Stranger Things season 4 finale Climbing the hill for more than two hours is not much fun (2023)

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This publication contains full spoilerfor the last two episodes ofstrange thingsThe fourth season is streaming now on Netflix.

In the middle of the super-giantstrange thingsIn the season four finale, "The Piggyback," Nancy (Natalia Dyer), Steve (Joe Keery) and Robin (Maya Hawke) climb the stairs of a haunted house in the Upside Down as part of an intricate plan to maintain the dimension. from hell. out of the Advance his own world. They have avoided attention until now, but suddenly Robin awakens the demonic tentacles surrounding them and within moments the three teenagers are pinned to the walls, choking them to death. The scene switches to a different set of characters, leaving the viewer nervous about how (or if, but not really) Nancy and the others will escape what seems like certain doom.

A few scenes later, the season's main villain Vecna/One/Henry/Mother of Dragons/Breaker of Chains/Cleaner of Carpets (played under at least some of those names by Jamie Campbell Bower) taunts Eleven (Millie Bobbie Brown). ) with a brief view of the trio fighting against its tentacles. But that's basically all we see of them for almost half an hour as Eleven turns the tide on Vecna, resulting in Nancy, Steve, and Robin being released.

It is said that the characters have not been strangled for half an hour. The ending tries to show a lot of simultaneous action from around the world: the first cut of Nancy's group is Jim Hopper (David Harbour) fighting Demogorgons in a Soviet gulag while Eleven's body rests in a freezer of pizza dough in Nevada, while mentally wrestling with Vecna ​​in a portion of the Upside Down adjacent to Hawkins, Indiana (*).

(*) Say this forstrange things: You know how silly a lot of this sounds when simply described. When Eleven mentions the pizza dough freezer to Max (Sadie Sink), Max is completely shocked and rightly so.

the problem is thatfeellike half an hour, if not more, that the show has forgotten about Nancy, Steve, and Robin when they are on the verge of imminent death. If you're interested in this particular subset of characters, it's annoying that they have to spin in the wind for so long. But even if you invest a lot more in Eleven or Hopper and Joyce (Winona Ryder) or what happens to Dustin (Gate Matarazzo) and his new friend Eddie (Joseph Quinn), the suspense still loosens up quite a bit, which should be an explosion -bang-bang ending.

Of course, it's hard to do a bang-bang-bang ending that lasts two hours, 17 minutes, and 25 seconds before the credits roll. That's a bit shorter than the two-and-a-half hour version Netflix promised (threatened?) a few weeks ago, but it's still comfortably longer than any previous episode of American television. And it's a comfortable amount longer thanET,Los Goonies,cristina, and many of Spielberg's and Stephen King's other films of the early to mid-'80sstrange thingsThe creators of the Duffer Brothers are inspired. (stay by me, which contains a lot of non-supernatural DNA in this show, is nearly an hour shorter than The Piggyback).

Why, you might ask, does that matter? when you lovestrange thingsShouldn't you be enjoying more time with Steve, Dustin, Will (Noah Schnapp) and even stoner pizza delivery man Argyle (Eduardo Franco)? (OK, maybe not Argyle.) The problem is thatstrange thingsit is not an atmosphere show nor is it a gathering show. It's primarily a supernatural thriller about a group of kids who somehow find themselves the last line of defense between humanity and the demonic Armageddon. This style of storytelling relies on a dynamic that simply isn't tenable on such a long episode of television: two long episodes, as this minisemi-season also includes an 85-minute episode ("Dad") leading up to "The Piggyback." - and that keeps stumbling things that work fine.

And there is, to be fair, aa lotthat works well at these two excessive rates. So many individual moments are a mix of funny, exciting, scary, and moving that to say otherwise would be untrue. Eddie distracts a horde of Vecna's army of demon bat bodyguards by shredding the electric guitar solo of Metallica's "Master of Puppets" into a chair-jumping sequence. Eleven's reunion with Mike (Finn Wolfhard) in the desert miraculously brings Mike back to life as a character after most of the season seemed to have completely lost the thread of the show's supposed main hero. Even supposed comic relief Argyle finally got funny when he ran into his spirit double at another Surfer Boy Pizza location.

But these episodes, like the fourthseason in general, kept squirming to excess, not just about the good stuff, but about the things that didn't work out and were never written off, like Joyce, Hopper, and Murray (Brett Gelman) repeatedly failing to get out of Russia. The whole experience felt like eating every menu item at The Cheesecake Factory over the course of a day - lots of deliciousness, some things you never wanted, and the whole experience leaves you full.

In hindsight, the Duffers would have done well to limit most of the Russian adventure to a single episode, and probably the same for Eleven, who, with the help of the inexplicably alive Dr. Burner, investigated. His roles in the climax could still have been saved for last, but it would have solved many of the pacing issues that had plagued the biggest season, and it would also have forced the Duffers to trim a lot of fat from both subplots. (Did someone, somewhere need a redemption arc for the duplicitous Russian peanut butter smuggling pilot?) Perhaps the Duffers are still feeling too scarred by audience rejection in their latest attempt at a relatively standalone episode, when Eleven ran off to the movies in town, Um hanging out with other powerpuff kids in season two. But this episode wasn't hated for being a standalone; He was hated because he was mean, and Eleven's new friends were annoying in a way that most of the show's cast additions over the years haven't been.

But, to paraphrase this season's inevitable catchy use of Kate Bush's incredible "Running Up That Hill," if only he could make a deal with God and have the Duffers swap their subplots from episode to episode,strange thingshe'd still be running up the giant hill the brothers built seemingly refusing to let go of a single story or character beat. It's lonely. A lot. The Duffers try to serve each character properly, and most of those arcs and scenes, like Eleven refusing to forgive Brenner in her final moments, or Nancy delighted by Steve's confession about the reformed ex-boyfriend who wishes he was so good. person when they were together - isolated from each other. The show just can't include them all without feeling like a grind when it's supposed to be a race.

Later in this dramatic fight against Vecna, Nancy's group reached the attic where Vecna's body is hidden while her mind tries to assassinate Max and fight Eleven. Here's the cut between Attic (where Robin and Steve set Vecna's body on fire), Ghostscape (where Eleven watches as Vecna ​​begins to disappear), and Gulag (where Hopper goes full barbarian, only to do it with a sword to fight a Demogorgon). fast, wild and much more exciting than previous attempts to jump from one group to another. (It also helps that "Running Up That Hill" is blaring on the soundtrack right now, rather than just blasting out of Max's headphones on a regular basis, and Kate Bush makes things better.) That David Harbor looks spectacular when he's awake a monster rushes at him, a sharp metal weapon in his hand doesn't retroactively justify the seemingly endless detours to Russia, but the sequence does suggest a more satisfying version of season four that has worked harder. hard to move faster from one bar to another.

Despite the Duffers' promises/warnings that the ending was going to be particularly brutal, even fromstrange thingsstandards, mostly it is not. Eddie is the season's sacrificial lamb and is eager to buy more time for Nancy's group to finish off Vecna ​​(though he ends up sneaking off), but no recurring characters are killed off. Clinically dead for a minute, Max completes Vecna's plan to open a giant gate between the Upside Down and Hawkins, but a more powerful elf soon brings his body back to life. Max is in a deep coma when Eleven, Mike and the others physically arrive at Hawkins, and his mind seems blank when Eleven uses her powers to visit her. but anyone who thinks Max won't make a triumphant return in the fifth and final season might want to consider buying some sort of local jumper.

Max's Eleven mind quest is part of a half-hour epilogue that somehow moves much faster than some of the parts where the characters fight demons or members of the US military. It's the lull between the storms, and as various characters come to a conclusion in their seasonal travels, such as Robin (who finally realizes that the girl he likes may be gay and also in love with her), Dustin (who comes to tell uncle of Eddie that Eddie died a hero, and not the monster the town thinks he is), and Hopper (who is able to reunite with his adoptive daughter Eleven after she fears he might end up dead at the end of season three) - the the breather feels deserved. Or maybe it's just that all of Hawkins' characters are finally together, and that this arrangement serves the show better than it has in recent years, where the ever-expanding cast has scattered to the five winds to give everyone something to do.

That the epilogue ends with The Upside Down finally breaking into the real world suggests that no one is going on road trips, at least in the final season. But let's hope that next time any new constraints come from both chronology and geography, for despite its many highlights,strange thingsthis year proved how easy less can be.

Some other thoughts on the season finale:

* The show has been so forthright and open with its discussion of Robin's sexuality that it's strange how hard the last two episodes work to show Will being head over heels for the clueless Mike without either him or Will's worried older brother Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), they really have to. say he is gay. There's a scene where Jonathan almost begs Will to talk about how much it hurts to see Mike and Eleven together, and the show's effort not to say it out loud is palpable, even though it's so implied almost no one who does. you're watching you might miss it. . Even if you try to read it in-universe, when Will (who is a few years younger than Robin and also a kid in an era where the culture was microscopically more accepting of gay women than gay men) is too afraid to admit it, Heaton plays the scene as if Jonathan obviously wants to say more than the script gives him.

* It's a sad fact in modern America that there's almost never a moment where a show or movie can say "Yay, Guns!" sequence without it being scheduled for a mass shooting. But the first episodes of season four debuted just three days after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which so deepened our ongoing national crisis that even several Republican senators voted in favor of a gun control bill. And "Dad" sends Nancy and all of the Hawkins kids to a seedy gun and ammunition store called The War Zone to gather the arsenal they'll need to fight Vecna. Although Nancy is the only one who buys a firearm (the rest of her use axes, knives, Molotov cocktails, etc.), the timing and context for this kind of thing feels worse than usual.

*Since the season one finale, the show has had its ups and downs in the comfort with which Eleven maneuvers in normal society after spending her childhood in a government lab. But when he questions Dr. Brenner in the desert, and especially when he returns to Hawkins, his speech patterns are more relaxed and confident than ever on the show.

* Finally, has anyone bothered to call poor Dr. Owens (Paul Reiser) out of the bunker in Nevada, or did the evil general (who presumably still wants to kill Eleven) leave him tied to a pipe down there?