Here's the thing:
Stranger Things came into the public consciousness out of the blue. I had not seen any marketing or build-up to its release in 2016, and so it came as a surprising, fun little relief for me. That was the year that my mother was diagnosed with what would prove to be (and it wasn't a terrible shock after the initial diagnosis) terminal cancer. I was home visiting her, along with my sister (who lives in New York) when we discovered the show.
It's funny to think that it was this word-of-mouth, out-of-the-blue thing, because now, Stranger Things is Netflix's biggest success story.
It doesn't seem that long ago to me, but I guess there are some who might not remember: Netflix didn't have original programming, originally. It was the premiere video streaming platform, really paving the way for that as a service (though before then it was the service that would send you DVDs in the mail). It was a big deal when Netflix launched House of Cards, a David Fincher-produced remake of a series from England (that most Americans had no idea existed) starring then-beloved actor Kevin Spacey.
But Stranger Things was splashy, a mix of nostalgia and fun sci-fi/horror storytelling with a group of remarkably effective child actors.
It's weird to think how the show has evolved since then.
In the final season's back half minus the finale, we learn some things about the cosmos of Stranger Things that are, frankly, kind of huge... but also the sort of thing it's fine to have saved for the end.
Given that this is a recap of nearly half the season (which is my own damn fault - I just wanted to go to the next episode and not pause to do a review of each one following my watch) there's a lot to talk about.
Actually, it's not a recap, per se - recapping can be useful in a review of this sort, but I'm assuming you've watched it if you're reading this, so we're going to kind of jump around to my thoughts about it.
There will be spoilers.
First and foremost, let's talk Max.
A character I liked all right in her debut in season 2 and felt for with the complex feelings about the loss of her brother in season 3 (one of the rare "this character has been killed off in a season after they were introduced" characters. Does Dr. Brenner count, given that I think he was dead at the end of season 1 and was conveniently revived just to bring back Matthew Modine without prior intention?), Max's story in season 4, and Sadie Sink's fantastic performance made me really love the character. And after her escape from Vecna midway through the fourth season, her recapture and apparent death at his hands in the finale was utterly gut-wrenching.
The show has been accused of giving its characters plot armor, and I think that's just objectively true (why did a bunch of kids survive when a ton of soldiers were slaughtered by demogorgons? Sure, I guess you could say that Vecna needs the vessel kids, but surely he's fine with killing Mike). But even though Max could very well have been killed in season 4 and it would have worked for the plot, I'm very glad that she made it.
See, I don't think this is a show that was ever really interested in killing off its main characters, and that's fine - sometimes we like our dark and scary stories to have happy endings. (We'll see how things go when the actual finale drops today, if it hasn't already.) I think it's just surprising given how dark and violent the show gets (top prize of "image I am having trouble scrubbing from my brain" is when Vecna puts his claws through a dude's head and out his face in episode 4).
The show's ever-expanding cast does mean that some characters don't really get their due time - Karen Wheeler has a great moment in which she once again takes on the monsters, saving the day this time, but then kind of has to stand around and be convinced that she should go back to her hospital bed because we just don't have time to give her more screentime.
I suspect that if the Duffer brothers had infinite time and money (and it would really have to be an insane amount of money because this show ain't cheap to make) they could take the time to give everyone their day in the limelight, but as it stands, checking in with everyone is kind of too much to ask. Mike and Lucas have pretty thin personal plots this season, and Murray is still around, somehow.
It does make me long for the days of 22-episode seasons that released annually. Sure, sometimes that gave us filler episodes, but it also had time to breathe with a large ensemble.
I also, and I hate to say this, but once I saw it pointed out that the show adheres to Netflix's not-so-secret directive to tell its writers to have the characters recap and explain the plot so that distracted viewers won't get lost, you really start to notice how much redundant exposition there is. It's the kind of thing that you sort of don't want pointed out to you in case you don't notice it, but it does mean that, if the show expected its audience to actually pay attention (I tall order, I suppose in our era of smartphone-induced universal ADHD) they might have been able to cut the episodes down a bit shorter or even used that saved time to give underserved characters a bit more.
I feel conflicted, because I love the aesthetic of the show, I love the characters, and I love its overall vibes. But I think that the show is not quite as smart as it ought to be. I don't know if that's the fault of the Duffer Brothers or just Netflix. As I mentioned in the previous post, there's an anachronism in having Will identified as a Sorcerer, as that's a class that wasn't added to D&D until 3rd edition (in the 80s, "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" was the contemporary system, which was effectively Edition 1.5). And, like, conceptually it's fine - the show has always used D&D terms as its primary metaphor for the supernatural/paranormal things they're facing (we'll talk The Abyss in a moment). But even if it's, you know, fine to have this anachronism, I think it would have felt just a little more authentic and effective if they hadn't hammered this square peg into a round hole, and had found some other analogy that worked better (though I'll admit that Sorcerer is a great name for a memorable episode).
To compare this to season 1, maybe the first D&D analogy the characters use is connecting the idea of the Upside-Down to the Valley of Shadow. I was pretty new to D&D at the time, and so I was confused why they weren't referring to it as the Shadowfell, which in that game is a plane just on the other side of reality that is a dark and spooky mirror to it (much as the Upside-Down is a dark and spooky version of Hawkins). But then I realized that the Shadowfell was actually only introduced in 4th Edition, which released in 2008, and consolidated a few earlier ideas, like the infamous Domains of Dread and the Plane of Shadow. They showed their work in not just introducing this anachronism there. This is, for sure, a nitpicky nerd thing, but hey, that's what I'm here for.
Anyway, the lore bombshell we learn in this latter half does finally give us a sense of what Vecna's actually trying to accomplish here. It turns out that the Upside-Down is not, in fact, a world in and of itself, but is the interior of a wormhole, which connects our world (or maybe even universe) to a yellow-skied desert planet from which the monstrous creatures of the Upside-Down originate.
We actually got a glimpse of this last season, when we saw Henry/Vecna's banishment by Eleven and the beginnings of his transformation into his monstrous form. My previous theory had been that the Upside-Down was originally this yellow-skied world and that Vecna had reshaped it into the dark and foreboding Upside-Down. But now, Vecna has decided that he likes this barren world better and would like to have it merge with and overwrite Earth, using the kidnapped children to draw the worlds together.
The yellow-skied world is dubbed by the party The Abyss, which in D&D is one of the outer planes (the realms of the gods and the afterlife, both the good, heavenly kinds and the hellish ones). The Abyss, in D&D, is the chaotic evil realm of demons (not to be confused with the lawful evil devils who reside in the Nine Hells) and is generally considered among, if not the absolute worst place in the D&D cosmos (though all the lower planes, the evil-aligned ones, are bad). Appropriately not, this is the plane that the Demogorgon inhabits (which is an individual demon lord in D&D) though not necessarily Mind Flayers or Vecna.
And, when Max and Holly help one another escape (with a big, not quite explained reveal,) Max returns to her body (turns out it wasn't technically a coma, she was just still stuck in the Vecna-induced trance he had used to kill her before she was resuscitated) as does Holly, but while Max comes to right after Karen Wheeler saves them all from the demo-dogs, Holly unfortunately discovers that she's far, far from home - off in the Abyss. Her escape is short-lived, as even though she pries open a rift into the Upside-Down, Vecna awakens and pulls her back.
Oh, and also, all the red stringy stuff in the rifts and even probably the red lightning in the Upside-Down is actually the effect of some exotic matter created at the Hawkins lab, which stabilizes the wormhole.
(Also, to note a shot-down theory, no, the rock wall near the dream-Creel House is not the same as the flesh wall around the Upside-Down. The former is part of a traumatic memory of Henry's and the latter is the wall of the wormhole opening up into some kind of total void that has now claimed Steve's BMW.)
The last note, and one that feels likely to be pretty pivotal, is that the memory Vecna/Henry fears to revisit is one in which, as a boy scout, he finds an injured man with a briefcase somewhere in the desert. (Why he was there, who knows?) But the man is paranoid and thinks that this boy has come to take the case from him, working for "them." He even shoots Henry in the hand before the boy, in self-defense, beats the man to death with a rock. But when he opens the case, the dark smoke/spores that infected Will and Holly pour out of it.
This must be the origin for Henry's powers - and now that we know that Eleven's powers were granted through an infusion of his blood, also hers. Is it possible that Henry isn't actually as guilty as he appears? Has this always been an alien invasion on the part of the Mind Flayer, with Henry/Vecna merely as its dominated minion?
I mean, look, I don't need to see Henry turn out to have been an innocent victim all along, but there's at least space for this interpretation.
Anyway, I'm caught up now, so I'll be able to watch the finale hopefully before I get spoiled.
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