Review of season 4 of Stranger things (volume II) on Netflix | a pretentious ending, an epic season

The division of the fourth season of ‘Stranger Things’ in two volumes made headlines. It was because the distribution of episodes seemed strange from the beginning: seven chapters for the first volume, two chapters for the second and last. But also because ‘Papá’ and ‘El plan’, as the last two episodes have finally come to be called, lasted up to an hour and 25 minutes, in the case of the first, and up to two and a half hours, in the case of of the second.

Having seen the last two chapters, it is easier to understand why the Duffer brothers left ‘Dad’ and ‘The Plan’ for the second volume, beyond the strategic reasons that the platform may have. The two episodes are the final stretch of the season and their plot arcs are much more concise, compared to what the bulk of the new season proposes. They were not right, on the other hand, when it came to establishing the duration of the chapters. The excess of footage ends up disrupting and slowing down an interesting proposal, which shines at times -the final epic ‘battle’, with our protagonists scattered in different corners and realities of the planet is just one example- but it ends up becoming tedious. There is no reason to lengthen something whose foundations are laid in the first half hour of this second part of the fiction and whose resolution, on the other hand, we will not see until three and a half hours later.

But let’s go by parts and remember how things had been towards the end of the first volume that, I suppose, you have already seen, if you are reading this. If not, keep in mind that the spoilers start from here. The group of friends is divided for the first time. After much thought and not without reluctance, Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) decides to go with Dr. Owens (Paul Reiser) and Dr. Martin Brenner aka Dad (Matthew Modine) to a hidden base under the desert to try to recover their powers.

Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Max (Sadie Sink), Steve (Joe Keery), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), Robin (Maya Hawke), Nancy (Natalia Dyer) and Eddie (Joseph Quinn) -the character is one of the great hits of this season – managed to escape the first encounter with the fearsome Vecna ​​/ Uno, although Nancy was gifted with a terrifying vision of the future that is to come. Meanwhile, Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), Will (Noah Schnapp), Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and Argyle (Eduardo Franco), Jonathan’s bland new friend, are searching for Eleven. Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, in the Soviet Union, Joyce (Winona Ryder) has embarked with the lunatic Murray (Brett Gelman) -the character is a discovery this season- on a difficult mission: free Jim (David Harbor) of the Russian concentration camp in which he is trapped. At the end of the first volume, they meet again.

This is how things are when the second volume starts. Lost and without contact with Eleven, the group of seven friends devises a plan that seems almost suicidal to end the monster that is endangering Hawkins and Max, the young woman who managed to save herself from almost certain death by listening to the almighty ‘Running Up That Hill’ by Kate Bush. Since Vecna ​​must enter a trance similar to the one Eleven must undergo to enter the minds of others to kill her victims, Dustin proposes to ambush her. Max will be her decoy and when he goes to attack her they will try to finish off the corporeal version of this master of dreams. Meanwhile, Jim, Joyce, and Murray try to get out of the Soviet Union, and Jonathan, Will, Mike, and Argyle continue to search for Eleven, who seems to have regained much of his powers by now. Her way of helping her friends is, to say the least, a bit tricky.

Some simple basics

The most amazing thing of all is that the simple foundations of the two chapters are established in just half an hour, needing another three and a half hours to solve them. It is an exaggeration, even for those who identify themselves as a fan, which gives rise to meaningless twists and turns and patterns that are repeated. And it’s a shame because it didn’t take that much footage for all the pieces to fall into place. As in the previous volume, one still has the feeling that the writers do not know what to do with so many characters and while Nancy, Eleven, Mike, Steve, Eddie or Dustin are exquisitely articulated, others like Jonathan, Argyle or Will lack strength. . Especially bloody is this last case, not so much because it is not made explicit what happens to him – we all sense what happens to him – but because his appearances are poorly written. It also doesn’t help that Noah Schnapp, the actor who brings him to life, is the worst performer of a cast full of charisma and very, very solvent – the two exciting sequences that Gaten Matarazzo and Joseph Quinn share are an example of this.

And although it is full of emotion -it is difficult for the viewer not to miss a tear-, the epilogue does nothing more than lengthen a pretentious ending, which seems almost like a goop to an epic season not only in what it tells but also in how It counts. It’s pure cinema, really. There is, now, a season for us to say goodbye to the Hawkins boys. The wait will be long.

All four seasons of ‘Stranger Things’ are available on Netflix.