A lame cliffhanger doesn’t ruin a high-emotion, heavy-metal climax.
Warning: This review contains spoilers aboutStranger Things 4.
In some ways the finale ofStranger Things 4is unforgivable.
Millie Bobby Brown on ‘Stranger Things’.Netflix
A well-armed squad attacks the season’s villain, and then just kinda lets him fall out a window.
He disappears when nobody’s watching, and I know, that happened inHalloween.
ButJamie Lee Curtiswasn’t three people who spent one whole episode prepping a heavy-ammo gun store loadout.
The mission is kill, not wound.
Unless they’re trying to set up season 5.
Also: A gateway rips through Hawkins, opening a doorway to the Upside Down murderverse.
A very cool, unusually bleak ending: The good guys lose!
Then she gets resurrected into a see-ya-next-season coma.
Finally, there are two straight meta-jokes about how thinDavid Harbouris now.
Stranger Things 4never did just one of anything.
Hop (Harbour) escapes the same prison three times.
Two broken romances rekindle.
ThatKate Bush song, righteously retrieved for the TikTok crowd, gets overplayed past oblivion.
More, more, more.
Max baits him Earthside.
All that while Hop and Joyce (Winona Ryder) duel devious Demogorgons.
I count four separate dimensions and Russia, too.
Eleven learns Papa is a monster, which we all knew in 2016.
Does the show really have any ideas for Eleven?
An early (and eerie) plot thread about herCarrie-ish rage disappears.
The shocking prologue (she killed kids!)
gets chumped into a non-shock (she did not kill kids!).
Hawkins descends into religious hysteria: realCruciblestuff, neighbor-against-neighbor, a small town torn asunder.
That thread seems to set up some drama for the kids' parents.
Then the parents and the hysteria fade away.
Next season will be the last.
Its apparent concept the Upside Down ishere gets teased in the finale.
Which makesStranger Things 4, in hindsight, a moving-the-chesspieces connecting chapter.
Get Hopper out of Russia.
Get Eleven her powers back.
Get the Nancy/Steve/Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) triangle cooking again.
It’s the 2022 version of aLostepisode where people walk across the island, except 13 hours long.
So there are many things to dislike about this season.
The adult performances are all TOO LOUD.
If I ever hearPaul Reisersay “kiddo” again, I am throwing my TV out the window.
And yet, I dug a lot of it.
Hop slays a Demogorgon with a sword!!!
So many people get tentacle-choked to almost-death.
And Jonathan looks very perturbed indeed.
These plotlines individually were good, meh, or bleh.I could’ve lost Russia entirely.
(Formerly: An unknowable realm of pure, unending chaos.
Now: Headquarters forStrangerThanos.)
But the finale’s crosscutting was symphonic, bangs and crashes and screams across realities.
It benefited from a Max focus, and Sink’s fully committed doomed performance.
I mean it as a massive compliment when I sayStranger Things' weird kids are growing into weird adults.
I worry some soul left this building.
Now the volume is only cranked high.
Still, what’s more ’80s than colorfully excessive excess?
