’s revealed to be Hawkins Lab experiment #1, ten subjects prior to Eleven, a demon seed whose chosen style of execution is to make his victims relive trauma, raise them in the air, pop their eyes, and snap each of their limbs, one at a time.
At some point, Stranger Things splits into four different shows: Joyce and Murray go off to find Hopper; Eleven is apprehended by Dr. Owens (Paul Reiser) and taken to a bunker in Nevada, where Owens believes Martin “Papa” Brenner (Matthew Modine) can harness her telekinetic powers to defeat the looming evil; Will, Jonathan, Mike, and Argyle hit the road in a Surfer Boy truck in an attempt to find Eleven; the Hawkins group, consisting of Dustin, Max, Steve, Robin, Nancy, Lucas, Erica, and Eddie, are doing the bulk of detective work, battling bros straight out of Heathers, and aiding Eddie after he’s forced to go on the run after a classmate commits Vecna-cide. (There’s some hilarious, and apparently true, commentary here on Hawkins’ belief that Eddie’s D&D society, “The Hellfire Club,” is evil incarnate.) This group eventually finds itself in the Upside-Down, battling demo-bats and, soon enough, Henry/Vecna himself, much of it in an effort to save Max (Sadie Sink) from becoming his next victim. Max, as we know, has had her share of trauma, including the death of brother at the hands of the Mind Flayer. Hence Kate Bush, whose song becomes the only way to maintain a flow of positive memories, which makes it harder for Vecna to invade her mind.
Breaking up the band may have been a necessary evil, but it robs each section of some power, especially the Russian escapade, which devolves into a series of hackneyed Cold War cliches, including a shifty, peanut butter-smuggling Soviet pilot who makes sexual innuendos about his helicopter. The Will-Jonathan-Mike-Argyle section finds the foursome mostly driving around, thinking of a way to hack into the Hawkins Lab computer. Their solution, tracking down Dustin’s long-distance love, Suzie, is amusing, but, stoned humor only, uh… plays out… for…
Sorry, did you say something?
Once Eleven arrives at the bunker (codename NINA), that section becomes a sloppily plotted mishmash of present-day Eleven recalling the past: scenes of young El (a de-aged Brown) walking down corridors, trying to make objects move with her mind, and being comforted by Henry, who apparently served as a lab orderly — and who, it turns out, was responsible for the massacre of subjects Two through Ten years back. This caused El to cast him out of this realm and into the Upside-Down, where he turned into Vecna — something we didn’t know until now, thanks to Dr. Brenner, who hid the truth from El, and us, all this time.
The plot machinery finally kicks into gear around episode seven, when Vecna’s purpose becomes clear (he’s trying to cause an incursion between the real world and the Upside-Down), and we begin to see how the far-flung groups might defeat him together. Turns out, the demo-creatures are connected, so to defeat one is to defeat them all, like some slimy, tentacled Borg. As Hopper, Murray, and Joyce wield a flamethrower in Russia, El mind-melds with Vecna as he pierces Max’s brain, and the Scooby gang attacks with homemade swords, shields, and, memorably, a sawed-off shotgun.
The latter episodes provide some indelible moments, none more so, perhaps, than Jonathan’s apology to Will for not being a better big brother, and Will‘s realization that his brother is someone he can talk to (presumably, about his crush on Mike). The scene between them, which takes place beside a makeshift isolation isolation tank in a Surfer Boy franchise, is about as real as the show gets, proof that the Duffers can mine genuine emotion when they’re not recreating Damnation Alley. Similarly moving: the scene in which Eddie meets his demise, a victim of one too many demo-bat bites, and poor Dustin is left holding his corpse. The crescendo comes at the end of episode eight, when our heroes are reunited, prompting long, lingering hugs and major heartstring-tugging. Unfortunately, the cheer is short-lived. In brushing back Vecna, fault lines have opened in and around Hawkins, and people are leaving in droves. The floaty white particles common to the Upside-Down begin appearing in real-world Hawkins, and the long-feared incursion begins.
Fade to black.
OK, who here’s pooped.
You must know: I am a fan of this show. The moment it premiered, I was all in. Being a nascent horror fan, a Winona stan, and a sucker for 80s nostalgia, I fell hard for the Duffer Brothers’ creation. The kids, the bikes, the walkie-talkies, the movie references, the soundtrack — all of it felt familiar, and not just from a pop culture standpoint. I knew these kids. I listened to Kate Bush in college with my emo friends. I had a crush on Winona. And the show has a superhero in it! The character of Eleven, seemingly from another planet but apparently bred in a lab, was unlike anything we’d seen on TV. Premiering July 15, 2016, following Orange is the New Black, House of Cards, and Bloodline, Stranger Things was Netflix’s first, bona fide smash.
So after three seasons of thrills, chills, dungeons, dragons, demogorgons, the Mind Flayer, and the Upside-Down, where do you go? How do you up the stakes? Characters have died on this show. People are seriously maimed. Kids have coughed up slugs. The Duffers’ answer: reveal the big bad. Show us who’s been pulling the strings, and unleash hell on Hawkins.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s me. I’m tired. I finally got to remove the collar I’ve been wearing since my surgery. Meanwhile the Red Sox have gone into a death spiral; the January 6th Committee is uncovering unspeakable acts and the DOJ isn’t acting on them; Joe Manchin is killing climate bills in Congress; I don’t have a job; and as I write, we’re on the verge of a six-day heat wave. Stranger Things felt oddly complimentary, like it was taking on the weight of the world at a time when the weight of the world is being felt, acutely, by everyone. The show is a textbook case of what critics have referred to as “Netflix bloat” — the tendency to stretch out series unnecessarily, with too much fat around the bones. I could have done with fewer scenes of Eleven delving into her past, the elimination of the Heathers bros, and, sorry, less Kate Bush. The fifteenth time I heard “Running Up That Hill,” I was like, Alright, we get it, it’s 1986.
Will I be back for season five? What are you smoking? Of course I will. You think I’m going to miss our heroes figuring out how to stop the end of the world? I’m not expecting Netflix to cut back on anything — hard to reverse course after pulling out the stops — so we’re likely in for another epic, exhausting round of storytelling. But if it takes another three years, at least we’ll have a little down time, a moment to catch our breath before the all-out assault on our senses begins anew.
