Review: ‘Stranger Things’ Season 4 Part 2 Overloaded, But Wonderful

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LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – SPOILER ALERT: Don’t read if you haven’t watched « Stranger Things 4 » episodes 8 and 9, currently streaming on Netflix.

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Writing about the first seven episodes of the current fourth season of « Stranger Things, » I noted that its ambition was both laudable and detrimental, throwing a throwback to a more exciting era of Netflix while loading each episode with more that he couldn’t bear.

The last two episodes of the fourth season, launched on July 1, prove it doubly. The singing moments — including, again, in the cadences of Kate Bush, this season’s musical patron witch — are truly on a different level than anything the streamer has done in recent times. And they’re set against the backdrop of episodes that seem designed to make the Duffer Brothers showrunning aspirations crystal clear: the finale is two and a half hours long, a length that the viewer really feels. It’s probably not an episode that many franchise fans on this side of standom will watch in one go, diluting the season’s cumulative power and impact in the name of creating a monument to match. what Netflix will allow.

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It’s frustrating because the season is accomplished in so many ways: its characters’ stories are well-drawn, intersect in rewarding ways, and the whole enterprise has a nicely rounded classic build, largely ending where it does. began, with a once-separate circle of characters reuniting at Hawkins and a supernatural threat reasserting itself just before the final credits. There are a few crucial changes that indicate why the whole trip was worth it. Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) has broken with the « Dad » (Matthew Modine) who shaped her life for good, letting his influence on her die like himself. (That wraps up a storyline and performance that never quite transcended the literal meaning.) Perhaps it was Eleven’s newfound freedom that helped Mike (Finn Wolfhard) confess his love to her. as she battled season’s villain Vecna ​​(Jamie Campbell Bower). Will (Noah Schnapp) has been making moves to talk about whatever’s on his mind with his brother Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), and the hapless Max (Sadie Sink), the season’s central character, is in a coma watched over by Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), after proving his courage and goodness in a battle against darkness.

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Much of what brought us here has worked well: the Duffers remain gifted stylists. Their tendency to reformulate, however, manifests itself broadly and narrowly. The reveal of Will’s painting – a much-speculated element of the start of the season – was beautifully done: it depicts the gang working together to slay a dragon, even as some closeness is obviously fading away. Will, whose growing isolation from his still-dating straight friends has reminded many gay viewers of their own teenage lives, shows the painting to Mike amid Mike’s nervous venting at the idea of trying to maintain a relationship with someone as special as Eleven. We see in Schnapp’s performance that Will is outside of this couple in more ways than one. He just can’t understand. After Will shares his art – a touching, youthful way of relating to his friend as they approach their late teens – he suddenly looks out the window: we see him look away from his friend as he says, with heavy ellipses: « When you’re different…sometimes…you feel like you’ve made a mistake. It’s about Eleven, but also about himself, a point that is well brought out by Schnapp’s work but underlined, loudly, as Mike ends the conversation and Will again looks out the window crying.(To the show’s credit, a later conversation between brothers Will and Jonathan renders an emotional catharsis, with Will being seen for who he really is, without having to rely so much on the telegraphy of how we’re supposed to feel.)

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Elsewhere in the story, some wells have been returned over and over again. If – as I would say – « Stranger Things » is the most visually ambitious and zeitgeist-inspired series since the equally maximalist « Game of Thrones » left the air, then it shares the Daenerys’ problem of this show: Little has weight when 95% of situations can be resolved by an all-powerful character involving her dragons, or, in Eleven’s case, her powers. So the scenes of an already long show feel like technical exercises, opportunities to show what visual ingenuity and streaming money can do. And the end of the season, with Hawkins suddenly converted to the dystopian dream hell of Vecna, seems like a statement that these characters are about to have the same fight, all over again.

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It’s to the show’s credit that its simultaneous campaign of shock and awe and smoother character beats don’t cancel each other out. The ‘Stranger Things’ cast almost feel well served – with the exception of Winona Ryder, whose time in Russia showed her performing spirit, but not the motherly ferocity that made Joyce Byers, at the start of the series, such a finely drawn portrait of despair. (But then her kids don’t need her the same way: maybe it’s growing up!) Schnapp occupies, well, an intriguing middle ground between her character remaining in her cheerful No-Girls-Allowed camaraderie and her taking a major step like coming out of the closet; Sink stood out as a major young performer throughout the season, up to and including her season-ending confession about her thoughts of self-harm.

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These are big, heavy themes – and the show seemed to make ever more clear the connection between the angsty, romantic darkness of being a teenager and the chaos that rained down on our characters. Just as they felt inner turmoil and disaffection, the world literally became unlivable. Fair enough! Often, however, this seemed to extend to the form of the show as well as its content: as a teenage columnist unsure of the most important part of the story, « Stranger Things » can’t help but point out , accentuate, doubling outline and return circle. To cite just one example: the Eleven-« Dad » relationship was very obviously upset from the start. The time taken to reaffirm the ways in which he negatively altered his life feels less like an elaboration, or even an embroidery on the margins, than an attempt to make a bugle-readable for any viewer possible.

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The impetus is understandable if one reads « Stranger Things » as an attempt at TV’s latest consensus hit (a status it seems to hold, given the worldwide boom in popularity of the song « Running Up That Hill. » in the first batch of episodes). He can’t connect as widely, perhaps, if he whispers his points rather than shouting them. But I would say, for everything Netflix wrote the Duffers a blank check, and for everything they, in turn, tested their audience in some way, there’s a trust issue at play .

The Duffers expected audiences to stay hooked for a season in which the main characters – and thus the key dynamic of “Stranger Things” – were fractured; they set up a slow reveal of Vecna’s true identity that paid off well and ended the season with the most dynamic character clinging to life. They took us quite a distance. And yet there’s an insecurity at the root of the more recursive decisions made by ‘Stranger Things’: for all the show to work, there seems to be a reluctance to accept that allowing character beats to have a proper weight and gravity means leaving something out. A two-and-a-half-hour TV episode makes an aggressive request from fans, a request they will meet (perhaps after a few nights); that length and bulky self-esteem, however, doesn’t leave much room for fans to process what they’ve been shown on their own terms. The characters’ reunion at the episode’s long-delayed ending forms a tight circle: any viewer seeking to interpret a show that’s increasingly insistent on making itself perfectly clear will be left out.