Stranger Things may be a Netflix original achieving unprecedented feats in online viewership, but getting through its fourth and penultimate season felt like being forced to watch The Hobbit trilogy thrice in one go.
Now I enjoyed that trilogy the first time around and, as a fan of horror, sci-fi and ‘70s-’80s nostalgia, there are a lot of aspects that Stranger Things creators the Duffer brothers usually get right, such as making effective use of its sizeable budget to give you more than enough high- concept world building, action, musical montages and campy dialogue per episode.
However, with the fourth season, particularly Volume 2, the makers have amplified many of the mistakes made in the second and third seasons and on a far bigger scale. Nearly all of the nine episodes are as long as a full-fledged film, with the shortest clocking in at 64 minutes and the finale at 142 minutes. So practically eight movies and one slightly longer episode.
The Duffer brothers try to justify these runtimes by dividing the majority of the season into three simultaneously occurring subplots — one set in the protagonists’ original hometown of Hawkins, one that functions as a road trip in California, and the third in a nondescript looking Soviet gulag with something to hide — before tying them all together in Volume 2.
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Amazing acting and soundtrack sequences
In some ways, these indulgences work, especially for those who have been heavily invested in the series for the past six years. When Stranger Things flies high, it still soars, the character development is second to none compared to most shows starring high school kids and you can’t help but smile throughout the Duffer brothers’ usage of Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill or Metallica’s Master of Puppets sequences pivotal to the plot.
In particular, Sadie Sink’s character Max Mayfield is given significant screentime to showcase her acting chops and she comes to the party magnificently, as we learn more of the anguish she faced as a victim of her stepbrother’s bullying.
The season’s standout character moments come from a protagonist who is now relatively sidelined. Noah Schnapp delivers some subtly raw emotional scenes as a teenaged Will Byers struggling to come to terms with his homosexuality and unable to come out to his loved ones yet. Amid the crazy Cold War connections and mindlessly repetitive violence, it is a refreshingly realistic take on adolescent gender identity in a mainstream series.
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What doesn’t work
On the whole, however, Stranger Things has mostly descended from being an enjoyable summer watch every couple of years to a soulless slog. The violence, especially in the final two episodes, frequently devolves into a superhero-lite CGI mess with the odd bits of blood and gore.
As with the previous two seasons, the horror elements especially don’t work because how can any villain be truly terrifying when almost all the prominent teenagers and adults have something far more powerful than any of Eleven’s (Millie Bobby Brown) superhuman abilities — plot armour.
There isn’t much dramatic tension to be had across these 8-9 films when so many of the predicaments are solved by the latest element of Eleven’s powers that are suddenly conveniently relevant to the story at hand, and when fan favouritism appears to dictate narrative choices.
Ultimately, this is a teen soap opera drama at heart. So half of the efforts put into character development and meaningful arcs are worn down by the Duffer brothers’ incessant need to pair up nearly every significant Hawkins resident, complete with cutesy-cheesy flirting and banter.
Some of it is realistic and relatable to give these folks greater depth, but more often than not, it only adds to the already excessive amount of fat that this series is perennially beset with.
This is what can happen when a distributor simply provides a blank cheque and lets the creators run wild with seemingly no notes or even an editor — an overlong, self-indulgent muddle of mediocrity.