Stranger Things 4 (2022)
Stranger Things is back. And all the people said, “Finally!”
If anyone hasn’t seen Season Three or doesn’t want spoilers of any kind (and I can’t blame you), feel free to skip the next few paragraphs because spoilers are unavoidable.
The Byers, along with Eleven, are living in California, where they appear to be thriving. Kind of. Joyce is a telemarketer for Britannica. Jonathan has made friends with a reefer addict named Argyle who’s very generous with his supply of weed. Will, who’s taken up painting, is withdrawn. Eleven, whose powers have been dormant since Season Three, writes to Mike about how everyone at their new school is so nice and she’s made loads of friends. She’s lying through her teeth, though.
Back in Hawkins, the group is sort of fractured. Lucas is playing on the basketball team so he’s fallen in with the jocks, but he, Mike, and Dustin make time to play Dungeons and Dragons with the Hellfire Club, led by a rather scary-looking guy named Eddie. They’ve all got matching T-shirts. Max is dealing with the trauma of her brother, Billy’s death and loses herself in her Walkman.
Meanwhile, Nancy and Steve as upperclassmen are the elder statespeople of the group. Nancy is working on the school newspaper and longs for the day when she and Jonathan can go to Emerson College together. Steve, along with Maya, works at the local video store, where Maya tries to convince him to play Dr. Zhivago on the store TV.
Things get weird, of course. People turn up dead with their bones grotesquely broken and no one can figure it out or predict who will be stricken next. Meanwhile, Mike goes out to California over Spring Break and finds a whole other set of problems.
And remember the Dungeons and Dragons scare in the 1980s? It comes into play, although it’s a triggering subject.
All right. Stranger Things 4 is very well done. Nothing about it is contrived; these characters are allowed to do what they want to do. I like the directions they’ve gone, particularly Steve, who’s turned out to be one of the coolest people on the show. Argyle also grew on me even though he starts out super-annoying. This poor guy had no idea what he let himself in for when he started hanging out with Jonathan Byers and almost weeps in bewilderment at the situations he finds himself in. There’s a lot of well-placed comic relief when characters who seem to be opposites are paired and have to put aside their differences.
The show’s tension game is on point as usual. It really ups the stakes when things start happening and these characters are half a country away from each other. It’s as if the Duffers decided to wind the show up with an Act Two on steroids. A lot of the visuals look really trippy, like a Salvador Dali painting had a head-on collision with the original Tron movie.
The season does have some minor flaws—it can be a wee bit overwhelming and depressing. I don’t know why, but I felt myself checking out a bit around Episode Four or so. Maybe it was too much of a good thing, or maybe it was the high body count. There’s something to be said for releasing a series in bits, especially when episodes don’t adhere to a strict running time. After a while the brain hits a saturation point.
That said, I’m looking forward to the finale in July. Part One leaves us on a partial cliffhanger, and if Part Two is anything like the rest of the series, we’re gonna be blindsided and like it.
Stranger Things 4 is currently streaming on Netflix. Rated TV-14.
My grade: A-
Principal Cast: Winona Ryder, Matthew Modine, David Harper, Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Charlie Heaton, Gaten Matarazzo, Noah Schnapp, Caleb McLaughlin, Joe Keery, Natalia Dyer, Maya Hawke, Sadie Sink, Eduardo Franco
Created, written and directed by the Duffer Brothers.
Additional writing by Caitlin Schneiderhan.