While there are more out now, it seems fitting for me to write up my thoughts on Stranger Things' final season's first four episodes because they were all released as a batch in November. Netflix is stretching out the release of the season, but perhaps as a point of branding pride, they haven't done the sensible thing of just releasing an episode a week.
Anyway, first, an aside:
I started playing D&D a little before Stranger Things came out. The show makes Dungeons & Dragons a constant metaphor for the supernatural horrors that torment Hawkins, first naming the petal-headed monsters Demogorgons after the iconic demon lord from the game, then calling the Hive Mind that controls them the Mind Flayer, and then naming the former-human monster at the center of it all after D&D's most iconic Lich-god, Vecna.
The fourth episode of the season is called Sorcerer, which is a class in D&D. Unlike a Wizard, who learns magic by studying it and gathers all their spells into a spellbook, a Sorcerer is either born or transformed into one, their magic drawn upon by instinct and force of will.
Now, Stranger Things does have its anachronisms, and this is one of them: the Sorcerer class was introduced in 3rd Edition, which came out in the early 2000s. Perhaps this is just poor dramaturgy on the part of Stranger Things' writers, or a winking acknowledgement that this show, while set in the 1980s, is very much a beast of our modern times.
While most of my experience with D&D is as the game's Dungeon Master, I do, thankfully, also have friends who take on this role, and have been able to play as one of its heroes myself. It's often advisable to have a "back-up" character in mind, should something terrible happen to your main character. I love writing character backstories, so I created several back-ups for the character I've been playing for the past four or so years.
Among them is an elf sorcerer. In D&D, at least the current, popular 5th Edition, you also pick a subclass, which further fleshes out the sort of vibes of your character and gives you some unique abilities. The concept for this character was that he's a Divine Soul sorcerer, namely one whose sorcerous powers were granted by a god. And that god, very unfortunately for him, is Vecna (or, as he's known in the Exandria setting created by Matthew Mercer for the actual play show Critical Role, "The Whispered One.") This character, Spar, was kidnapped by Vecna's minions and held within the dark realm of the Shadowfell, a parallel plane sort of just on the other side of the mundane "prime material plane" reality, which is full of dread, horror, and the undead. Spar was kept in that plane for centuries (elves can live about ten times as long as humans in D&D,) where he was shaped and molded by Vecna's power to serve as some kind of vessel for him. However, after the events of Critical Role's first campaign, when the heroes (players) sealed Vecna away, he was able to be rescued, but would be haunted by the notion that he might be the evil Lich-God's contingency plan to somehow return.
I came up with this backstory years ago. But there's a very clear parallel here that I'll get into within the spoilers:
There's too much to sum up here - Stranger Things is a snowball of characters, gathering new ones and being very, very hesitant to kill anyone off (though I'm glad Max was just in a coma and not dead, because she was so good in season four).
Broadly speaking, though, we come back to Hawkins under the following situation:
The military has cordoned off the town, quarantining it. Eleven is in hiding, as the military sees her as a threat to be eliminated if they can't control her. Our ragtag group of heroes is trying their best to blend in with a compliant and fairly chill populace while secretly working to try to hunt down Vecna and kill him for good.
The first episode sees Hopper going on his 37th "Crawl," again borrowing a D&D term for a day's delve into a deep and scary dungeon, searching some part of the grid that is the Upside-Down version of Hawkins. Using a bunch of cobbled-together radio equipment, they have to follow his progress on the real-world side to maintain contact while he dodges not just the monsters of the Upside-Down, but also the very hostile military presence that has now opened up a laboratory in that shadowy plane, run by Major General Kay, a military scientist portrayed by Linda Hamilton (Sarah Connor herself) who sure seems more interested in weaponizing the horrors there than protecting civilians from it.
Naturally, Crawl 37 goes haywire (this is why it's the one we start the season with). But while the immediate danger of Hopper and Eleven being trapped in the Upside-Down (but still hunting for Vecna/Henry Creel,) there's another odd thing going on:
Holly Wheeler, Mike and Nancy's little sister, whose age is profoundly mysterious (she was a baby in season 1, so at most she should be 5, though she seems more like she's supposed to be 8 or 9 and is played by a 14-year-old actor) has been visited by an imaginary friend she calls Mr. Whatsit, named after Mrs. Whatsit from Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.
What we discover, though, is that Mr. Whatsit is actually Vecna, now appearing as he did before he was warped by the Upside-Down into the gross flesh-monster lich thing that he is now. When Vecna sends a demogorgon to take Holly, it does so after seriously injuring Ted and Karen (though not, at least instantly, killing either). But Holly wakes up in an idyllic world, by the Creel House as it looked in the 1950s, like it was before Henry's powers awakened and he massacred most of his family.
I will say, I actually love bringing in this element: As a kid, I remember these sort of scary stories that I read, like A Wrinkle in Time (which gets the lion's share of references, even describing the dreamscape that Holly finds herself in as Camazotz, the planet under control of the monstrous IT - not to be confused with the creature from the Stephen King novel, though... like, not totally different.) L'Engle's book came out in 1962, but it was still very much the kind of story that elder millennials would read. I was also reminded of The Thief of Always, a kid's book by Clive Barker (you know, the guy who wrote Hellraiser). While this book was written in the early 90s, it still feels of a piece with that "scary stories for children" genre.
While initially I'd guessed that this was some physical location in the Upside-Down, we discover that it's not - more of a mental dreamscape - because in fact, Holly is in the same state that Will was in season 1, bound to some fleshy wall with a gross tube feeding into her mouth.
And, as it turns out, she's not the only one being gathered up by Vecna. Other kids are getting taken, and the... let's call them The Party, to borrow another D&D phrase, sets about trying to find the kids and keep them safe.
A great deal of focus is on Will, who has to deal both with the fact that he's a closeted teen with a desperate crush on his straight best friend (though after spying Robin's secret kiss with her girlfriend, Will does at least find a queer mentor who can help him navigate these feelings), but also that he's still tapped into Vecna's hive mind that controls the Demogorgons. This is a source of torment for him, but soon he begins to realize that his connection allows him to see what Vecna is doing. While Vecna doesn't seem to be targeting the kids for death (at least immediately) the way he did with Chrissy or Max, he is still stalking them in their own heads, and because of that, Will is able to see through the future victims' eyes and identify them.
There are a lot of little mysteries being seeded here, naturally needing to be answered by the end of the season. Among these is the presence of a massive flesh wall around the Upside-Down version of Hawkins, radiating out as a perfect circle centered on the DoE lab where they experimented on Henry and Jane (by which I mean Eleven).
Holly seems to be living in a perfectly safe if boring existence in the Creel house, but she's lured out into a forest Mr. Whatsit has warned her is filled with monsters, only for the "monster" that lured her turning out to be Max.
Still in a coma, and having even briefly died, Max is now trapped in Henry Creel's memories. She nearly made her way back to consciousness, only for Lucas' Kate Bush tape to run out right as she might have. When Henry discovers her exploring there, he gives chase, but a wall actually very much like the flesh-wall in the Upside-Down, though here made of orange-red desert rock, seems to be a barrier to him. Max is able to slip into a cave within the wall and make it her sanctuary, while Henry seems terrified to enter.
Certainly interesting, but something the show wants us to just put a pin in for now.
The bigger problem is that the military goes and takes all the kids who fit the profile of Vecna's kidnapping victims to keep them at their base (the real-world side). But while the Party mounts a hare-brained but actually fairly sound effort to tunnel the targets out of there (save for a leaky pipe that betrays them,) they're caught by the military only for the bigger foe - an army of demogorgons, to tear their way through the barriers of reality and take all the kids, but not before absolutely wrecking a ton of soldiers (the villainous Colonel Sullivan's fate is a little ambiguous - he's last seen burning from an exploded gas tank, but he's still screaming when it cuts away, so I think we should assume he's still alive).
With the soldiers powerless to stop the monsters, and Robin, Lucas, and Mike all right about to die to demogorgons' claws, suddenly, they're stopped, held mid-lunge in the air, lifted up psionically, and then snapped like Vecna did to his teen victims in the previous season.
And we find that Will's powers as a sorcerer have awakened, a dribble of blood coming from his left nostril.
I've got to say: there's a lot of this show that's messy. It's bloated. It has anachronisms that, sure, could be intentional, but often feel accidental and lazy.
But damn if this isn't a satisfying way to end what is effectively a mid-season finale. Will Byers has been through the wringer. And while the nature of his power and how much of it might make him vulnerable to Vecna's further machinations gives me pause, it's a wonderful moment of growth in Will's arc.
Will has felt weak and useless - even called out as weak by Vecna mere minutes before all of this - and he yearns for external validation (as we all do) and feels like he's worthless without it. But Robin does some really effective therapy, explaining to her how she found self-worth after her initial romantic fantasies were dashed by reality, and in the moment his power awakens, he does flash back to first befriending Mike, but I suspect that he's beginning to understand that even if his feelings aren't reciprocated, he can still find strength in his love for his friend, that he has this inner core of strength he can draw upon.
I had heard some whispers about this episode by title, and I suspected something like this was going to happen, but I do think that this climax really shows off the show's strengths, how cinematic and exciting it can be.
I'm not sure why I didn't jump in and start this season as soon as the episodes first came out, maybe because I was afraid of being disappointed. But while the show's as much of a mess as it has always been, it's a strong start to the season, and feels like, despite the big gap in real-life time, like they've maintained the second wind they got in season 4 after the somewhat less impressive seasons 2 and 3. Let's hope that that carries them to a satisfying finale (to be clear, I don't think it's likely they'll totally nail the ending, but I'd be happy with one that just basically works).
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