Hi!
So, a few disclaimers before we get into this piece.
Spoilers for the first four episodes of Stranger Things: Season 4.
A content warning for gore and suicide. I'm gonna try keep things as light as I can but just keep the subject matter in mind.
So, at time of writing, the first chunk of Stranger Things Season 4 has been out for about four days. Personally, i binged 95% of it on the day of release and then finished the final episode the day after because holy fuck, I didn't realize how much I missed Stranger Things, but it's safe to say that those who're taking it at a slower pace, an episode a day, will have reached 'Chapter 4: Dear Billy' by now. It's clearly a fan favorite judging from the widespread acclaim the closing sequence has gotten, especially for both actress Sadie Sink's performance as Maxine 'Max' Mayfield and the excellent usage of Kate Bush's "Running Up that Hill (Deal with God)" which has gone to the #1 spot on iTunes and is climbing the Spotify Viral Charts at #18. So what has made this scene and this episode in particular stand out from those previous?
But First, the Recap
Stranger Things is a Netflix Original Series created by the Matt and Ross Duffer, credited as the Duffer Brothers. On July 15th, 2016, the first season released to universal acclaim, prompting a second season on October 27th, 2017, a third on July 4th 2019 and, most recently, the first half of season four on May 27th 2022. Set in the fictional rural town of Hawkins Indiana in the early 1980s, the show follows four kids who are embroiled in a dark mystery when one of their number goes missing as strange happenings are reported from a nearby research lab, followed by a mute girl with apparent superpowers appearing in town as well as the otherworldly monster and government agents that pursue her . The show indulges heavily in 80s nostalgia in all aspects, from aesthetic to music to technology and tone. The country is still firmly in Cold War mode, with the supernatural events that occur first presumed as some communist attack. As the show progresses, the cast grows along with the scale of threats emerging from the Upside-Down until we reach season 3, where the climatic showdown between the main cast and the monstrous Mind Flayer results in the destruction of both the town mall as well as the hidden Russian base below, with a resulting body count in the 50s, many of them innocent Hawkins residents.. The season ends on a fairly conclusive note, with core cast members, including recently depowered Eleven, being relocated across the county to California. Presumably due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the fourth season wouldn't release for another three years, leaving the neon-soaked iron curtain closed on Hawkins. Season 3 also introduced some elements viewers were desperate for more of, the introduction of fan-favorite Robin Buckley and the apparent death of series mainstay, Police Chief Jim Hopper among them. Most importantly for today however, is the death of Billy Hargrove, step-brother of Max and unwilling antagonist of Season 3. Billy was possessed by the Mind-Flayer and used to create a 'flayed' army of other possessed residents of Hawkins, all of which were eventually used for their flesh in order to create a physical form on Earth for the Mind-Flayer. After Eleven broke the flaying on Billy, he sacrificed himself to save El, Max and the kids, buying just enough time for the final gate to the Upside-Down to be closed and therefore, the Flayer's defeat. Season 4 picks up nine months later, and the first episode lets the viewer know that this new direction, escalating otherworldly threats combined with political espionage, is the new norm.
Season 4, aka: Oh God, Oh Fuck, Oh God, Oh Fuck
Episode 1 of Season Four introduces Chrissy Cunningham, a cheerleader at Hawkins High. She's in a relationship with star basketball player Jason Carver, she's the queen of the school, everything's great... from the outside. Chrissy is also seeing the school councilor, hallucinating a grandfather clock as well as visions of an abusive mother. By the end of the first episode, after seeking drugs from Eddie Munson to help with her demons, she's murdered by new Upside-Down demon, Venca. Chrissy is levitated into the air inside Eddie's trailer. Her arms and legs are snapped, her jaw is broken and her eyes, grey and glazed over as she's lost in Vecna's visions, are gouged out, all without anyone or anything physically touching her. Eddie screams in horror, roll credits.
Stranger Things has never shied away from gruesome deaths, season 1 and Barb will attest to that. But the end result of being cursed by Vecna (the visions and grey eyes) is easily the furthest it has gone into pure horror. The cutting between what Eddie is witnessing in the real world and Vecna impaling a clawed hand into Chrissy's head within the visions, after subjecting Chrissy to her worse traumas, is beyond effective at conveying just how much the stakes have raised this season. Dustin puts it extremely well in the show when
he says "If the Demogorgon (the antagonist of season 1) was a foot-soldier, then Vecna is the five-star general". He is the the first creature from the Upside-Down to be able to directly harm those living on Earth and he does so in the worst ways, using a victim's trauma and inner darkness as torture before horrifically murdering them. He is a bit of a bastard, to say the least. The thing that makes Vecna stand out the most in my mind, however, is that he talks. Not the weird, psychic connection the Mind-Flayer communicated with, but full sentences he speaks. It adds that extra bit of humanity to him and in turn, makes him seem all the more alien. It removes the presumption that the creatures of the Upside-Down are just predators following their natural instincts with no malicious intent. Vecna is a fully self-aware villain, he knows what he's doing.
Episode 2 has a similar fate in store for co-editor of the Hawkins High newspaper, Fred Benson, found on a road nearby the trailer park he and Nancy Wheeler had been searching and the site of Chrissy's death. This is when Nancy reunites with the main Hawkins cast for the season, as Max, neighbors with Eddie Munson, overheard the screams as Chrissy died as well as the signature power fluctuations that comes with Upside-Down interference, brings her concerns to Dustin, who in turn ropes both Steve Harrington and Robin into the story. The team eventually manage to obtain the school counsellor's records and realize both Chrissy and Fred were seeing her for identical physical symptoms and various mental health reasons. Both of which Max has begun experiencing. The reveal is edited really well, as Max flashes back to scenes we've seen of her taking pills to deal with the same symptoms Chrissy and Fred suffered from, while she reads said symptoms on their diagnosis. Once she's done, she's pulled into a vision and sees the ominous Creel House grandfather clock, a sign of her inevitable confrontation with Vecna and, given all the evidence, unavoidable demise.
Max Mayfield aka Sadie Sink Appreciation Section
Max Mayfield, as played by Sadie Sink, was first introduced in Season 2 as a newcomer to Hawkins, her mother remarrying and moving to the town alongside her new husband and stepson. Billy was generally a prick even before his possession by the Mind-Flayer, and his abuse led to Max becoming closed-off and a loner, spending much of her time at the local Arcade. This is what led to her introduction to two of the main four kids, Dustin and Lucas (whom she eventually has a romantic relationship with) and eventual introduction to the madness that is life in Hawkins. She honestly doesn't get a whole lot to do in seasons 2 and 3, at least in comparison to her costars, but she's remained a likeable, sarcastic tomboy who helped the gang in their adventures. Her arcs mainly revolved around becoming part of the group in season 2 and her relationship with Lucas, Eleven and Billy in season 3. Season 4 feels like the first time we're shown progression in her character beyond her introduction to the whole Upside-Down thing, which, keep in mind, isn't a negative. Sink uses every scene she's in to its fullest and where characters could fall into the trap of being "just the other member of the group", Max never feels like that. Each season tends to highlight a certain selection of the cast over the others, never pushing the others off-stage but not shining the spotlight on them either, Will Byers post-season 2 being the first example that comes to mind. Max was always a delight to see, but she was never at the center of the action like Eleven or Hopper or even Billy were. That is, until Season 4.
Season 4 shows us a Max whose regressed to her Season 2 self and then some. She's a loner, keeping her Walkman and headphones on hand at all times. Her grades have dropped, she's stand-offish with everyone including her now-ex boyfriend and refuses to talk about her feelings in counselling. Her stepfather left her and her mother after Billy's death and her mother now works two jobs, coming home to drink and sleep, leaving Max essentially alone at home most of the time in her mourning. She has nightmares of Billy's death and suicidal thoughts at night. Max is in a deep depression, a depression Vecna is all too happy to exploit.
'Dear Billy', episode 4, follows Max's realization that her death is imminent, as neither Chrissy nor Fred survived longer then 24 hours after first experiencing visions. She writes letters for her friends and family and the episode follows her in what's she has every reason to believe is her last day on Earth. The closing sequence has Steve, Lucas and Dustin, charged with watching Max, go with her to Hawkins Cemetery. Lucas follows her out of the car and tells, implores her to talk to him. He says he doesn't want a letter, he doesn't need one. He just wants to help and needs Max to know that he and the others are there for her. It's a plea that, to anyone whose had friends or family in a similar situation, hits extremely close to home. Max continues on to Billy's grave to read out her final letter. She wonders what she could've done differently to save Billy, whether they could've become friends regardless of their mutual dislike if given another chance. She apologizes to Billy's grave before Vecna comes for her.
Quick pause to just go over this real quick. I'm the furthest thing from a psychologist, but it's apparent that Max is dealing with survivors guilt, alongside the complex feelings that mourning a brother who never displayed any sort of affection outside of his self-sacrifice. All of this is coming from a 15 year old kid who, while not being an original graduate of Demagorgon Academy, has survived through two almost-apocalypses now and been instrumental in preventing them. It's clear just how badly Max needs to open up, to actually accept help, but she's regressed into what's comfortable for her, quiet isolation.
So Vecna comes to her in the form of Billy, tells her that she felt a small piece of happiness at Billy's death and that's the cause of her withdrawal from her friend group. He reveals he knows of the thoughts she has late at night, of wishing she could join Billy in death. Max flees and finds her way into what appears to be Vecna's mindscape, tinted the classic red of the Upside-Down. As Vecna tries to take her, the guys in the real world frantically try to get in contact with Robin and Nancy, who were trying to find the only known survivor of Vecna's curse. As the three boys gather around Max, eyes glazed over and grey, Max is pursued and taunted by the monster, her death seemingly unavoidable.
And then.
I genuinely get goosebumps every time the violins kick in on "Come on baby". So lets dissect this.
Running Up That Hill (The Hill is Depression)
The common trend through all of Vecna's victims up until this point is an unwillingness to open up to their loved ones. Chrissy keeps up a façade of normalcy to both Jason and her peers, the only one questioning her well-being being Eddie Munson, who questions why the queen of Hawkins High is buying drugs off him, the school weirdo. Fred similarly refuses to open up to Nancy or presumably any of his friends and Victor Creel, Vecna's first victim, doesn't talk to anyone about the horrors he witnessed and committed during World War 2. All of Vecna's victims suffer in silence until it's too late and they're killed. In this reading, its pretty clear that Vecna is a stand-in for suicide, or at least mental health issues in general, however his lines like "I can end your suffering" paint a much darker picture. Max's isolation is understandable. She's dealt with a lot of abuse and pain throughout her time in Hawkins and her first instinct is to just power through it. But when it comes down to the final moments, the thing that pulls her back is pretty simple compared to the eldritch abomination trying to murder her. It's a song. A song about swapping roles and coming to a better understanding, a meaning that Max, who I'm sure imagines what the world would be like if she had died in Billy's place, holds close to her heart. Her memories of her friends come flooding in as a reminder of what she's about to lose and she just runs. Personally, the final lines she has, repeating "I'm still here" really hits home. She mentions in her letter about feeling as if a part of her died with Billy, but finally, collapsing into the arms of her loved ones, with a new glimmer of hope in the practical knowledge of how to fend off the curse and the emotional realization that she doesn't want to die and that her friends are worth living for. Sure, she's still here as in "she's no longer in Vecna's realm" but also that she's still alive, that she has friends and that things can get better. Billy is gone, but she's still here, and that's all that matters.
To be quiet honest, my biggest nitpick with Stranger Things as a series is that it never really deals with the fallout of its events in terms of the mental and physical scars it can leave on some of the cast. Sure, Season 2 is essentially the Will Byers Trauma Show and Season 3 has plenty of Joyce dealing with the death of her boyfriend Bob but again, its a case of "If you're not the golden child this season, you aren't gonna get as much development". Which again, I don't think is a major misstep on the shows part, no one is pushed off-stage entirely. But when you have characters like Steve, whose been in the trenches since day 1 and is the casts main fighter besides Hopper and Eleven, whose gone into otherwordly underground tunnels full of baby Demagorgons to burn the whole network down or been captured and tortured by Russian soldiers, you would think that would be spoken about beyond a simple acknowledgement while he's in a "lets recap the show for this new character" scene. Or Dustin, another day 1 alumni whose role as the jokester and idea guy who names all the monsters never really lends itself to a serious story about what it's like to be this kid, growing up in a town that seemingly wants you and your friends dead. I'm not saying we need an obligatory "Lets gather round the campfire and discuss our shared trauma" storyline every season, but I would appreciate if at some stage before the curtain is finally closed on Hawkins, we got some form of acknowledgement for the whole cast. It's another reason why Max's arc for the first four episodes works so well from a narrative standpoint as well as an emotional one. There's a bit more I'd like to talk about in regards to the fallout from Season 3's finale as it affects the wider town of Hawkins, but that delves more into the Satanic Panic/Basketball Team side of this season's story and while it overlaps with Max's a little bit, it's not really relevant to this topic.
Conclusion
There's one final note I wanna end on that's a slight spoiler for the rest of the show, so if that's a problem, feel free to click off now.
Max doesn't face Vecna again for the rest of the season, but she's constantly repeating her copy of Running Up That Hill in order to stave him off. Every scene she's in, the Walkman and headphones are on. It's another practical choice, a temporary solution to the Vecna problem, but holds another meaning. Depression is a life-long struggle, there's isn't a big demon you can go kill to be rid of it, there's no miracle cure. Making the comparison to Sisyphus pushing his boulder up his hill only for him to have to repeat the task every time it rolls back down isn't an original comparison (and I've tried my hardest to avoid making it this entire time because of that) but it's common for a reason. Neither is the message 'Dear Billy' is sending, that talking to your friends and loved ones can make an immense difference in your mental health battles but again, its common for a reason. Sometimes, we just need to obvious reminders when things get dark. Max has her friend group that she's gone through literal hell with and even she felt she couldn't truly open up to them. Max has to keep running up that hill, but at least now she's realized not running alone.
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