Stranger Things Season 4, Part 2 Serves Up Oversized Blockbuster Cheese for the Fourth of July: Review
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The post Stranger Things Season 4, Part 2 Serves Up Oversized Blockbuster Cheese for the Fourth of July: Review appeared first on Consequence.
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the Season 4 finale of Stranger Things, “The Piggyback.”]
The Pitch: This year’s super-sized season of Stranger Things felt, if anything, a confirmation of Netflix’s confidence in the series — marking it as their true blockbuster tentpole, the thing to keep people subscribing amid price hikes and a nagging sense of doubt in their catalog.
The first seven episodes (all nearly feature-length) set up our rapidly growing set of chess pieces along four branching storylines: Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and her attempts to get her powers back, Joyce’s (Winona Ryder) quest to get Hopper (David Harbour) back from Russia, Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and crew fleeing from the authorities in California, and the kids of Hawkins facing down a spooky new baddie named Vecna.
When we left them all, the endgame was set: Eleven regained her powers, and discovered that Vecna was actually the Upside Down-ed form of One/Henry Creel (Jamie Campbell Bower), the first of Bremmer’s (Matthew Modine) psychic subjects. The kids successfully saved Max (Sadie Sink) from becoming Vecna’s latest victim, thanks to the soul-healing powers of Kate Bush.
Joyce and Hopper reunite in Russia, thanks in no small part to Murray’s (Brett Gelman) Spies Like Us-level plan, but still need to make their way out of the country. And Mike and the Byerses (Charlie Heaton and Noah Schnapp) set off to reunite with Eleven. And they all need to figure out how to vanquish Vecna once and for all, and make sure the apocalyptic visions Vecna gifted Nancy Wheeler (Natalie Dyer) — of the Upside Down coming to Hawkins — never come to pass.
So the stage is set for a rollicking blockbuster finale that Netflix sees fit to shape into two mega-sized episodes; one the length of Yellow Submarine (85 minutes), the other the length of Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (150 minutes). Of course, you need all that time, considering the Robert Altman-sized ensemble and the bevy of subplots you’ve got to resolve. And the results are largely satisfying, even as the season split makes the finale feel like all climax, no foreplay.
Stranger Things (Netflix)
Telling Lies? No, Papa: Episode 8, “Papa,” felt like the last vestiges of piece-moving before our Big Damn Finale, swirling all our disparate main characters into at least a few main groups to rally around their final gamble against Vecna. Eleven gets some much-needed closure from her arc across the first three seasons, with her two father figures — the controlling Bremmer and Paul Reiser’s gentler Dr. Owens — fight over her ultimate destiny.
Meanwhile, the kids in Hawkins come up with their ultimate, four-phase plan (take that, Kevin Feige!) to kill Vecna: Let Max off the Kate Bush drip to lure Vecna into a supernatural kill box, then light him up with guns and Molotov cocktails while he’s sleeping. The preparations give us plenty of one-on-one moments to shore up vital character relationships: Dustin’s (Gaten Matarazzo) budding bromance with Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn), Robin’s (Maya Hawke) unspoken crush on Vickie (Amybeth McNulty), Max opening up to Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) about the dark thoughts re: her late brother Billy that made her so vulnerable to Vecna’s curse in the first place.
Most heartbreaking, though, is Will’s pick-me-up chat with Mike, who feels particularly useless and that Eleven will abandon him once she sees he’s good for nothing. “You’re the heart” of the team, says Will, reasserting Eleven’s love for Mike in a not-so-subtle metaphor for his own feelings towards him. It’s a little Captain Planet meets even more queerbaiting, but ugh, the tears on Will’s face when he turns away from Mike! Tell him how you feel, man!
Master of Puppets: It’s these moments that help leaven the unrelenting pace of this back half of the season, even as the Duffer Brothers speed through the events at a breakneck pace. What’s more, the show still benefits from the sheer amount of cash Netflix throws at it: both its practical effects (Vecna, a dazzling helicopter-vs-Eleven showdown at the end of Episode 8) and CG spectacle feel expensive and marvelous, even if the Upside Down still suffers from muggy day-for-night confusion.
Stranger Things (Netflix)
That’s especially true in Episode 9, where we finally get down to the business of The Plan, and the show hurls one air-punching moment after another at you. There’s the much-hyped heavy metal moment from the trailer, where Eddie straps on an axe and shreds his way through Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” to lure Vecna’s demonic bats away from his friends; Eleven’s touch-and-go psychic battle with Vecna; Lucas in a deadly fistfight with psychotic jock Jason (Mason Dye); Steve (Joe Keery), Nancy, and Robin finally vanquishing Vecna’s physical form with both fire and shell.
Hopper even gets to face down a Demogorgon with what looks like He-Man’s Sword of Power! Even as the storylines stay relatively disparate, the sequence is expertly edited to keep everyone feeling connected to the broader battle against Vecna, no matter how many fronts it’s fought on.
It’s all fanboy catnip, until it isn’t: The day is eventually theirs, but the victory is as Pyrrhic as they come. Eddie’s brave stand against the demon bats, a nifty conclusion to his season-long struggle with cowardice, comes at the cost of his life (his and Dustin’s scenes are definitely the most tear-inducing, especially later as Dusty comforts Eddie’s grieving father).
Meanwhile, Max only barely makes it out of Vecna’s influence alive, thanks to Eleven’s psychic intervention, and is now comatose and blinded with three of her limbs dramatically snapped. And her pseudo-death still completes Vecna’s plan, even as he’s no longer alive to see it: Four cracks in reality shatter through Hawkins, turning it into a disaster area, and even reawaken in the season’s final minutes to disrupt the touching Byers/Wheeler family reunion.
Stranger Things (Netflix)
The Verdict: “This is the beginning of the end,” warns Vecna in his final moments, and it feels like the Duffers saying the same thing to their audience. For a series that took full advantage of its ’80s nostalgia for maximum audience engagement, Stranger Things at this point feels nostalgic for itself: its characters, its lore, and more importantly the emotional connection its fans feel towards it.
It’s a bonafide phenomenon, after all, something that’s somewhat surpassed the cultural capital its audience feels towards the show’s own inspirations. It’s fitting, then, that the show’s scope is getting bigger, its cast more expansive, and its stakes more universal. And it’s a miracle that it manages to keep all these plates largely spinning, even as its runtimes threaten to give Titanic a run for their money. We’ll see how the whole shebang ends, now that the show is in its Infinity War-level cliffhanger stage: Hopefully, the Duffers stick the landing.
Where’s It Playing? Shove Stranger Things down your gullet right alongside those hot dogs and brewskis this Fourth of July weekend on Netflix.
Trailer:
Stranger Things Season 4, Part 2 Serves Up Oversized Blockbuster Cheese for the Fourth of July: Review
Clint Worthington
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