Zhihu question: How should we evaluate Season 4, Episodes 8–9 (the finale) of the American series Stranger Things?
The writers chickened out.
They chickened out in two ways: first, they didn’t dare kill off characters; second, they didn’t dare expand the scope.
Let’s start with the character deaths.
What does killing off Papa and Eddie even count as? One isn’t part of the main cast, and the other is a new character the audience hadn’t had time to form much of an emotional connection with. They tried to wring tears out of us without actually daring to hurt us, and in the end they failed to please anyone.
The plot of Stranger Things has always had a raw, high-energy quality. Even though Seasons 2 and 3 had plenty of plot flaws, that raw energy never disappeared. My feeling is that the Duffer brothers simply hurled out everything they loved, without worrying whether the audience would like it, and sometimes without even worrying whether it made sense. It was a little childish, but also very sincere and full of life.
But the final two episodes of Season 4 are clearly different. You can plainly feel the two of them starting to calculate. Every corner of the script shows them managing audience expectations: a little tearjerker here, a little heroism there, a separation and death, then a long-awaited reunion. So, are you shocked? Moved? Emotionally tortured? But once they started calculating, that raw energy vanished, and the whole thing lost its rhythm.
Seasons 1–3 of Stranger Things, along with Part 1 of Season 4, are street food: stir-fried over a fierce flame, still carrying the wok hei when they hit the table. The final two episodes of Season 4 are hotel French cuisine, every seasoning measured to the gram. The taste isn’t exactly hard to swallow, but it really is bland.
The character-killing feels just like hotel French cuisine too: over-calculated, with no courage left to turn up the heat. If the Duffer brothers still had the spirit they showed in the first three seasons, the Season 4 finale absolutely should have sacrificed one or two beloved core characters from earlier seasons.
If it were up to me, I’d kill off Steve and Robin in one stroke. And forget having Robin pine for some bandmate—why not have her fall for Nancy instead? Then she and Steve could form a pair of fellow sufferers, both secretly in love with Nancy.
The plot could have Steve and Robin sacrifice themselves in the final battle to save Nancy from Vecna. Before dying, they could first stare in perfect unison at the same precious object of affection, then turn to look at each other, and die embracing in their friend’s arms. Wouldn’t that be ten thousand times more devastating than Eddie’s death?
Even leaving aside how heartbreaking it would be, killing Steve makes more sense from a plot-logic standpoint than killing Eddie, because Eddie is obviously there to take over Steve’s role. After three seasons of putting Steve through things, there isn’t much left to mine from him, while Eddie has just become a new fan favorite—and his character arc has barely begun.
And once you consider that their ‘babysitter’ roles overlap so heavily, it’s obvious who should have died at the end of Season 4: not Eddie, but Steve. That way Eddie could step into Steve’s place in Season 5. Maybe that was the Duffer brothers’ original plan, but in the end they chickened out. They didn’t dare touch Steve, a veteran core member of the main cast.
Now for the cowardice about expanding the scope.
Come on. We’re already four seasons in. How many times have the gates to the Upside Down been opened? How many times have monsters from over there come visiting this world? And it’s not as if the U.S. government doesn’t know the Upside Down exists, or doesn’t know the threat it may pose. Any government that still had its wits about it would have deployed a national-level response to monitor and warn against every disturbance in the Upside Down, ready to respond rapidly at any moment.
So why, this time around, are only the small-town teenagers in the main cast panicking? Come on—that’s an ultimate boss planning to destroy the world, and you’re going to kill him with a shotgun? And the government is somehow completely unaware of a world-ending threat?
Didn’t the military already notice the changes in Hawkins? Weren’t they investigating and trying to solve the problem? Then why, apart from obsessively hunting Eleven, do they suddenly show zero interest in how things are developing in Hawkins, with zero intervention? Did every member of the military go after Eleven? Is this really all the U.S. military can deploy?
Actually, in the first three seasons, not only was almost the entire main cast smart and capable—the one clear stream of sanity in a horror series—but the U.S. government was reasonably intelligent too. The reason the government was practically a villain in those seasons was simply a difference in position and lagging information. But in Season 4, the government has ‘disappeared.’ The whole mess gets dumped on a bunch of middle-schoolers who can’t even remember to put on thicker protective clothing (Eddie, I’m talking to you—you wouldn’t have died if you’d worn a padded jacket).
This is one extremely, extremely abrupt aspect of the final two episodes of Season 4: the government is gone.
In the first seven episodes, Vecna’s threat was hazy and intermittent, and the truth was still unclear, so the government’s absence was understandable. But by the final two episodes, the truth is clear and the threat has already escalated to world-ending proportions. At that point, the absence of government power sticks out like a sore thumb.
So why do the intelligence and physical presence of the U.S. government both go offline in Season 4?
I think the reason is simple enough: the Duffer brothers got trapped inside the frame of ‘small-town kids fight demons and save the world.’ They simply didn’t have the courage to step outside it.
The Duffer brothers have played ‘small-town kids fight demons and save the world’ for three seasons, and each season they played it brilliantly.
But the reason this formula worked in the first three seasons was that: 1. the crises in those seasons had a considerable degree of suddenness; 2. the threat had not risen to world-ending proportions—at least not in people’s perception.
Small-town kids run into a sudden crisis, match wits and fight bravely against demons, and end up saving the world more or less by accident. That works.
But in the final two episodes of Season 4, neither of those two elements really holds: 1. Once Vecna’s identity is revealed, the crisis is not especially sudden; in fact, the main cast has the initiative to set a trap and kill him. 2. The threat has clearly risen to world-ending proportions.
In that situation, if the main cast were still as sharp as they were in the first three seasons, what they should do would be to find every possible way to convey the seriousness of the crisis to the U.S. government. The focus of the final two episodes of Season 4 should have been how the main cast communicated with the government and military, cleared up the misunderstanding, and formed an alliance.
In other words, this was where the plot should have completed a major ‘expansion of scope,’ lifting Stranger Things directly to the level of ‘the real world vs. the Upside Down.’ The main cast would have had to give up some ground, transforming themselves from ‘lone heroes fighting demons’ into ‘heroes who save the world in cooperation with the government.’
But the Duffer brothers chickened out. They didn’t dare break the formula. They were clearly reluctant to give up the old model of ‘small-town kids fight demons and save the world,’ which had succeeded three times, so they simply waved a hand and forced the government offline for these final two episodes—and made the intelligence of the main cast collectively go offline for the first time in the four seasons of Stranger Things.
And so the main cast marched off to face the series’ ultimate boss with one shotgun and a pile of junk (and, yes, still without remembering to wear thicker protective clothing).
It’s basically child’s play.
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