Psychic battles and darker storytelling

THERE is very little room to argue that Netflix began the culture of digital “bingewatching” when the streaming platform’s popularity rose in the middle 2010s, and when the first season of Stranger Things premiered all at once on July 16, 2016, things changed meteorically.

The immediate popularity of the series certainly helped in shooting the culture into the universal stratosphere, with each successive season becoming an event to be anticipated and looked forward to.

With the release of Matt and Ross Duffer’s fourth season of Stranger Things concluding on July 1, things have changed once more.

More popularly known as the Duffer Brothers, the duo pushed the envelope of what constitutes traditional television series runtimes and the idea of binge-watching, as every episode in the latest season were well beyond an hour each, with the last episode being as long as a modern feature-length film.

Gone were the days of fans sitting down and binge-watching an entire season of Stranger Things within a single night or a couple of days.

Volume One

Split into two “volumes” or parts, Stranger Things’ fourth season debuted its first batch of seven episodes on May 27, and the last batch of two episodes on July 1.

Having watched the season in its entirety, it makes sense why the season seems bloated; there is a lot that happens, and almost nothing can be edited out to shorten any of the episodes due to everything being critical to the narrative.

Picking up eight months after the third season’s last episode, the main cast have been split up into three separate plotlines that eventually intersect.

The main plotline involves (yet another) series of supernatural murders that begin happening in the fictional town of Hawkins, with the group consisting of Steve Harrington, Nancy Wheeler, Robin Buckley, Dustin Henderson, Max Mayfield, Lucas and Erica Sinclair attempting to figure out whether the otherworldly “Upside Down” is responsible.

As this is going on in Hawkins, the new addition to the cast, Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn) is blamed for the murders that are inspired by the real world “Satanic panic” that became prevalent in America in the late ‘80s.

On the opposite end of America, the second plotline occurs with Mike Wheeler, Will and Jonathan Byers, and new character Argyle (Eduardo Franco), with the group attempting to find Jane Hopper/Eleven, who is elsewhere attempting to get her psychic powers back.

It doesn’t stop there. In the third plotline, all the way in Russia, Joyce Byers and Murray Bauman are attempting to rescue Jim Hopper from a Soviet Union prison.

As much as it great seeing all these characters again, there is simply too much going on, and some of the story beats were simply a drag – like almost everything in Russia.

The first volume also introduces and sets up the season’s main villain, dubbed Vecna, a humanoid being capable of similar psychic feats as the series’ lead, Eleven, due to their shared past.

Volume Two

By the end of the final episode of the season in the second volume, it became easier to digest why the Duffer Brothers chose this “long-format” television storytelling.

The episodes needed the extra time to properly tell its story, and to flesh out characters who are either fan-favourites or never received proper scriptwriting attention in previous seasons, such as Noah Schnapp’s Will, who was always sort of “just there” in other seasons getting character development that may hint to his sexual orientation as he becomes older.

Fan favourite Max also becomes central to the narrative as she is pursued by the main antagonist, as the character’s actress Sadie Sink really flexes her acting prowess, with one pivotal sequence featuring Max causing singer Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” to explode in popularity.

The creative choice to pivot the story around Max also paves the way for Caleb McLaughlin to shine as Lucas Sinclair. As both these characters are in a complicated romance, a crucial scene towards the end has McLaughlin out-performing everyone else in the cast with a heartwrenching performance.

For new characters such as Argyle and Eddie, Stranger Things does it again, with Eddie in particular having what is destined to become a classic television scene involving Metallica’s “Master Of Puppets”.

Though this might be controversial to say, the choice to put other characters and their actors at the forefront instead of the series’ lead character, Millie Bobby Brown’s Eleven is a welcome one, because this season has truly proved that Brown just isn’t that good of an actress.

How the series moves forward towards its final, fifth season will be interesting to see, especially with how the brothers have said when the fifth season is eventually made, there will be a “time jump” so that the real ages of the actors better match the age of their characters.

As the dust settles over what remains of Hawkins, Stranger Things is proving to become an epic of sorts.

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