Today I’ll be doing a spoiler-free review of season 4 of Stranger Things. This is the darkest season of the show so far, and I mean that literally and figuratively. This season is basically like a longer extended horror movie, as they try to leave you on the edge of your seat as much as possible. There are also a lot of very violent scenes that do remind you of a horror movie. All the main characters stayed the same this season, but they were all in different groups and had their own stories that were still all linked together. The main and best group in my opinion was Steve, Dustin, Robin, Max, Lucas, Nancy, Erica and Eddie. Eddie is one of the few new characters, but he immediately jumped in as a fan favorite with a massive role. This group was also in Hawkins the entire time and was the most entertaining part of the season. There was a group in Russia with Hopper, Joyce, and Murray, which was very entertaining as well with a lot of comedy from Murray, but they also had their fair share of serious moments. However, the worst group for me was easily the “California group” with Will, Mike, Eleven for a short time, Jonathan, and Argyle. Argyle is also a new character, but he doesn’t do much except provide some comedic relief. This group just didn’t have the energy and entertaining characters that all the other ones did. There wasn’t any serious comedy with them, and the serious moments only felt important sometimes, and they were few and far between. Eleven for most of the season was dealing with a major part of her past, and this story plays a major part in most of the season and provides the villain with its motives.
The villain of this season is named Vecna. The best villain in the show’s history. Vecna just felt like such a major threat from the second he was introduced and had so many violent moments. Once they finally did a backstory on Vecna, I think they nailed it. I can’t really get into it without spoilers, but all I’ll say is that Vecna has a lot of history tied to the town of Hawkins and Eleven. I thought all of the episodes this season were very good at the minimum. This season was released in two different parts, the first seven episodes were part one, and the last two episodes were part two. The main reason they did this was because the final two episodes had runtimes of 1 hour 25 minutes, and 2 hours 30 minutes. Unheard of for a TV show, and did make these final two episodes feel like movies. Episodes 4 and 7 stood out to me in the first part. Episode 7 is also one of my favorite episodes in the series so far, as it had just such a phenomenal story and left you on a massive reveal/cliffhanger. The final two episodes were also fantastic, and you have to be prepared to watch two movies because that’s basically what this is. The ending to the season was fantastic too and left you questioning what’s next for everyone, and on a cliffhanger for one of the characters is specific.
I always rate shows I watch and I rate them based on 10 things in the show. Those things are action, acting, cinematography, pacing, score, characters, ending, plot, protagonist, and antagonist. I rate all of those pieces 1-10 and then after that, I add up the scores of all 10 of them and get a total score out of 100. I gave this season a 94/100, just slightly below season 3. I didn’t have many gripes with this season at all, my main issue was just the California group. They just had no energy and really brought down the show whenever they were on. Hopefully, in season 5, they can do Mike and Will better, because they used to be so important, but in the past two seasons, they’ve felt like side characters.
