Hi!
So, I am writing this introduction about an hour to an hour and 45 minuets after finishing the final two episodes of Stranger Things season 4. Considering this blog has been focusing on Stranger Things recently (its just what I've felt like writing about at the moment, I'm planning on changing that soon, don't worry), I felt it would only be right to throw my thoughts up here again on the much-hyped up closing act of what's become an extremely popular season. I'm not going to give a in-detail play-by-play analysis of the whole thing, just a broad strokes of each storylines conclusion and some other various bits and pieces I liked or disliked. I'll leave a lil underline on stuff I wanna come back to once the recap is over, so if it seems like I'm skimping out on stuff, that's why. Settle in, this might be a long one.
The Broad Strokes AKA The Gang Goes to War
I'm going to keep this as brief as I can, since I'm guessing you, the reader, have already watched the finale and don't need it spoon-fed back to you. But for those who may stumble upon this piece in the future, it goes as follows.
Eleven finally fully regains her powers thanks to Project Nina and is told about the danger Hawkins is in by Dr Owens and Brenner. Eleven is ready to head straight home to help, but Brenner disagrees, saying she's not ready. Owens, upon reminding Brenner this whole Nina thing wasn't going to be a prison like the Hawkins lab was, challenges him and tells El to go get ready to leave. Owens goes to ring his contact in Hawkins, but is beaten by Brenner's soldiers as Brenner himself tells El she can't leave yet. El stands up to him, calls him the monster for all his sins that led to everything that's occurred in Hawkins and goes to leave, but is drugged and thrown back into her room. When she wakes up, the base comes under attack by General Sullivan, whose of the belief that El is behind all the deaths in Hawkins and is generally the stand-in for the typical Men in Black bad guys. El and Brenner escape, but Brenner is shot by a sniper perched in a helicopter. El, in one of the coolest moments of the whole show, smashes the helicopter into the ground as the rest of the California crew arrive. I'll come back to what they were doing en route to El later on, as its part of another point I want to make. Brenner tries to get some last minute sympathy from El but fails as El finally cuts him off in his final moments. He dies in the sands of the Nevada desert, four seasons after he absolutely died in Hawkins but the writers realized "wow that's a shitty death, huh".
Meanwhile, the Hawkins crew gets Nancy out of the Upside Down after she gets a warning from Vecna/Henry/One (I'm just calling him Vecna from here on) and realize he only needs one more kill to fully unleash the Upside-Down on Hawkins. They gear up at a nearby Army Surplus store, which the Jocks-turned-Witch Hunters are also at. Their plan is to use Max's curse as bait to get Vecna physically vulnerable in the Upside-Down Creel House, Eddie and Dustin lure the Bats away and Nancy, Robin and Steve go in to put Vecna down. The plan works, sorta. Eddie ends up dying giving the kill team as much time as possible, after the most metal rendition of Master of Puppets ever, but he goes down fighting as a hero. Max manages to hold out against Vecna for a while, hiding in happier memories until Vecna finally catches her, right as Eleven shows up, having used the same memory trick she used with Billy back in Season 3 to show up and mind-duel with Vecna, before being overpowered herself. Vecna begins to kill Max, as Lucas (who was on stand-by with good oul Kate Bush) is distracted by a very angry Jason with a very loaded gun. In their fight, the walkman is broken and even though Lucas manages to overpower Jason, Max still gets the full curse effects up until the exploding eyes and cracked jaw. Thanks to some final pep talk words from Mike, El overpowers Vecna at the final hour and sends him careening back into the physical realm, where the kill team (who had been tied up in tentacles for most of the finale up until this point) set him on fire with molotov cocktails before Nancy "Final Girl" Thompson unloads a shotgun into the flaming monster, sending it careening out the window of the house. However, ala Michael Myers before him, he disappears once the gang leave the house and worse of all, Max dies from her injuries, leading to four massive cracks forming through Hawkins, originating at each of the murder sites. The one from the Creel House, handily enough, tears Jason in two, and as they all meet at the Town Hall, they erupt, causing further damage to the town. Eleven manages to get Max's heart beating again, keeping her alive but in a coma and extremely hurt.
Whilst ALL that is going on, the Russian gang escape the base, but not before noticing Demodogs and Mind Flayer dust being experimented on. Once they get back to the safehouse Yuri uses, they try to figure out how to get home. They get in contact with Owen's contact in Hawkins and realize shit's hitting the fan again, so decide to go after the experiments in the base. Kill some of the Upside-Down monsters, hurt the hive mind, give the kids some help. So they do that, after Hopper and Joyce have a quick smooch to finally pay off three seasons of romantic tension. After a close call with a Demodog, Murray burns them all with a flamethrower before Hopper, now facing down a severely weakened Demogorgon in the same arena he escaped it early that day, picks up what I can only describe as a sword straight out of Skyrim and cuts the beast to ribbons. That's what frees the kill team from those tentacles and allows Dustin through the bat swarm to Eddie back in Hawkins.
Two days after ALL of this, the California team meet up with the Hawkins team. Hawkins is in ruins, with most of the population leaving. Steve, Robin and Dustin go help at a refugee centre set up in the school, with Robin finally getting to properly talk with Valerie, her crush this season, and Dustin getting to give Eddie's uncle some closure, with the town still thinking the murders were the cause of the Dungeons and Dragons club Eddie was the head of. Eleven and Hopper finally reunite, there's some tension between Nancy and Jonathon left for next season, Lucas and Erica watch over Max in the hospital (whose mind may or may not be lost in the Upside-Down) and the series ends with Will, having realized that Vecna has been the presence he's felt ever since escaping the Upside-Down in season once, leading the Byers, the Wheeler siblings, El and Hopper to hill nearby Hoppers cabin, overlooking the town. It begins to snow a substance similar to the particles that hung in the air of the Upside-Down and the gang look out over a destroyed Hawkins, the clouds lit with red lightning and the flora dying as the two worlds finally cross over. The score mixes the at this point iconic synth score with some classic strings and vocals as the music reaches a dramatic crescendo as the final shot is of the characters looking out at their home, completely destroyed.
So! Time for the initial reaction.
The reaction, AKA OH DEAR LORD, EVERYTHING IS SO FUCKED.
I'd argue that's pretty fair, right?
On a more serious note, I really enjoyed the finale. I think splitting it in two, allowing one episode to conclude the Brenner/Eleven arc properly and giving the rest of the cast some room to breath before the final two-hour sprint to the finish line, was a smart idea. I don't know if I agree with everything they did (an out-of-nowhere redemption arc for Yuri, whose suddenly a war hero, for example) but on the whole, I'd say I enjoyed the vast majority.
OK, enjoyed is an understatement, I was an emotional WRECK the entire time. Genuinely, my original plan was to start writing right after the credits rolled on episode 9, but I had to go and process all the emotions I felt for a few hours. It was a ROLLERCOASTER of a ride. There's enough left on the table to make season five interesting (I'll talk about what I wanna see at the end).
Now, for those highlighted bits I wanted to go into further detail on and, since pride is just over, lets begin with...
Will Byers: The Third Wheel
He's gay. He's- he fancies Mike, he's so gay, why aren't we just saying he's gay, i swear to god-
Will has been a background character ever since season two. He had a small arc with Mike in season 3 where the first hints of him potentially being queer were dropped as well as Will being unable to really grow up with the rest of the gang. This season, it's seems like the writers have decided to double down on that, themselves forgetting that the roller rink scene is set on Will's birthday. It's an honest mistake but unintentionally a great writing choice. The painting Will drew for Mike does come up on route to the Nina Project, but Will very badly lies about it being a commission from El and pours his heart out to Mike, albiet by means of comforting his doubts about El. It's a genuinely touching scene to watch, Will on the verge of tears at points as he confesses his love for Mike to his face, but without ever saying it verbatim, while Mike, whose adopted the role of Token Himbo from Steve, is clueless to his friends feelings. Who ISN'T clueless however, is Jonathon, another Byers whose not been up to much this season beyond smoking weed and trying to figure out his relationship with Nancy. He comforts Will later on, as the two prepare a sensory deprivation chamber for Eleven, and as someone with a younger brother with a similar age gap, this scene fucking destroyed me. The "I wish you came to me for help like you used to, nothing as changed between us" message shot me right in the heart. Will and Jonathon have been pretty underutilized this season, since all the boys in Cali have been playing second fiddle to El and the Nina Project, but this scene does remind me that these two are great and, if their closing moments are anything to go by, will be getting a LOT more screen time next season. However, I'd be wrong not to mention how coy the producers and writers of Stranger Things have been about Will's sexuality in interviews. It's a lot of "we don't want to disclose EVERYTHING" type stuff, but personally, I feel like its coming up on being more annoying then it is intriguing. Like, it's so CLEARLY apparent that Will is queer, and for a show with another fan-favorite queer character in Robin, keeping Will's sexuality in a weird, "will he/won't he" purgatory for this long seems a bit... odd. That's a personal thing, though, I can fully understand if not everyone feels the same way. Next up...
Dr Brenner: The Monster
He better stay dead this time.
Dr Brenner had a famously unsatisfying end back in Season 1, mauled just off-screen by the Demogorgon in Hawkins Lab. His survival was implied in Season 2 and he's back and at the emotional manipulation again in Season 4. Personally, I fucking despise the character, just a gaslighting monster of a person. But that's just thanks to the phenomenal work Matthew Modine does portraying him. He's never emotional, he never raises his voice and most importantly, he thinks he's always right. The dude is an out-and-out sociopath, so when he DOES get emotional or raise his voice, it comes off as a sincere shock. He's actually being held to some sort of standard by Dr Owens, the one good scientist at Hawkins apparently, but by seasons end, he's fully ok with strapped a collar to El's neck if it means getting her ready to his standard for her face-off with Vecna after detaining Owens. His and El's confrontation before that, though, does offer the interesting prospect that his ulterior motive back in season 1, training El to find and spy on Soviets, was to find Vecna in the Upside-Down, which would be a pretty decent retcon IMO. His final act, getting shot to shit by that sniper and begging for some semblance of understanding from El is a million times better then "gets hopped lol", and it closes his chapter quite well. The ends justified the means, but he couldn't get the one person who mattered most to him to justify said means in the end. Speaking of ends and deaths...
Eddie Munson: The Hero
There was a lot of theorizing online about who was gonna die this season, after the writers confirmed some cast members weren't making it out of the finale in one piece. Combined with some suspect lines in the trailers leading up the the last two episodes, most people settled on long-time cast member Steve Harrington or new fan favorite Eddie Munson. Personally, I thought it was going to be both of them (or, if the writers felt like going scorched earth, Eleven or Mike) but in the end, Eddie went down a hero, distracting the horde of Bats long enough for the kill team to take out Vecna. His whole arc this season has been about him running away from problems when, if we were to take a "hindsight is 20/20" lens to this season, sticking around after Chrissy's death and explaining things might've helped avoid a lot of the Satanic Panic stuff this season, if leaving Eddie with probable jail time. It's one of those "easy to fix, but needed for the show to progress" problems, so Eddie does run and hide for most of the season. I figured Eddie was gonna end up possessed by Vecna at some stage, ala Billy in season 3, but he ends up as an extremely likeable character and another addition to the "holy shit, his actor is british" crew alongside Jonathon and Eleven's actors. His final scenes, his "never change, Henderson" line as the crew prepare their weapons, the Master of Puppets bit and his decision to stand and fight are all quality performances and really drill home how much of a decent human being Eddie really was. Dude gets caught up in all this Upside-Down shit and sticks it out till the very end. I wish I had more to say, but so much of what I loved about Eddie is on-screen for all to see, as opposed to the more implied stuff with Will and Brenner. So yeah, Eddie is a quality character and I'm genuinely sad to see him go. If i was to criticize anything, though, it would be him not getting enough interaction with Robin, Steve and Nancy. The young adult cast has been fairly bogged down in the love triangle stuff recently, minus Nancy and Robin's bonding, so Steve having another dude to bounce some banter off would've been nice going forward. I hope he and Jonathon end up with that sort of relationship in season 5, but he and Eddie had great chemistry in the few scenes they shared so I am sad we missed out on that. On the subject of new characters... (god I'm great at segways lol)
Jason Carver: The Psychopath
Not a lot of online discourse about season four mentions Jason positively, mostly dismissing him as a conduit for the Satanic Panic elements of the show that kept the Hawkins crew on their toes for most of the season. However, I'm on record as being a fan of the Jock-Turned-Inquisitor, so entrenched in his white-picket fence of a personality that anything outside the norm, such as his girlfriend not coming to him for help, is just incomprehensible to the point that a cult murdering his girlfriend and others is a much more likely story then anything Lucas could tell him. Which, before anyone says "Whose gonna believe anything about other dimensions and monsters", Eddie and Robin came around right quick, and Jason saw his teammate get Vecna'd so its not impossible. Jason is clearly out of sorts when Nancy bumps into him in the army surplus store, all sweaty and exhausted from an apparent streak of dead-end tips in his hunt for the Hellfire Club. When he does find Lucas, he refuses to listen to anything Lucas tries to explain, assuming the Hellfires summoned Vecna and Chrissy would never go to Eddie for drugs because Eddie is a freak and yada yada yada. I do understand where the dislike for Jason comes in, and to be honest, I'm running out of things to say about him, but as far as the human antagonists in this series goes, he's solid. He does get season 1 Brenner'd a bit, being caught in the bath of the Upside-Down gates opening and apparently just disintegrating, but he did have a whole ass fight scene with Lucas before that so it works out in my mind. But there was one more person in that attic with Lucas and Jason and that person was...
Max Mayfield: The Fourth Sacrifice/Dead Characters
So Max died. For about a minute. I won't lie, I really thought that was it for Max, given how the gates all opened and wrecked Hawkins's shit, so it was a nice surprise to find out she's still breathing, albeit in hospital without her mind. Her final confrontation with Vecna is solid, her plan of hiding from him working long enough for El to arrive, and the fact the show went so far as to half-Vecna curse her, all her limbs snapping and her eyes bleeding was a genuine shock after her close call back in episode four. I'm not gonna take up too much time on Max, since I've a whole other piece written on her that you can go read on this very blog (# shameless ad) but I am gonna use this space to briefly touch on the death of characters on the show. Or more accurately, the lack of it this season. In terms of named characters, we had the three other sacrifices (Chrissy, Fred and Patrick), the two agents protecting the Cali crew, Brenner and Eddie, just off the top of my head. Max basically died and at least twenty-two confirmed causalities in the ruins of Hawkins, although expect a much higher body count there come season 5, but in terms of main-cast deaths, it feels like the Duffer Brothers are holding off on that until the final season. Again, people were putting money on Steve biting the bullet, or even Robin and Dustin were names thrown around. I knew SOMEONE major would die, but half-expected a small culling of the cast, a few big names bowing out, maybe one from each crew. I'm not gonna say I'm disappointed Steve or Jonathon or Murray didn't die, I'm not. I'd say I'm more surprised that the Duffers didn't rack up some more kills. Either way, coming back to Max before we move on, it appears her mind is lost somewhere in the Upside-Down, after El got her heart beating again but upon venturing into her head, being unable to find any semblance of consciousness. I hope this doesn't mean Max is gonna be sidelined for most of Season 5 like El was with Project Nina this season, but it's definitely going to be a side quest for the gang in the future. Speaking of the future...
Vecna/Henry/One AKA The One Behind it All
. I imagine there will be a LOT of conversation surrounding Vecna's reveal/retcon as the mastermind behind the events of the whole show, with the Mind-Flayer being some weird source of power he stumbled upon in the Upside-Down and used to try open a path out. Personally, while it's not as solid a retcon as Brenner potentially searching for him with Eleven, it holds up enough that it doesn't feel too out of place. As long as Season 5 brings about some proper answers to the Upside-Down, I'll be pretty happy with "It was me all along, Austin-i mean, Eleven" Vecna. As for the rest of his role in the finale, the dude cuts an intimidating monologue and did a great job fulfilling his role as the monster with a superiority complex. There's always been a presence behind the Hive Mind of the Upside-Down and the realization that it was Vecna instead of the Mind-Flayer as originally assumed is a pretty fine change in my opinion. I really appreciate the love for Halloween the writers have, with both the callback to Max's Halloween costume from Season 2 with the Michael Myers mask as well as Vecna's disappearance after falling from the attic window, ala Michael at the end of Halloween. When he does return, I hope he's a bit more fucked up looking, like go all out with the make-up, make him just the most monstrous thing you've ever seen as opposed to the second cousin of the fishman from Shape of Water. Now, before we get to the hopes for season 5, I wanna give a character I've really grown to appreciate this season some much needed credit.
Nancy Wheeler: The Final Girl
For those who don't know, a Final Girl is the term used for the character, usually a woman, whose left the last alive in a slasher movie to fight against the murderer. Your Lorie Strode's from Halloween, Ridly from Aliens and Nancy Thompson from A Nightmare on Elm Street, Nancy Wheeler's namesake who ALSO lost her best friend to a supernatural monster from another world. Across the series, not many characters actually use firearms, considering most are children or teenagers. The few that do include Hopper, Murray and Nancy Wheeler. Nancy Wheeler is a fuckin badass, like, there's no two ways about it. I remember tweeting something like "Stranger Things would be over in an episode if someone gave Nancy a shotgun and pointed her towards the monster" AND LO AND BEHOLD, WHO UNLOADS A BUNCH OF BUCKSHOT INTO VECNA FOR THE KILL??
Nancy has always slid a little bit under the radar for me personally, even with our shared career paths. Maybe it's because I've always liked Steve a little more then Jonathon, although Nancy and Jonathon's arc in Season 3 was amazing. But by the time season 4 rolled around, I've fully come aboard the Nancy hype train. She's the one who, for lack of a better term, gets shit done. If Steve is the Babysitter, Nancy is doing her best main character action hero shit, getting info and fighting bad guys. Genuinely just a really cool character I wanted to gush about for a few lines. There's a lot of other stuff I'd like to go off about, little stuff like Robin getting a nice scene with her crush or Dustin's scene with Mr Munson, but I think I've written enough. Now...
Season 5 AKA Endgame
Hawkins is destroyed. The small town mystery this show began with has escalated to the point where not one but two mass casualty events have struck the town thanks to the Upside-Down and Vecna. What once could be kept under wraps is becoming more and more obvious to the public eye. So where does the show go now? I'd feel pretty confident in saying the Russian side of things has been tied off, especially now with the military/political angle being covered by Sullivan. Max is gonna need saving and lord knows Vecna is gonna be on the warpath. I'm still not fully convinced Steve is going to see the final end credits, as much as I'd love him to, and I dunno if the Duffers have the balls to kill off one of the original four kids, but I suppose only time will tell. This season has really reignited a love for Stranger Things I forgot I had and honestly, I could keep writing about this season for a while, given enough rewatches and reading. For now, though, I'll leave it here. Thanks for reading this far, it is really appreciated. Enjoy the rest of the summer and I hope I'll be still be here to write about Season 5 when it comes out.
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