If I were to create a Strangethings tier list like a good unemployed person, season 3 would sit at the very bottom. But would season 4 really rise above it? I had heard mixed things— some claimed it was as good as the first two seasons, others said it wasn’t as bad as season 3 but still quite flawed. Indeed, season 4 immediately starts with another tone shift. The pendulum swings back from Goosebumps to Stephen King and ends up resting about in the middle. Half the subplots are about Hawkins, half the subplots decidedly not. Joyce abandons her children and fucks off to Alaska with Murray to go find Hopper on a whim. Guess where he ends up? In a fucking gulag. You know. The famous 1985 Russian gulags. I’ll be honest with you— I could absolutely not be bothered with this subplot and skipped it whenever possible. This was for a couple reasons: one, narratively, its sole purpose is to return Hopper to life because of course he’s still alive. (Hopefully it’s been well-established by now that there’s nothing I wish more than for Hopper to be dead.) The second reason is unfortunately a lot more serious.
Hopper’s scenes in the gulag throughout Season 4 were filmed in Lukiškės Prison, a former prison operational from 1837 until 2019. Lukiškės Prison was used by the Gestapo during the Nazi occupation of Lithuania to hold thousands of Jews and members of the Polish resistance, before they were executed during the Ponary Massacre. According to an article by ABC News1Myers, Emma. “Netflix Hit Stranger Things Slammed for Using Nazi Prison and Brutal Asylum in New Series.” ABC News. , “Netflix partnered with Go Vilnius tourism to develop a Stranger Things-themed cell within the Lukiškės complex to be rented out on Airbnb. A petition against the proposal gained more than 53,000 signatures, leading Go Vilnius to shut down the project indefinitely.” Naturally, Netflix didn’t ever respond for comment or apology about any of this. This was compounded with other controversies, like Netflix reposting images of people getting numerical wrist tattoos inspired by Eleven’s. One of the other major subplots takes place in a fictional asylum called the “Pennhurst Mental Hospital”, directly named after the real life Pennhurst State School and Hospital in Pennsylvania, where a myriad of human rights abuses against the intellectually disabled led to its closure in 19872Watson, Joanne. “By Naming “Pennhurst”, Stranger Things Uses Disability Trauma for Entertainment. Dark Tourism and Asylum Tours Do Too.” The Conversation. . This fictional asylum is a sanitized caricature, essentially only in the story for Robin and Nancy to have a Hannibal Lector confrontation with a supposedly crazed murderer. Unlike the prison subplot, I was unaware of the real-life background of this until doing research.
I don’t need to explain the reprehensibility of all this and my genuine contempt for the showrunners, the writers, and those at Netflix who allowed all this to happen. It is ghoulish. If I had been an active watcher at the time I probably would have abandoned the show for good, and anyone who refuses to watch it for these reasons is completely justified. Out of all the bad shit, these incidents spoil the experience of merely revisiting this show the most. It is important to highlight these choices as heinous in a sphere beyond bad writing; even if Stranger Things had been the best written, most culturally important show in the world, this would still be unacceptable. There is a level on which we can continue with acknowledgement of these transgressions and I think there are still things to be gained from further analysis, but it is safe to say if I could pick a world where these choices weren’t made, even if it meant the show didn’t exist, I’d do it in a heartbeat.
When you cut the utterly worthless gulag subplot, you don’t miss much. Everything else becomes more streamlined, yet still drags on. The last season had a certain momentum to it by virtue of at least three completely absurd things happening an episode, but because this season’s trying to go back to the roots of the first two (without establishing any of the conflict that immediately set up those stakes), it has to start building from ground zero. No one other than Joyce and Murray are in on the Hopper rescue scheme, so everyone’s just shooting the shit until something happens. The kids are in high school because they super cannot pass as middle schoolers anymore, going through being-in-high-school and/or moving-to-new-city angst, except Max, who is going through more situationally-appropriate I-watched-my-brother-die-in-front-of-me angst. Hope you’re ready for mundane coming-of-age drama! Jane’s getting bullied by some regular-ass girl and she can’t throttle her with psychic powers! Oh no! Lucas wants to play basketball, but he also wants to keep playing D&D— being a jock and a nerd at the same time? It could never be true. Mike misses his girlfriend! What else is new! Surprisingly, nothing particularly bad has happened to Will yet, other than being ignored which is the norm for the show already. He’s working on a painting, that’s nice.
In the meantime, we’re immediately thrown more new characters: popular girl cheerleader Chrissy Cunningham; her jock boyfriend Jason and his band of interchangeable cronies; Argyle, Jonathan’s California stoner friend; Vickie, Robin’s new love interest; and most prominently “super senior” aka grown-ass man Eddie Munson, metalhead, alleged Satanist, and leader of the school’s Hellfire Club (the title sounds scary but all it actually means is he’s a dungeon master for a bunch of high schoolers, which is hilarious). We get an episode explaining his and the kids’ alleged dynamic before he’s implicated in Chrissy’s supernatural murder. Listen, I wanted to like Eddie. I can see his potential on paper; he encapsulates a lot of what the show nominally wants to explore. He’s the king of freaks, a blatant outcast, actively disruptive to the student populace and obsessed with sticking it to ‘the man’. His framing and subsequent persecution is intended to comment on the Satanic Panic, giving the show an actual foothold in relevant cultural critique. Unfortunately, this show has three seasons’ worth of characters and is buckling completely under the weight of all of them, and it has to really, really speedrun a lot of beats to make Munson seem like an organic inclusion. Much of the buildup of his and the kids’ dynamic has to happen offscreen, exposited to us through blunt backtalk, and it simply doesn’t feel earned— we already have a character who’s a young adult and an older male authority figure for the kids, who’s close to Dustin in particular, and who has had multiple seasons to organically build such a dynamic with those characters. The execution is slapdash, rushed, and ends up having little payoff for the amount of time invested, all for a character who was redundant anyway. Eddie could have been a good inclusion if he’d existed two seasons earlier— a recurring problem for a lot of this season’s aspects.
This show has decided it wants to be a tension-filled supernatural mystery again and not Looney Toons, so it has chosen the murder mystery path. To its credit, a lot works in its favor this time around. A supernatural curse that makes its way between various townsfolk, making them hallucinate their loved ones berating them and ominous visions of a clock, before being horrifically mangled by an invisible supernatural force? My god, that sounds… actually good. And it is! Kind of. Chrissy’s death is quite well executed, despite her short screen time; the nature of the curse gives us more insight into her character than we ever got for Barb. Vecna is an inherently more personal villain than the entirely animalistic Demogorgons and Mind Flayer, which allows for more psychological horror. This is demonstrated best with Max, who pulls her weight as one of the most consistently well-written characters of the show. Max’s season-wide arc deals with grieving her brother’s death, her self-loathing at her inability to save him, her guilt that part of her didn’t want to save him. This is one of the only arcs in the show that elevates every character brought into it. Jane and Max’s bond from season 3 is reinforced. Lucas especially comes into his own as a stalwart presence by Max’s side. Vecna gets to display some actual menace by using these feelings to goad her towards death, and for once, nearly succeeds in killing off a main cast member. It’s only through reaffirming her connections with her loved ones— actualized by the recurring use “Running Up That Hill”, which calls back to the way “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” was used in season 1— that Max is able to escape him.
That scene is the highlight of the season by a wide margin, and still held in high regard by most viewers. It also happens halfway through the episode count. My surprise turned to concern turned to deep dismay when I figured out the season was going to keep spinning its wheels, and unless the writers suddenly got really good at their jobs really soon, it was never going to reach these heights again.
Despite Vecna apparently having been intended to be a character since season 1, he doesn’t feel like an organic evolution from the show’s previous conflicts. The antagonists between seasons 1 and 3, discounting the Russians, are connected and escalate in a way that makes sense— the single Demogorgon from the first season, then the Mind Flayer for the second, then the doppelgangers for the third as an extension of the Mind Flayer’s will. This season tries to take all these forces, which previously have been portrayed as your average otherworldly world-destroying hivemind, and suddenly recontextualize their actions as the machinations of one human guy. Will was taken by the demogorgon because Vecna wanted to put slugs in him specifically. Everyone else? Literally whatever. Why did he do this to Will? Uh, reasons. We’ll find them out later. Why is he killing people now, then, in an entirely different way from before? I don’t fucking know, man. Also, he was the first psychic child of Dr. Brenner and the originator of Jane’s powers. It’s theoretically cool to tie these disparate plots together, but when Vecna is the answer for every single thing that happens, it starts to get disappointing and confusing more than cool. He’s a universal villainous solvent who’s not well-written enough to do anything but eventually cheapen each conflict he’s introduced to.
Every plot is continually waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it’s exhausting. Eddie spends most of the season hiding out in a cabin as everyone scrambles to clear his name. The show can’t figure out what to do with Nancy except have her bounce between her two love interests, so that happens in between investigating Vecna’s murder trail. Jane gets kidnapped by her evil doctor dad, who’s alive even though it really seemed like he died a couple seasons back, and the show will try very hard to get you to care even though there’s nothing particularly interesting or novel about him. He begins directing Jane to rediscover her powers through long, repetitive flashbacks, as well as to unravel Vecna’s history with the lab rats. Half the gang diverts from Cali to go rescue her and they all waste a lot of time driving across the desert doing nothing of note. Well, nothing of note except Will, who gets some “interesting” stuff with the worst boy best friend the world has ever seen.
Yes, the incredibly weird Byler dynamic is back, this time with 50% more Cyrano trope! This is where the show begins leaning very explicitly into the idea that Will is in love with Mike, but because Mike’s entire character at this point revolves around mooning over his kidnapped girlfriend, Will’s affections have to be sublimated into pep talks about Jane instead. He third wheels Jane and Mike constantly. This culminates in the infamous painting incident, where Will gives Mike the painting (Jane previously noted that he was making it for someone, and wondered if a girl had caught his eye) and says it’s from Jane. He motivates Mike to go back to Jane using a speech clearly based on his own repressed feelings. Afterwards, he cries to himself in the car with Mike sitting right next to him, totally fucking oblivious.
This messy gay shit ignited a lot of people’s imaginations in 2022— there was no way they were setting this up for no reason, especially considering Mileven was still the premiere Strangethings ship— and despite the odds, an increasing number of people thought there was a non-zero chance Will’s feelings towards Mike were requited. Robin’s subplot provided more substantial textual evidence: she has a crush on a girl who ambiguously reciprocates her feelings, said girl appears to be straight, but by the next season, they’re in a relationship. So the writers are totally alright with a character getting together with the seemingly straight same-sex object of their affections, they just don’t see what that has to do with Will and Mike. Naturally, Byler stocks rose this season by 150%. People were noticing3Declan, Liz. “Byler Shippers Haven’t Given Up On “Stranger Things” Yet.” Parade. 4Frank, Jason P. “Did Will Byers Come out in the Stranger Things Finale? An Investigation.” Vulture. 5O’Keefe, Meghan. “‘Stranger Things’ Season 4’s Saddest Storyline Is Will Byers Pining for an Oblivious Mike Wheeler.” Decider. . If ship debates seem like an unimportant thing to analyze, you severely underestimate the amount of time and money young gays and delusional yaoi fans will invest for scraps of representation; whether aware of it or not, the Duffers were building their empire on the foundations of the ever-powerful fujo nation. It would be a ridiculously audacious move to sink their main het ship and make the supposed gay pipe dream real— it wouldn’t make the show good, but a significant amount of the Duffers’ fumbles could be forgiven.
Byler, of course, does not end up resolved here. The Duffers were originally going to have Will come out in season 4, but walked it back for the next one instead. Fair play, it’s a delicate subject, it makes sense to give such a subplot time to build in order to craft the tasteful, satisfying resolution it deserves.
I’d tell you about the other important stuff if anything was achieved. An entirely new form of Demogorgon that can fly is introduced, kills a single character, and is never seen again. Everyone makes a really bad plan to blow up Vecna that’s not going to work. It doesn’t work. Eddie basically kills himself in front of Dustin for no reason, everyone else survives. The show treats this death as a very earned and necessary heroic sacrifice that deserves enshrining. Max is put into a coma. Mike confesses his love for Jane with Will’s hand on his back. The party swears vengeance on Vecna and vows to find a way to defeat him. We end right back at square one, a whole lot of information recontextualized with not much value to show for it.
I think I actually dislike this season more than the last, even if it’s objectively better written. If season 3 was being immediately handed a live grenade, season 4 was like trudging through knee-deep trenches with the end in sight but agonizingly far. It took forever both because of its bloated runtime— 13 hours and 2 minutes, a length not even outpaced by the finale— and because I was taking longer and longer breaks, actively procrastinating watching more. After 5 days, the longest I had spent on any of these seasons, I rolled myself reluctantly over the finish line and prepared to start the finale. I was glad to soon be done with the whole thing.
2022 saw an escalation in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war with a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II. Elon Musk bought Twitter. ChatGPT first publicly released, leading into the 2023 artificial intelligence boom and the hellish AI landscape we currently occupy. COVID was still going strong and mask mandates were slowly rolling back. At this point, most people had given up on the concept of good years— this was the world now, this was life. Stranger Things season 4 came and went across two volumes and three months. On the last day of the year, the former Pope died.
Myers, Emma. “Netflix Hit Stranger Things Slammed for Using Nazi Prison and Brutal Asylum in New Series.” ABC News. ↩
Watson, Joanne. “By Naming “Pennhurst”, Stranger Things Uses Disability Trauma for Entertainment. Dark Tourism and Asylum Tours Do Too.” The Conversation. ↩
Declan, Liz. “Byler Shippers Haven’t Given Up On “Stranger Things” Yet.” Parade. ↩
Frank, Jason P. “Did Will Byers Come out in the Stranger Things Finale? An Investigation.” Vulture. ↩
O’Keefe, Meghan. “‘Stranger Things’ Season 4’s Saddest Storyline Is Will Byers Pining for an Oblivious Mike Wheeler.” Decider. ↩