I am the one. I am the hypothetical, and hypothetically nonexistent, person you are all alluding to in your reviews of Stranger Things season 4. You: who would want a two and a half hour season finale of a TV show about kids solving spooky mysteries? Me: me.
At this point it would be fair to say that I love the stranger things (being the regular and recurring characters of the Netflix television series Stranger Things) more than reason allows and so, also, beyond anything resembling critical faculty. I dunno, there could be merit to the critical arguments I’ve read, about Stranger Things 4 being baggy and overstuffed and self-indulgent. There could be. To me, you all sound like insane people who hate joy and inhabit a world absent of love.
I don’t get that way with Marvel or Star Wars or any of my other particular preoccupations — I’m fully capable of loving something in sure and forgiving awareness of its abundant deficits, is what I’m saying — but Stranger Things? Nope. The season could have been 70 hours long. I’d already have finished it twice.
And it isn’t for all the apocalyptic Vecna stuff, although (in durable fashion) the grand finale(s) sailed as far as the Duffer Bros.’ stuff always does. The runtime is permissible for the other reason: the hangout scenes. So many wonderful hangout scenes. Lucas and Max. Eddie and Dustin. Robin and Steve. Will and Mike. (❤️). There were a lot of those beats in these last two episodes. I’m in the tank for these characters as stated above; but, I also want to point out, each one of those little conversations was better than the adventure story they were supporting; and the adventure story was, in turn, better for those scenes having been there.
Eleven is my favourite character (duh) so I think I give 4.8 (“Papa”) a slight edge over 4.9 (“The Piggyback”), only because (spoilers from here) 8 is more of an “Eleven wins!” episode and 9 is, of course, more of an “Actually, we’re in big, big trouble” sort of a vibe. The two-part finale, stretching across 4 hours, generally serves as the third act of The Empire Strikes Back to tee up the final season; Eleven even does the vision-of-her-friends-in-trouble-so-she-will-leave-before-her-training-is-complete bit, although in her case, she has an ally in Dr. Owens (while Obi-Wan and Yoda were both very anti- Luke’s right to choose, back on Dagobah). It was a powerful scene given all the awful shit of the past month, to see one white man stand up to another white man and telling him that giving a woman the right to choose doesn’t only come into play when you like the choice she’s making; it means backing her choice, regardless of what it is, once she’s made it.
Sometimes, the woman in question chooses to pull a helicopter out of the sky because the Bradley Cooper wannabe on board is shooting people, and that’s awesome too.
I appreciate the episodes’ game attempts to recreate a reason for Mike to still be here at all; I wish they’d managed the same for Joyce. Neither of these gaps particularly bother me, though, because they’re both endemic to what I find so fascinating (now) about television as a format for longform to begin with: you just don’t really know where any of it’s going to go. More accurately: you don’t know where the specifics are going to go. It’s one of the reasons television criticism (still in its relative infancy) is such a compelling thing to read. How do you analyze work-in-progress? How do you assess a piece of narrative that is neither its beginning nor its end? What are the rules of episodic television where each episode is a chapter of a larger whole, and where each larger whole(/season) is a component of a mega-design that theoretically has an end point but whose specific, small-brush strokes are worked out in conversation with a group of writers year by year, and also the public absorption of the pieces prior?
In the LOST era — yes, I can relate everything about modern television to LOST given three paragraphs or less — there was an honest paradox, which Damon Lindelof would often comment on, that grew out of the creators’ active engagement with the fanbase online. It went something like this:
a) fans want creators to listen to them and react to them, but
b) fans also want to believe that creators have an ending already determined, so
c) which is it? the flexibility to react, or the certainty of the plan?
Of course, “both” is actually possible to a degree, and that degree lies in the difference between the small-brush strokes I mentioned above, and the actual big picture direction of the ending. For example, I’m sure the Duffers (by now, if not initially) know where season 5 is going to end, big-picture; I’m sure they also amped up Steve Harrington’s role in all this substantially over the past few seasons, because Joe Keery just keeps giving back everything they hand him and more, and the fans can’t get enough of it. (When he emerges from America’s Guns R’ Us in a Tom Cruise bomber jacket with his Kurt Russell hair, I fucking clapped.)
In any event, to return to the point: no, not all of the stranger things “fit” in the storytelling architecture anymore, and that’s likely just the outcome of some characters turning out more powerful than expected when you write the bible (Steve, Dustin, even Nancy) and some nominally-sidelined characters being given their shot at the majors this season (Lucas, and obviously Max). Sometimes it works perfectly — I for one have no problem with Jonathan’s role dwindling to, essentially, “bus driver,” if it still nets out to the scene where he sees Will struggling, and connects with him later about what he’s seen — and sometimes you have Winona Ryder go on a mission to Russia. Well, they can always get it all back in season 5. Joyce seems to do well in the odd-numbered seasons.
And for any complaints about this season splitting up the (overwhelmingly large, at this point) principal cast into a series of smaller groups — which is actually situation normal for this series, albeit never at such international range — I found the solution in 4.9, to bring them all into the final fight together without resorting to some Game of Thrones logic re: travel and distance, fairly neat. It whiffed faintly of The Lord of the Rings, and the cunning ways in which Tolkien, after the breaking of the Fellowship, keeps having their actions impact one another’s situations, even at a distance; and, of course, the final feint, where hurting Sauron in one place draws his eye away from the one place he needs to be keeping it, so that Frodo can ascend Orodruin and reach the Cracks of Doom. And let’s face it: the Cracks of Doom is (now literally, RIP Hawkins) where we are going.
I have no idea when Season 5 will be filmed or released; I know I’ll be sad when it comes. No more taking a day off work and burying myself in pillows with the curtains drawn. Till then, I am rather enjoying the mental question of how, exactly, the American government is going to manage the whole “there’s a small town in Indiana that is now an open Hellmouth” thing; and, I am absolutely enjoying the (surely to be refuted) idea that the entire gang of stranger things will now live in Hopper’s hobo cabin together, singing songs and smelling badly. With Joyce and Jim as proud brood-parents to the unstoppable warriors of the Upside-Down. Where the military cannot find them and Vecna, still licking his wounds, can only wait for Eleven to emerge and smite him for what he did to Max. And all of them, the last remnants of an era when television was beautiful and fun, monocultural in form and unapologetic in its self-absorption. May they inhabit that fringe-world for as long as it can hold them.