After almost three years, Stranger Things has finally returned to Netflix for its Fourth Season and, wow, was this one hell of a return.
Created by the Duffer Brothers, this may be the best season of the show so far, delivering stellar story telling, character development, scares, comedy, you name it and it’s probably there.
Season Four picks up with the main characters divided, Joyce (Winona Ryder) having taken Eleven (Mille Bobby Brown), Will (Noah Schnapp) and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) to California, leaving Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), Max (Sadie Sink), Nancy (Natalia Dyer), Steve (Joe Keery) and Robin (Maya Hawke) in Hawkins.
It is with the latter group that the story is most engaging, as they investigate a series of gruesomely horrific murders in Hawkins that somehow involves the mysterious monster in the Upside Down known as Vecna.
Meanwhile, in California, Joyce and Murray (Brett Gelman) begin their own mission, when they learn that Hopper (David Harbour) may just be alive but a captive in Russia.
At the same time, Eleven dealing with some over-the-top bullies at school sets her down the path of confronting her horrific past, eventually learning the horrible truth about what happened to the other numbers.
So, as you can gather, there are a lot of moving parts to the Fourth Season of Stranger Things but the Duffer Brothers and their team juggle it all seamlessly with some excellent pacing.
They even somehow find enough time to bring in new characters like Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn) and make them just as interesting as the older characters.
All of this results in some truly brilliant episodes like the fourth, “Dear Billy,” and the seventh, “The Massacre at Hawkins Lab”, which has a mind blowing ending.
“Dear Billy” is especially amazing, potentially being the best episode of the entire series with plenty of spectacular action, horror and character development, especially for Max, who Sadie Sink plays excellently.
As for my criticisms of the season, I did find the California storyline, with the exception of Eleven’s sections, to be not as interesting as the rest of the storylines.
Sure, there are some great moments, one action scene in particular but, for the most part, I was just wanting to get back to the other storylines whenever the focus went back to the California group.
Another problem I have is characters constantly receiving injuries that should leave them unable to walk, yet they are running with no problem in the next episode.
It stretched believability a little bit.
Finally, and this is a minor nitpick, but it was especially apparent this season that some of the actors cast as teenage side characters are way into their twenties and maybe even thirties.
Some of them did not look like high-schoolers at all and this could be quite off putting at times.
Thankfully, these were only side characters so it was not a massive issue.
Otherwise, this season is absolutely fantastic.
What’s even better is that this is only Volume One.
We still have Volume Two to come, where the final episode will be two and half hours long.
The only downside is that we have to wait until July 1st to see these final two episodes of Season Four and, with how incredible this season has been so far, that is going to make the wait even longer.
If you somehow have not checked our the Fourth Season of Stranger Things yet, then I would highly recommend you drop everything and go watch it.
Although, now that I think about it, maybe you should wait for Volume Two to come out to watch the whole thing.
It would certainly make your wait to see Season Four’s conclusion a lot shorter.
THE REVIEW MONSTER 