Stranger Things 4 is NOT the Redemption You Think it is

hear ye hear ye stranger things season 4 is not the redemption you think it is yes i'm talking to you the aggregate of maybe six twitter accounts and four youtube channels i follow that have been stranger things posting attributed to a potential 1.4 million individuals who may watch this video you're [ __ ] wrong about stranger things jesus christ it's been a while since the last season of stranger things and the world has changed immensely it's time we sit down and ask ourselves how does stranger things contend with post-covet america all right [ __ ] this so i had some trouble coming up with a framing device for this one i'm pretty sure i've only ever done one sequel video and it was on such a bat-shit season of television it kind of just flowed through me with little resistance i'm now daunted by the herculean task of following up my biggest video to date on a series i've prided myself in giving measured non-reactionary takes on which makes it a little hard to sensationalize i hit a good level of ambiguity branding the last one and i think the only place to go from there is to swing into more provocative territory but you're not here to listen to me reflect on my own legacy you're here to watch me talk about a show that itself has fallen into an obsession with its own legacy stranger things boom framing device in the can we got it let's go home i definitely have noticed a narrative growing around this season that suggests it's fixed its main problems and has sort of hearkened back to its original magic and i gotta say i did not share that sentiment when i started watching the new season i more or less felt the same as i did about the two prior seasons that the shows become an abstraction of itself that relies on self-mythologizing and ever-expanding scope and increasingly convoluted upside-down plot mechanics to chug its way to a finish that hasn't been entirely figured out yet in many of those respects season 4 is actually the apex of later stage stranger things as it's i'm gonna put on my professional movie reviewer glasses for this one bloated enough to convince you that it's consumed 600 pounds of salt season three was already pushing it with the kids getting older and now it's beyond parody granted they couldn't have predicted the coveted curveball but they were already sort of in desperate need to wrap things up before it got out of hand and between the sheer mass of this season and the amount of stranger things content on the horizon stranger things oh sorry [Music] stranger things is not just the guy who hangs out long after a party is over it's the guy who hangs out after and says oh by the way i'm going to be here all day tomorrow too and i also have some more friends coming over but also like seasons two and three i did have fun with it for reasons alien to the first one and if i'm being honest with myself sometimes that bloatedness is exactly what scratched the itch i'll admit it was nice to come home from work throw this show on think i'm almost done with an episode and then realize i still have another 45 minutes left in it but that also concerns me because i realized as i was doing this that i was drinking the content kool-aid and once again buying into the gorging binge model that stranger things specifically has become so emblematic of [Music] the binge model is a tricky topic an easy target and yet an all-consuming monster that i think is rightfully disparaged at any given opportunity it's the reason the episode as a unit doesn't really exist in most tv shows anymore leaving the season as the new smallest unit which i've talked about in previous videos but even worse is the recent streaming influx of what i like to call the miniseries unless now this is arguably not stranger things fault i don't remember if the first season was ever explicitly called a miniseries or if that's just how it was embraced because of how self-contained it was but it of course had some loose ends that invited a second season i think there's a connection to be drawn between the success of this practice back then and how many mini-series are coming out of the woodwork now namely on disney plus and intentionally tying up their loose ends half-hazardly so that if the audience wants it the groundwork is laid for future seasons but if not it has the plausible deniability to remain a mini-series but if there's no episodic self-containment and there's not even a real seasonal self-containment gambling on the promise of concluding things only on a series-wide level and then there's only one season you wind up with nothing six half-hour episodes of nothing this format of storytelling is the end of the line in my book this is where tv goes to die and i think it's at least somewhat the consequence of stranger things but a big capital b butt i think the binge model can be done right i think a show if intended to be gorged by design is handled with proper care it can be an acceptable buffet despite stooping to the most shamelessly content-baiting strategies though these mini-series unlesses are still so ashamed of the binge model or at least have learned to avoid the optics of it that they can't even commit to that they end up releasing weekly episodes to give the illusion of golden era network tv but not actually writing for the episode and running out of steam before a real status quo can be established on account of prestige scarcity so i will say of stranger things that despite these consequences it in and of itself understands how to lean into the binge model with confidence and sincerity to provide something that is best experienced to be a marathon every time and even being dumped all at once the volume of this season specifically because of that bloating leaves more in terms of nourishment all on network tv than those other shows granted this is the first season to be released in installments probably because it is such a long season and each volume is still satiating but we're also just in a weird period of streaming shows trying to figure out the best release schedules amazon's been doing some weird week to week stuff and don't even get me started on the three volume final season trend i've digressed enough it's time to reel it in [Music] i think there are a few different things going on that have contributed to the sense that stranger things is back in business like it used to be some of them surface level and some of them more fundamental and structural for one there's a sense of obligation the show has to remind you of all its most iconic bits catchphrases and images and what have you so we get all these callbacks friends don't lie these mouth breathers bitching and on one hand i get that they're trying to keep this stuff embedded into the language of the show but a lot of it also feels like beating a dead horse or again like trying to keep a party up long after it's ended and i think the clear aging that's occurred between seasons is a little emblematic of this you can dress the kids up like you used to you can make them say the same things but you can't hide the fact that they've gotten old but it's not just language or images it's moments too in my last video i talked about how i was glad season 3 didn't try to recapture the magic of joyce messing with the lights in season 1 like season 2 did with will's drawings but i was wrong the archetype is joyce on some kind of wild goose chase and season 3 totally does that with the magnets this season they had a bit with a russian doll but this one is a lot quicker to the point where it almost just feels like a nod to the obligation that they can get out of the way real quick before moving on to greener pastures unfortunately there aren't really greener pastures to move on to joyce doesn't have a whole lot to do after this but i'll get into that later if anything this season actually undoes what i found egregious about the season 2 drawing stuff retroactively embedding that too into the language of the show rather than a one-off attempt at that season 1 mystery and wonder now it's seemingly just a function of the upside down this scene is actually pretty funny because as max was drawing what she saw i was thinking like man good thing will was good at drawing but what if max just sucks at it and then they actually try to address that and dustin jokes about it but not only are her drawings like pretty competent but they're also so geometrically proportional that they form a perfect diagram of the house everything revolves around this season from which i can only surmise that drawing is a superpower you get from being in the upside down at the same time though i can't shake the feeling in moments like this that iconography is a currency not just in the corporate sense that easily distributable lines and images are good for marketing but also in the sense that they keep whatever work they're representing in the audience's consciousness to force them to keep mentally engaging with the work and that's something stranger things has been chasing since season 1 which was an oil geyser of iconography surely beyond what netflix or the duffer brothers could have predicted there's been a sense in the later seasons then that they've been digging around for oil and only finding small pools of it season two had a couple ideas that stuck season three had the maul and scoops ahoy which helped to crew some currency but i think the whole kate bush running up that hill thing is the closest the show has come to striking the same liquid gold as season one i do think like the drawing stuff there's something a little insecure about jumping through hoops to narratively justify something whose real primary purpose is just being cool and making the show look cool and i think the whole concept of oh vechna can't kill you if you're listening to your favorite song is a little guilty of this there is an art to seamlessly burying your crude desires under a narrative hood but i think i prefer stuff that's a little more shameless about just wanting a vibe scene without the need to explain itself you could argue that because they don't explain why music snaps you out of the vecna trance it does fall under that category but i think what actually redeems it is just how hard they commit to running up that hill bringing it back in nearly every episode and eventually incorporating it into the orchestration of the score the other thing it has going for it is that it's a new idea rather than a repurposing of something that's worked in the past helping to carve out season four's individual identity it gives the season a freshness that the other two seasons were lacking which season 1 has just by virtue of being a season 1 of anything and this ironically makes season 4 feel most like season 1 in the moments where it's not trying to be a totally opposite thing is happening genre wise though after season three's romp through 80s muscle-action pastiche there was certainly something refreshing about how season 4 returns to its horror roots which may actually be the primary reason the season as a whole is touted as a return to form for one it seems to be visually referencing the evil dead for probably the first time considering how often we've seen the poster there are genre nods to carry a nightmare on elm street but aside from references the tone is more gothic with elements like the de facto haunted house and it basically just feels like a more classic horror movie and presentation which was nice coming after the body snatchers stuff in season 3 which wasn't my favorite and i'm sure the decision to set that over the summer was an attempt to color in a different sphere of horror but it lacks the moodiness that season 4 brings back to pretty good success that's not to say a new territory isn't found in this return though at the very least the show seems to be pushing its limits in terms of gore i was surprised just how graphic the show got for something that's casting such a wide demographic net and still lands under a tv 14 rating you see people getting ripped in half organs spilling out rivers of blood i really didn't think they had it in them but i do think the reason they get away with this is because despite how graphic it is despite how much explicit blood and guts we're actually seeing it somehow still feels pg from the filmmaking like conceptually it's pushing the limits on what it can show but i never really felt it was going too far i think with the amount of blood we're shown that we're intellectually told this from barb for instance the fact that what we're seeing is just a dismembered mass of red liquid helps detach it a little bit from what it actually is and in general i think there's a big cgi barrier with most of this stuff the biggest offenders being the vechna kills themselves again intellectually it's like damn their joints are snapping and their eyes are getting gouged and blood is seeping down their face but it looks so rubbery and uncanny every time it doesn't live up to the terror of the premise on a sensory level and typically you want the opposite as a filmmaker it almost feels like a pastiche of violence itself but stranger things is by design a ride for the whole family so i do have to commend them for even going to some of these places at some point i have to contend with the fact that [Music] so i wanted to do a brief section on a specific phenomenon that keeps happening with this show that i can only describe as stuff i wanted to happen or at least thought would be a cool or logical or even necessary progression that the show actually did and now i'm mad about it i think the clearest example of this would be how will's character has been handled he's not really in the bulk of season one aside from some flashbacks but the show is still able to give him a presence and make him feel like a character who's part of the core group specifically in his absence somewhere between the comedian and laura palmer you know two very similar characters this was of course unsustainable moving forward and i was looking forward to seeing how the dynamics would change once will was reintegrated into the group and now that he has been he just doesn't really do much which is underwhelming to say the least as i talked about in the last video one of the most satisfying aspects of the first season is everyone figuring out the pieces of the puzzle in various parts of town and being unable to communicate it to each other until they all come together in the end but i always knew that if the show were to keep that up it would get a little repetitive and contrived now as a group they're kind of an omni consciousness a high of mind if you will adding each new piece of info immediately into the bucket and watering down some of the tension that comes with unfolding the mystery on the other end of the spectrum another example is the cross country distance this season which is perhaps the element most emblematic of the season's bloat when the buyers were moving at the end of season 3 i thought it was a bit of an eye roller and we were going to pick back up in season four and plot would mandate that they all go back to hawkins and like episode two that didn't end up happening which you know take that taylor from three years ago but now that they've done it it's awful it's one of the biggest problems with this season in general and i think the decision to handle things this way actually is a response to the cerebral pickle they found themselves in cerebro made the characters too powerful and once that power's out of the box you can't put it back in i think pretty much the only way to configure a workaround for its range was to put the characters on opposite sides of the country the problem here is that nobody outside of hawkins is really doing anything essential joyce and murray are rescuing hopper which actually has nothing to do with anything going on it's a c plot of pure coincidence and their absence isn't even really felt and mike and the gang are on a wild goose chase after 11. in hawkins there's some if only 11 were here sentiment but as far as they all know 11 still doesn't have her powers anymore and then 11 and mike in them only really know vaguely what's going on in hawkins for most of the season the main urgency there coming from 11 being seemingly kidnapped it's all just so loose none of it really plays off of each other for tension and none of the separate threads really help each other out either if 11 had had these revelations about vecna and one and didn't know who henry was and the people in hawkins were investigating henry but didn't know the vecna connection that could have lived up to the sense of puzzle pieces coming together like season one but for some reason vecna decides to show nancy of all people the whole backstory barring the question of why nancy it makes the whole west coast group irrelevant their big contribution is just sending 11 over to use her powers for a bit and tying this back to the point about cerebro and distance they make a big point to be like we can't make it in person but we can still help them from here i know i had that bit intro at the start of this video but i can't help but feel like this is a comment on covid and remote work and interconnectedness and i know what you're thinking why would stranger things possibly feel an obligation to address covet i mean it's been happening all over the country it's like it's like an epidemic i know the beauty of period pieces is the cultural parallels but is remote work really the tenant of the present day we're interested in exploring here art is a means of self-expression whether conscious or not and i guess the main source of conflict in the duffer brothers lives for the past few years has been trying to make this season despite all the real world obstacles so maybe that just unwittingly came through in their work maybe it's that stranger things wants to be the be-all-end-all manifesto on friendship and in these tumultuous times where the distance between us is greater than ever stranger things has figured out a way to jerry-rig its own period-appropriate guide to long-distance friendship i don't know i don't [ __ ] know exhibit d in this section arguably not a real exhibit is how i was getting frustrated with all the upside-down stuff coincidentally happening to the same group of people and then when i saw that upside down stuff was happening to this new character chrissy who was involved with these new characters jason and eddie i was like oh great now i have to watch the show catch these new characters up to speed and i could already feel how much that would drag but then it kind of undoes this mainly by just killing chrissy off but by having max witness all this it kind of transfers that stuff back to the core group i will say it's real convenient that max is eddie's neighbor and watch this go down after already watching chrissy all day and then that out of his four total victims vechna chooses her too i don't want to delve into plot hole territory here but considering vecna can look into his victims minds and see their pasts and whatnot would it not behoove him to choose someone who isn't familiar with the upside down and hasn't thwarted upside down threats on numerous occasions i'm not going to put too much stock into that thought because ultimately it's whatever but come on the duffer brothers i think this exhibit deed does give me a good transition into this season has some of the best new characters and some of the worst new characters chrissy doesn't even really count because she dies right off the bat same with freddie benson whose main purpose is to relay nancy's arc to the audience i do think it's comical just how brutal of a backstory they give him out of nowhere that we're never going to get any more info on yeah let's just throw in a record of vehicular manslaughter nobody else knows about and then kill him off easy money the show took a big swing with argyle that didn't pay off at all i usually like eduardo franco a lot and i think they were kind of just banking on him to be the funny guy here like tj miller and transformers but his shtick is really one note and it is not a good note i guess on top of those classic horror movies i mentioned earlier this season is going for a fast times at ridgemont high homage but the stoner angle is [ __ ] nails on a chalkboard just as out of touch as the punk characters in season two except it sticks around the whole season and pretty much the extent of the antics is argyle just saying my dudes it over and over which gets really grating really fast i kept waiting for them to have an ace up their sleeve and give us a reason why there's more to argyle than we might have thought but his big contribution is just recognizing the pizza place and bribing the employee with weed to use the space for 11. jason is a little more interesting though he does fall under a villain archetype i kind of hate which is someone who doesn't actually know what's going on and sort of obtusely hunts down the main characters and basically just causes problems on accident because they don't understand the supernatural stuff that's going on i feel like that sort of thing lacks an emotional attachment that's sort of necessary for a compelling villain but jason does spearhead the whole witch hunt thing going on in hawkins which is interesting if maybe a little underdeveloped even more interestingly though he demonstrates what happens when you develop an ensemble the way stranger things has jason and eddie are sort of channeling a bit of the steve and jonathan dynamic from season one steve coming after jonathan with a weapon and finding himself amid some upside down battle is redone here almost exactly with jason coming after eddie which makes me think about the fact that as the show goes on it keeps folding characters that are introduced in antagonistic positions back into the main group of good guys and then because what they have on their hands is a bigger group of good guys they need to add new bad guys to fill the old archetype positions billy was already a replacement steve and now jason is a replacement replacement steve but each facsimile of a facsimile gets more and more evil billy is pretty much entirely an antagonistic force until he redeems himself in his death and then jason is just pure evil to the point where it's honestly kind of funny that they don't even bother trying to redeem him they just say [ __ ] it and rip him in half just as casually and accidentally as he broke the walkman i do think the sort of proxy war the gang finds themselves in having to absolve eddie's name in a conflict they're a little outside of is a fresh idea that brings a lot of momentum to the season and it was a good move to have jason's final showdown be with lucas even though he's going after eddie the whole time since that's the relationship we've seen grow and develop in this proxy war i also think part of what's refreshing about all this is that it's a conflict that relies on tensions from school which is nice after a season of summer break where those dynamics were sort of out the window to an extent the fact that this is two seasons in a row now checking in during a break indicates that the momentum of the show doesn't really allow for the same school life balance the first two seasons had but spring break is a smart choice that lets them have the best of both worlds for a bit and maintain those conflicts without needing the characters to ditch class or anything like that then we have the two new russian characters demetri and yuri yuri's basically not a character he's wily coyote and eventually gets talked into helping the group after screwing them over time and time again with his pesky schemes the whole soviet conflict in general is underbaked so he doesn't stand out as a particularly heinous part of it but he is solely responsible for a lot of what goes wrong and i think there's something emblematic about him stalling the group with the helicopter so they can't get out of there in time and the rider is literally stalling that plot thread using yuri as a device to make it last the whole season when there's really not enough material there and then similar to how jason feels like slotting a new character into an archetypical position that's opened up from last season dimitri feels like he's filling the void left by alexi from season 3. granted his whole demeanor is different and he's far less o fish than they made alexi he's fine he's sort of a no [ __ ] character and i think he and hopper have a good thing going but i also think he's representative of the show's continuation to harp on anti-soviet cold war fervor did you know peanut butter is banned in motherland season three was obviously doing this and the big bad commies were the enemy there but the star court mall element at least gave the season a veneer of ironic patriotism that seemed to criticize capitalism along with the whole corrupt mare arc showing that things weren't exactly sound in america either again that gets sort of muddled by the whole secret commies under the maul thing but there's not even a benefit of the doubt you can give season 4. there's no reading of it that isn't just unequivocally anti-communist comparing the [ __ ] gulag to midwestern suburbia which in all fairness the duffer brothers are not political philosophers i don't think they have an obligation to be but any cold war story kind of inherently invites this discussion and the early seasons were able to toe a good line with it because they didn't have to get into the specifics if anything being anti-america but just like the mechanics of the upside down the more they try to flesh out the more problematic things become there are two more new characters i want to talk about but for pacing reasons i'm going to save them for after i talk about the [Music] as i've talked about we have three separate threads sometimes the threads have a and b plots within themselves but it's all pretty geographically segmented and i think it's clear just how much the hawk and stuff is the meat of the story there's a case to be made that the beauty of such a bloated season is that because there's so much going on if you're not enjoying a thread it won't be long until we cut away from it and go back to the one you like but i don't know anyone who's watching for the west coast stuff or the russia stuff at the heart of the russia stuff is hopper and joyce reuniting which somehow feels a little rushed there's not really a significant weight expressed in joyce's loss or the prospect of hopper being alive and there's really not a whole lot getting in the way of their reunion on a level of pure plot mechanics which is why they have to rely on so many small inconveniences from yuri to progress the story along affecting both joyce and murray and hopper and dimitri and once joyce gets the message and recruits murray she's kind of just along for the ride since she doesn't speak russian and can't pass herself off as yuri and it's kind of sad to watch her take a backseat role here hopper at least gets a fun storyline where he has to battle the demogorgon gladiator style this is something that does ring clear as the show just unabashedly doing something fun and not feeling the need to justify it too much the prison guards want to watch people get eaten by demogorgons sure yeah it also leads to hopper getting a sword at the end which harkens back to the joyful dungeons and dragon's passion the show was founded upon in the first place not to mention it shows that the russians are harvesting demogorgons which kinda goes south for them i don't know if the idea here is this is just one prison camp that's doing this and we're gonna get more of the russians harnessing the upside down in the next season i feel like we kind of have to but i really don't care about that stuff then we've got california the b team the show puts a lot of chips here having mike will and eleven three apparent a players on this side of the country once eleven leaves them though it becomes apparent just how much weight she carries despite how the show tries to present him by now we've seen mike settle into a more supporting role and as i mentioned with will the show has also struggled since bringing him back to give him any meat as a lead in a sense it's kind of fitting that the show puts them together on the outskirts both done a little dirty by the writing now more explicitly than ever it's also fitting that mike went out to california to c11 and got stuck with will i haven't always bought the two as best friends season one did a good job of conveying it since will wasn't really in the picture and then he's incapacitated for a lot of season two and season three starts with them having already grown apart which this season seems to be trying to reckon with it's clear at this point though that will has a crush on mike and he's settled for experiencing that love vicariously through 11 which is tough pretty much any time will has dialogue this season the scene ends with him breaking down and crying and you know frankly i don't blame him he's been through the wringer but his feelings about mike are expressed in a speech about how mike is the heart of the dnd group the romeo the emotional backbone and unfortunately i just don't feel that anymore i like mike and i hate to see him keep getting shortchanged like he has been and moments like this seem to be trying to convince us that he hasn't been when they just haven't given him a lot of opportunity to play into this trade season three was kind of his toxic male arc which i bought especially as he was egged on by lucas but this season he's still so obtuse about things he just feels dumb at this point which is a shame because he was pretty perceptive early on i guess the idea here is that in the same way 11 has lost your powers mike has lost his perception and the fact that he's the heart is exactly why this is a source of conflict but he's just not given enough to showcase his emotional triumph and redemption i'm hoping season 5 goes more into this stuff they say will's gonna be the focus i hope that means we get a little more with mike but we'll see the other source of conflict in will's life is jonathan who's pretty stagnant this season he has some conflict about not going to college and that affecting his relationship with nancy but there are no developments on this front throughout the season and he's in the same boat at the end as he is at the start he's also been smoking a lot of weed to cope with this which has made him a little absent from will but this is only really hinted at is something before the season begins aside from this prologue we get with 11 jonathan gets high i think once and the rest of the arc is expressed by argyle which is probably his real purpose argyle keeps getting high and will keeps being like really jonathan but that's exactly the problem jonathan is competent and doing his job the whole time not actually driving that wedge between him and will you can't outsource that kind of thing and make jonathan guilty by proxy i've been well in this situation before when i was like 12 and i didn't even make that connection until i sat down to write this video because the conflict they insist is there is just non-existent eleven's threat is important but mainly as an info dump in terms of present day arc she's dealing with having lost her powers which is usually a symbol of indifference or contentedness or a metaphor for puberty and coming of age none of which is the case here she's still in a very volatile stage anxious about the upside down and reeling with hopper's absence and frustrated with mike wanting to use her powers for malicious purposes from teen angst i think the real symbol in this case is her attempt to assimilate into normal life and be a normal person which her hair has tracked the progress of throughout the seasons once it's proven that she can't really operate in the normal world which amounts to her getting her clay jensen moment and being arrested she shaves her head and gets her powers back there's also an arc with brenner and owens that's sort of a good cop bad cop thing tough love versus nurturing i think the arc with brenner gets a little muddled on the back and forthness of whether he's good or not and wants the best for her or not it's a little frustrating on a narrative level but i think it services how convoluted brenner's own rationale is for putting 11 through what he has it also makes her relationship with owens a little more saccharine and it serves a grander narrative purpose which i'll get into in a little bit i think that covers all my non-hawkins bases i talked in the last video about how the cast was bigger than ever but compared to season 4 the expanse of season 3 feels as tight as season 1. they reached the point where we had to have some characters basically just [ __ ] off for a season and i honestly think it would have been funny if they had moved to california and we just didn't see them for a whole season like bran and game of thrones now i know i've been talking a lot of [ __ ] so far but either in spite of all these ancillary threads or because of them the hawk and stuff is really great so great in fact that even when it becomes an abstraction of itself it feels elevated i think one of the scenes that demonstrates this is when officer callahan is hunting after the kids john reynolds having been on search party a show that also became an abstraction of itself like possibly no other show has is familiar with portraying what starts out as a lovably goofy but grounded dork and evolving into a cartoon character so he brings a quality to his performance that highlights the postmodern absurdity of a show this far out of its initial scope which also contributes to the incompetence of the police this sort of thing didn't work so much for me at other parts like the susie household which felt like a crossover into netflix's series of unfortunate events but here i felt it elevated where the world of the show is at this point now you'd think sending all these characters away from hawkins would make the hawk and stuff feel airtight and while it's certainly tighter than the rest hawkins still feels bigger than ever and here's where the bloat really worked for me even when they're in the same town the characters all fuel a world apart in a way cerebro can't affect because it's not a matter of needing to know information they're just not in each other's lives anymore until duty calls and they unite and well we've been over that but this is ringing the stephen king bell the show has always relied on the melancholy of childhood friendships growing apart and how catastrophic an event needs to be to get them back together that's the core of almost every relationship here i especially liked how much they gave max and lucas to do this season with lucas sort of torn between worlds on a social level with everyone that also ends up making him the bridge between sides when the conflicts escalate as i mentioned earlier with jason and making amends with max he's one of the few characters i feel is given an active emotional story that unfolds as the season progresses rather than harping on the same note or extrapolating on a single emotion throughout the whole season as i felt was sort of the case with steve and nancy to their credit they have way more chemistry than nancy and jonathan have and i think the show realized that and got a little carried away at times steve has always been the day one heartthrob but they put him in comically handsome situations where it's like oh plot mandates that his shirt get ripped off and he turned into fabio here as well as just situations where he and nancy conveniently have to reflect on their relationship but this is playing the trope game in the best possible way just tried and true stuff that always works i think some of this arc doesn't really check out they try to suggest that steve hasn't been putting himself out there to date anyone because he hasn't gotten over nancy yet but that's sort of demonstrably untrue in season 3 when he was more than ready to date robin but i do think this love triangle is the most interesting direction for all three of these characters especially when nancy and jonathan had nothing to do without it so it was a smart move leaning back into it it's also crazy that with eleven and mike gone from the kids group steve is kind of spearheading the whole hawkins thread at least on a level of busy work and competence otherwise we'd have been in charge steve but max really does get the focus here which mostly works naturally a lot of her arc consists of mourning billy but i swear billy is the worst character in the whole show and killing him off is the only way they could have made his weight sag the showdown even more because now there's all this reverence for a character who was never even fully realized to begin with and while it makes sense for max to be mourning him i as an audience member was not that being said the dear billy episode is probably the best episode this season specifically because max sets a parameter that gives us a ticking clock we know will go off in this episode and i know i gave a whole spiel about how stranger things is the exception that can get away with seamlessly blowing through a whole season like that but dear billy demonstrates how much power the self-contained episode still has even in this context anyway max being confronted with past deaths and her own impending death brings a maturity to the group and an urgency that paired with the urgency of the eddie plot helps the pacing a ton the only character out of the hawkins group that maybe hasn't done his due diligence this time around is dustin who's taking more of a backseat role here but even he reflects a lot of those core relationship issues i talked about for one there are moments like when dustin is right about the magnets but steve is right about where the rock is that i feel reflect how each character's core traits contribute to their utility within the group and synthesis making them feel individually necessary despite the cerebro hive mind but even as he worships steve you can feel that stephen king distance growing between them like five minutes after the magnet scene where steve blows dustin off and leaves him out of the action on the boat this void is filled however by a subject i can't push back any further it's time i talk about [Music] eddie munson is in many ways the forky of stranger things an outwardly advertised new face that's in a corporate sense the selling point of the fourth installment but who's proven as the gang works to save him to be emblematic of this chapter and in many ways the entire franchise where forky sort of drops out of his movie after the first act however eddie grabs the torch after a few passive episodes and takes on an active role of his own the last bastion of 80s pastiche stranger things finds this time around is metal which is in many ways the aesthetic wrapping paper of season four and is pretty much entirely manifested in eddie he is also the springboard for the season's renewed passion for dnd keeping the spirit alive even after the characters in the show seem to have grown out of it which brings me to a very important point about the show's whole framework i've covered by now the satisfying quality of separated age groups finding unique information and putting it together which has been watered down as the seasons have progressed but the other essential element here is that they were pretty rigidly separated by age group this helped it cast a wide demographic net to become like the most populist show ever but meta textual factors aside it also allowed the show to comment on the unique human experiences of these three different stages in life and this too has gotten watered down as the age groups have morphed together the kids have been forced to grow up the adults act like children and it's lost some of that specificity season four seems to have an active interest in re-segmenting the age groups which is already evident from the fact that the adults are completely absent from the kids all season but we can also track this pursuit through eddie he's a bit of a pariah on account of his metal and d d passions which are externalized as this town-wide witch-hunt that also frames eddie's arc about running away from his problems these things are synonymous with the fact that he hangs out with so many freshmen as he's still a bit of a kid himself in denial with his head in the sand in the same way it takes a world-ending calamity to bring drifting friends back together that's also what it takes to get eddie to confront where he's at in life and there's just something satisfying about watching eddie interact with people his own age which is captured in that moment where steve kind of dismisses dustin there's then the dual purpose eddie serves as a remedy to the stephen king wistfulness of dustin and steve growing apart a bit as steve focuses on his more age-appropriate arc with nancy i mentioned that jason and eddie were the new steve and jonathan but there's also a lens through which they reflect the good and evil sides of steve and eddie is dustin's new role model the fact that he sacrifices himself to complete his coming of age arc in a way that still lets him be true to himself and utilize the metal and d d passion capstones the contradictory nature of this season he doesn't run away anymore but he still embraces these aspects of his character to a more mature cause he can hang with the big kids now but he's still there when he needs to be for the freshmen he's a facsimile of a facsimile like the other new characters and a fresh face rather than an uncannily old version of a returning character's younger self embodying the paradox of a season intent on reveling in the past while also spearheading the show's movement forward and he's this season's greatest accomplishment at the very least he's in the running with [Music] in the last video i was very skeptical of the show's ability to build a sense of finality to what had become by season 3 a monster of the weak mo season 4 begins with what feels like another monster of the week villain in vecna while bringing brenner back into the fold and i figured the idea here was that brenner was the day one villain and bringing him back and seemingly redeeming him for a bit was the best way they could lay the groundwork for him as the eventual big bad tying the beginning of the show to the end this would have made enough sense but brenner's just not a great long-term villain and his redemption was of course very muddled and confusing in terms of motivation so it brought me great joy to realize that what they were actually doing was using brenner to transfer that sense of scope being the day one villain over to vecna not only erasing that sense of monster of the weak but effectively making him the day zero villain it also helps that the past upside down villains have essentially been faceless forces of nature which worked in season one and then left a little to be desired later on even as they tried to anthropomorphize the mind flayer and dialogue but now there's finally a sense of human sentience to the upside down upon which a more complex relationship can be built i do think it's funny that they have a whole speech about how things are simple for superheroes but eleven isn't a superhero and then they give her the most textbook superhero super villain setup which i don't think is a comment on the mono myth it wasn't exactly a surprise when this guy turned out to be one who turned out to be evil but they play enough cards right here that they can more or less get away with hitting the it was me all along button as it is the mechanics of vechna's powers showing people their traumatic past functions essentially as a clip show built into the narrative which in addition to everything else helps conjure up that sense of returning to season one glory i mean they've really milked the [ __ ] out of barb's death at this point but it also ties vechna's story directly to the circumstance of us meeting 11 in the very first episode and also ties that inherently to will disappearing as i've made clear by now i usually don't like when this show goes out of its way to answer too many questions but considering the scope of the show now compared to the self-contained first season these feel like necessary questions to answer that inherently tie the beginning to the end in a properly conclusive way now maybe this is what the duffer brothers had planned from the get-go it was all figured out and they just spent a couple seasons [ __ ] around to see how much they could get out of the show i feel like that would actually be less impressive than if they just pulled this out of thin air after basically filibustering for two seasons but considering how tired i was after they so much as announced the volume of stranger things we still had in store before this season came out i do feel now that it was warranted in order to reconfigure things and lay the groundwork for a proper ending and this season's bloating was a necessary evil on account of the past two seasons transgressions at the very least this sort of thing makes me think about how we compartmentalize problems with shows on a seasonal basis and how the seasons really do work in conjunction so that the flaws of one season can inherently bring down another one that has so much more going for it watching this season was conflicting bouncing between such boring cross-country [ __ ] and watching the writing contend with this beast growing too big for them to carry it was hard to feel in the moment how this season was such a radical departure from the past two seasons but considering the next season is said to be shorter and will focus on most of the groupings from season one i think the beauty of this season is not so much the callbacks to season one or even the aspects that are a return to form but rather its willingness to bear the burden of its siblings in service of sticking the landing which we'll see if it manages to do in that sense i would say the bloatedness is season four's monster of the week and the show's most compelling yet i don't think this season actually is a return to form i think it's doing the best it can within the unshakable framework the show has evolved into which is a smarter move than chasing the past so perhaps i shouldn't say that stranger things season 4 is not the redemption you think it is but rather that stranger thinks season 4 is not the redemption you think it is unless it is in which case stranger thinks season 4 is not the redemption you think it is buckaroo [ __ ] hell like share comment subscribe [Music] like share comment subscribe i'm gonna do the meisner technique like share comment subscribe like share comment subscribe like share comment subscribe [Music] like share comment subscribe like share comment subscribe like share comment subscribe like share comment subscribe

Channel: Taylor J. Williams

Views: 215,244

Keywords: Stranger things, Duffer brothers, Netflix, Eddie Munson, Joseph Quinn, Steve Harrington, Joe keery, Eleven, Millie Bobby brown, Will Byers, Noah schnapp, Mike wheeler, Finn wolfhard, Hopper, David harbour, Joyce byers, Winona Ryder, Season 4, Vecna, Upside down, Demogorgon, Mind flayer, Hawkins

Id: dcgUlkZPYOA

Length: 42min 31sec (2551 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 24 2022