Stranger Things Season Four Part One (Spoiler-Filled) Review

This review will include spoilers for the first seven episodes of Stranger Things’ bifurcated fourth season. If you haven’t watched the episodes and do not want to be spoiled, save this review and come back to it once you have survived the insanely long run of episodes.

Well, after slogging through all seven episodes (whose combined run times were much closer to a full ten episode season – but due to a desire not to pay actors more for more episodes, much like Game of Thrones did with their final season, we had to sit through overstuffed episodes that felt more like Soviet torture at times rather than just get a compact story), I think it’s safe to say that season four of Stranger Things is, thus far, pretty hit or miss. When the show is hitting – that would be any time we are in Hawkins dealing with the latest invader from the Upside Down – it’s a rollicking good time, offering a tight, compelling story with some of the show’s best character combinations pairing off in new variations and keeping us on the edge of our seats. And when it’s not – that would be 100% of the time in Russia and most of the time with the Mike/Will/Jonathan side of things – it’s long, drawn out, and taking literal hours to reach a conclusion that I suspect all of us saw coming from the start of the season. And then there’s the Eleven of it all, a storyline that has elements of both the good and the bad tendencies of the show’s writing staff.

Let’s start with the bad: Joyce and Hopper’s Russian reunion. We’ve known since 2019 that Hopper was the American somehow transported to Russia when he closed the Upside Down gate back in season three. And we all knew that the show would find a way to have Joyce (with an assist from Murray) save him – although, of course, since Hopper is the most capable man on this show, he would really be saving himself. And that storyline isn’t a bad one! In fact, it’s a great one. It brings Joyce and Hopper back together again in sweeping, romantic fashion. It gives both Winona Ryder and David Harbour scenes that allow them to act with adults and not simply be yelling at, chasing, or being outsmarted by the show’s real stars – the kids. But it’s the execution of the story arc that creates the problem – as well as all the problems for storylines that weren’t set in Hawkins this season.

We spend an ungodly amount of time slowly reaching a point within the story that we all knew we would reach. You see, nearly every character on Stranger Things is wrapped up in so much damn plot armor that we know they aren’t really in danger, with Hopper and Joyce protected near the top of that list. Spending seven episodes in Russia, following Hopper as he slowly gets put in a position to kill a Demogorgon doesn’t make sense unless we get the pay-off of his reunion with Joyce. In a normally paced season, I suspect this arc would have felt much less like a detour into the darkness. But my god, we spent so much damn time in that Russian prison – and watching Joyce and Murray try to rescue him – that I felt like I was trapped in a Soviet gulag. There was not nearly enough actual story to justify the amount of time the series spent on that piece of the arc. We learned next to nothing about the Soviets, their plans, or Hopper himself that we didn’t already know (which made this a particularly hard arc to sit through), and it added nothing of note to the season arc as a whole. All it did was allow the kids a chance to operate on their own without their parents overseeing them as they did in the previous seasons – and considering how much the kids did on their own in those seasons, well, it wasn’t that much of a change in the grand scheme of things.

Speaking of operating without parents, the California arc was also a major miss for the series. We spent far too long setting the stage for Eleven simply to be whisked back into Dr. Brenner’s control once more so that we could get a pretty basic explanation as to just what’s happening in the realm of the Upside Down. Breaking this storyline down, it does fare better than our trip into the Russian wilderness, but not by much. For starters, we spent about an episode too long watching Eleven get bullied whilst Will sat on the side and did nothing. Now, there’s an interesting story that could have been mined from that – Will’s continued difficulties dealing with social situations following his trauma in the Upside Down – but the series, despite all the shit it put him through, hasn’t seemed all that interested in digging into Will’s life nearly as much as it wants to with all the other teens. Which is an absolute shame, as Noah Schnapp has turned into a hell of an actor (which isn’t the case for all of the show’s younger cast, unfortunately). Instead, we get more Eleven drama, mostly centered around Mike – who is far and away the dullest of the show’s central characters, and who has turned into a jerk of a character this time around – with a strangely out of place stoner comedy with Jonathan and his new friend Argyle (comic relief is always needed on a series that gets as dark as Stranger Things, and stoner comedies were definitely a thing in the mid-80s, but man, this addition absolutely lands like a lead balloon and helps balloon up the bloated episode run times while we’re at it, which really sucks).

By the end of the seven episodes, we know why the Eleven portion of the story was so important, and we can guess why the Mike/Will/Jonathan side matters (mostly to give them something to do and allow Mike to learn a lesson from Will calling him out for being an ass), but again, it took far too long to reach those conclusions. Yes, I’m sure Eleven will eventually regain her powers on a permanent basis and her and her posse will roll into Hawkins just at the right moment, but a key aspect to good, strong storytelling is in providing the correct ratio of plot to time. Here, we finally received the necessary plot points, but only after a journey that took us way out of the way to receive those answers.

And then there was the season’s A story – the one that ran along at a solid clip, was full of meaningful character beats, and frankly, felt like Stranger Things: The Hawkins Story. The strength of Stranger Things has always been the ability of the writers to channel elements of childhood and teenage angst through their season-long fights against the supernatural villains of the Upside Down.* So, when the story is set in Hawkins, in school, and dealing with the issues of being a teen and not, say, with the Cold War tensions between Soviets and Americans, well, it works best. It also doesn’t hurt that the series placed all of its top line characters (and, really, actors) in this portion of the story. When the series started, it was clear that focus was on Hopper, Joyce, Eleven, and Mike. But now? Well, Steve, Dustin, Max, Nancy, Robin, and the incredible newcomer Eddie (a sensational Joseph Quinn) have stolen the show.

*This was the calling card of Buffy the Vampire Slayer during the high school years of its run, and Stranger Things has adapted that playbook to encompass childhood in the nostalgia-infused 1980s setting, but with the shift to high school for the central leads – and the approach of graduation for the older teens – this comparison is far more obvious this time around than it was in the past.

We knew that the combinations of Steve and Dustin and Steve and Robin were winners from their extended work back in season three, but who knew Nancy could become one of the show’s best – and most complete – characters this late in the game simply by teaming her with Robin and teasing a romantic reunion with Steve? And Max, boy has Sadie Sink turned out to be one of the best finds in the Stranger Things universe? Staking so much of the emotional heart of season four on her shoulders was a gamble – this is a character that hasn’t been given a real chance to shine on her own yet – but Sink turned Max into the soul of the series thus far.

Every time the action switched from Hawkins to another element of the story, the wind went out of the sails of the storytelling and it just felt flat. But in Hawkins? It was electric. There was tension, genuine stakes (I honestly thought they might actually kill off Max – which is something I haven’t felt for a major character on this series for a long time), the characters had incredible chemistry with each other – no matter the combination – and things just worked. The longer run time didn’t feel nearly long enough when watching these kids attempt to take on the Upside Down. And I know they’ll need Eleven back before they can deal a death blow to Vecna, but I couldn’t help but wish they didn’t – that the ones who have been fighting him from the jump would be the ones to win this time around. Perhaps they will be – Nancy is in a precarious spot (love the call back to Barb!) and I think she’s strong enough to get out of it on her own this time around. But man, I cannot wait to see how things shake out with the Hawkins gang when the series returns in July. I just wish we didn’t have to sit through even longer episodes with the rest of the stories to get there.