Why the Stranger Things Season 4 Villain Is the Show’s Best Yet
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The post Why the Stranger Things Season 4 Villain Is the Show’s Best Yet appeared first on Consequence.
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Stranger Things, Season 4, Episode 7, “Chapter 7: The Massacre at Hawkins Lab.”]
One of the biggest challenges faced by any storyteller, not just the folks behind Netflix’s Stranger Things is how to structure your reveals: Delay things too long and without enough explanation, and the viewer gets frustrated. Tell all too early, or drop one too many clues, and you’ll just annoy people. But while there are multiple secrets at the center of Stranger Things Season 4, Volume 1 (as we’re referring to the first seven episodes released over Memorial Day weekend), one of the most exciting aspects of the season is the fact that there’s one answer which unites nearly all of them.
Season 4 of the Netflix hit splits up into largely four narratives: First, Nancy, Steve, Dustin, and the rest of the Hawkins gang investigate the strange deaths of their classmates at the hands of a mysterious demonic presence they dub Vecna, after a D&D monster they manage to slay in the first episode. Meanwhile, Mike, Jonathan, Will, and new pal Argyle (Eduardo Franco) go on the run after one of the government’s nastier black-ops divisions decides to go after them in search of Eleven, as Eleven herself goes on a deep dive into her past with some help from the man she one called Papa, Dr. Martin Brenner.
And yes, there’s also Hopper hanging out in Russian prison, with Joyce and Murray doing their best to rescue him — perhaps the least connected to the other storylines, except that of course he and his fellow Russian prisoners find themselves battling a Demogorgon, gladiator-style. (Stranger Things Season 4 comes by its nearly nine hours of screentime honestly; there’s a lot going on.)
While all four storylines feel relatively split apart at first, it turns out that two of them — the Nancy-led investigation into Vecna’s victims and Eleven’s own quest for answers — are actually two sides of the same coin, as the show slowly but surely reveals the disturbing truth behind the Creel murders of years ago: That they were orchestrated by young Henry Creel, whose enhanced abilities led to Dr. Brenner selecting him as his first test subject: The infamous Number 1.
Stranger Things (Netflix)
And that brings us to Eleven’s trips back into her own past, as it’s revealed that the same orderly who befriended Eleven in the facility prior to the titular massacre of Chapter 7 was in fact Henry/Number 1, all grown up and living with a power-dampening device in his neck. When Eleven removes the device, Henry/Number 1 goes on the rampage we saw from Dr. Brenner’s perspective in Episode 1 of the season — and in the aftermath, the two fight it out, with Eleven proving to be strong enough to not just stop him, but blast him into a whole new hell dimension, his flesh flaying away to reveal the demon we now know as Vecna.
Just because you know who a monster is doesn’t mean you know how to stop it, and the super-sized runtimes of Episodes 8 and 9 will surely be devoted to answering those questions. But this is also one of those reveals where now the audience knows more than the characters involved, and seeing how our heroes put the pieces together will be a big part of the fun.
Everyone’s going to have their own answer as to when exactly they figured out who Vecna was, but one of the best aspects of the reveal is how multi-layered it is. From the second that Jamie Campbell Bower was introduced as “Friendly Orderly” in the credits, it was clear there was a bigger reveal to come from that character (given Bower’s well-established resume, it seemed unlikely that he’d be playing a bit part) — probably at that point, savvy viewers were beginning to remember the existence of the mysterious “One” from the facility that trained Eleven.
But bringing it together with the Vecna reveal doesn’t just elevate the twist, but it works to unify a narrative that up until this point had been, by necessity, pretty fragmented. Is that a bit too clean? Not necessarily. But the rightness of the monstrous Hawkins Laboratory experiments being in part responsible for creating the monster Eleven must fight can’t be denied, and there’s a thematic element to Vecna’s reveal that’s pretty compelling, in how it reflects the nature of trauma in shaping these foes — it’s far more interesting to see these characters face off against a creature whose creation we understand.
In short, while the previous supernatural villains of Stranger Things have always felt a little disconnected from the individual characters, we now know Vecna intimately — including the part where we know Eleven helped create him. The major concern worth having over the reveal of Vecna’s true nature is that, well, that’s an awful big thing to top, mostly due to the elegance with which his true nature ties into almost every facet of the season, not to mention the show’s overall narrative.
There’s still another season to go before Stranger Things concludes, which would theoretically revolve around the fight against the official Big Bad of the series. Established back in Season 2, is known only as the Mind Flayer, with Dustin at one point referring to Vecna as a general in the Mind Flayer’s army — but Dustin’s not necessarily an accredited Upside Down-ologist, this could be the Party scrambling once again to understand something way, way beyond normal human understanding.
After all, it’s worth remembering that “Mind Flayer,” along with “Vecna” and even “Demogorgon,” aren’t scientific terms for these entities — they’re the names agreed upon by these teenagers to try to make sense of this madness, using the best resource they have for dealing with the supernatural: their Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks. Every time they use them, it’s a reminder that these kids are brave, and they are smart, and they are even still, more often than not, in way over their heads.
Stranger Things Season 4, Episodes 1-7, are streaming now on Netflix. The remaining two episodes will premiere July 1st.
Why the Stranger Things Season 4 Villain Is the Show’s Best Yet
Liz Shannon Miller
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