I just finished the finale of the fourth and penultimate season of Stranger Things. This season has been quite good - my favorite since the first one. I was talking with my sister about the show the other day and thinking about how the first season very much seems set up with the expectation that it would be the only one - there are a couple of plot hooks to carry things on, but mostly things are wrapped up relatively tidily.
Season four's ending is the sort of thing that clearly anticipates the finale of the series, and the elements at play here are big - big reveals, big moments, and big character arcs.
Let's get into spoiler territory:
First, I want to talk about Max.
Max plays a fairly central role early in the season, as she's one of what turns out to crucially be four teens targeted by Vecna with the intention of opening his portal across Hawkins. The early episodes see our heroes rallying to save her before she can be so horrifically killed the way that the other teens have been.
Max was introduced in the second season, but really came into her own in season 3. It's this season, though, in which they gave Sadie Sink some real meat to bite into, and she did a phenomenal job. Episode Four, Dear Billy, is an absolute showcase, and her escape to the tune of Running Up That Hill from Vecna's clutches is probably the best sequence of the season.
But one of the major motifs of the finale this season is victory being snatched away. Max is clinically dead long enough to allow Vecna's plan to succeed, and even though Eleven is able to kickstart her heart and reduce her fate from death to coma, it's not clear that she's really in there anymore.
Stranger Things is technically more sci-fi than fantasy, so talk of "souls" is a bit off-genre, but it would be utterly heartbreaking for Max to truly be gone - especially after how glorious it was to see her survive in that early episode.
My hope is that, like Hopper, rumors of her demise are greatly exaggerated.
Now let's talk about Eddie:
Logically, it made sense for Eddie's fate to be what it is. But there's a powerful sense of injustice that Eddie dies only to be remembered as some kind of satanic serial killer. I didn't really expect them to kill him off, and even wonder if his death was strictly necessary (even when we set aside that Vecna was ultimately able to get his plan off, did he have to be out there to keep the bats from the house where Nancy, Steve, and Robin were? I guess we should assume that to be the case - this might have been my viewer comprehension rather than a problem with how it was shot.
Next, let's talk about Vecna and the Upside-Down.
It would seem that Vecna has actually been the big bad all along - Henry Creel, later "One," was sent into the alien landscape by Eleven after the massacre at the lab. We see that things like the Demogorgon creatures did exist there already, but it's Vecna who seems to form the being we know as the Mind Flayer out of the shadowy particles there.
The Upside-Down prior to his intervention is a very different place - truly alien, a primordial world with giant floating rocks and strange creatures (that seem indifferent to him, actually) and a notably yellow sky, rather than the midnight black punctuated with crimson lightning that we know the Upside Down to have.
And I have mixed feelings about this revelation: on one hand, the malevolence of the Mind Flayer makes somewhat more sense given that there's a human (or formerly human) mind behind it, but I guess I also kind of liked the idea of this being truly some cosmic horror, alien entity. There's a scene in season three when the Mind Flayer is reaching out to Billy and speaking as this kind of chorus of projected people coming out of the darkness that felt truly weird and alien, and knowing that there's actually just one guy that is speaking through that to him somewhat lessens the effect.
Essentially, I could be wrong, but this feels like something the Duffer Brothers had not decided was the case - specifically that the main villain was ultimately a human - before this season. It shifts the story somewhat.
The way the season ends, things are looking truly grim - Vecna is not dead, and Hawkins has become something of an overlap for the Upside-Down to invade our world. Max is in a coma, Eddie is dead (and vilified as a satanic murderer) and let's not forget that Eleven is still hiding out from a military faction dedicated to hunting her down and killing her and everyone who stands in their way.
So yeah, something of a bleak note to end on. Especially when victory seemed in hand - we got to see Hopper behead a Demogorgon with a sword, saw Nancy fill Vecna with lead while he was on fire, but no dice, as it were.
I'm eager for the next season, though also a bit sad to see the show coming to an end.
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