Stranger Things Season 4 is a Bloated, Competent, Boring and Mesmerizing Mess (No Spoilers)
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The cultural phenomenon is competent enough, but retreads old ground and doesn’t say anything.
Stranger Things has recently been released on Netflix for its fourth season. The cultural phenomenon aims to keep its momentum and propel itself forward to hopefully, and likely inevitably, maintain its popularity for a series of spinoffs.
In order to garner interest for spinoffs and to cement itself on the Mount Rushmore of Netflix originals, the show must first deliver quality entertainment. Which it does, but… mostly doesn’t.
Stranger things Season 4 is a competent show that is still somehow astonishingly boring. It’s a show you can’t keep your eyes off but simultaneously can’t wait to end. The show manages to have everything you’d want in a television series but simultaneously void of the vital ingredients that make shows remarkable and memorable. It’s a bloated, competent, boring and mesmerizing mess.
Our favorite nerds are now in high school, with some living in California and others still living in Hawkins. The plotlines began pretty much exactly where you’d expect them. El and Mike are exchanging letters, counting down the days to see each other. Lucas is on the basketball team and deals with the internal turmoil of trying to work his way into the cool crowd while remaining loyal to his closest friends. Dustin is looking for a sub for their DnD group while Steve and Maya have found work at a video store. Jonathan and Nancy struggle with their time away from each other, while Max and Joyce are grieving from the tragedies from the previous season.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the premise of the season which navigates through the peak of satanic panic (which is always cool to see the dispelling of such a topic). The audience knows some stranger things are about to begin. The problem comes from the audience’s frustration from being three steps ahead of the plot at all times. The audience has the superior perspective in this show, having more information than the characters. If the show retreads old information too many times, the audience will grow bored. And that’s kind of exactly what happens.
“Does this have something to do with that death?” Jason, the new one-dimensional captain of the basketball team asks. The question comes during a police interrogation moments after he gives a heartfelt speech about the tragic losses and horrors Hawkins has suffered in the past.
The characters kind of seem to have selective amnesia. It’s reminiscent of John Mulaney’s joke about Ice T on Law and Order. 100 seasons in and Ice T is still surprised murderers exist.
Our favorite nerds in Hawkins seem to be one step ahead of everyone, but still two steps behind the audience’s patience. We know that the characters are going to outsmart and maneuver past the unfathomably incompetent adults, so that leaves the show’s entertainment in the hands of the execution of their plan and defeating the season’s new big bad.
The show is entirely plot because of this. There isn’t a story. The show isn’t about anything. It doesn’t ask us any questions. It doesn’t give us something to ponder or reflect upon. And it’s not making a statement about anything. Now, the show doesn’t have to do any of that, but if you find yourself bored watching a carbon copy of the lightning in a bottle that was season one, this is likely why. You’ve been there and done that. The show is competent enough to keep you coming back, but you’re bored waiting for it to capture that lightning again. The problem is it never will, and you shouldn’t even want it to.
Another symptom of this is reflected in the show’s inability to create tension or stakes. In every season, we know that a character is not really in any sort of danger as the only people who die are those freshly introduced in the current season. So every time a main character’s life is in danger, we don’t really feel anything. Once again, the audience is several steps ahead of the show.
The stakes of the show suffer from the same thing — whether they’re internal or external. The external threat of the Upside Down or anything supernatural is always interesting enough to make us raise our eyebrows. It’s enough to mesmerize us with the 80s’ aesthetic and music surrounding it. However, without coupling it with actual stakes, it leaves the plot to be a bit of a mess where characters are conveniently written out of the corner they’re in at the expense of story. The show is unable to put a magnifying glass to anything, ask any question or make a statement because it’s retreading old ground every chance it gets.
The Duffer Brothers understand what made their show the cultural phenomenon that it is, but by being too scared to do anything with it, they’ve made the same season of television four times. Instead of trying to execute the impossible task of recapturing the lightning in the bottle, they should have took the chance to make the show be about something. Make it say something.
If you really reach, you can possibly extract a vague message of appreciating your friends, the importance of family or maybe a question about what sacrifices you’re willing to make to help your friends. But the characters don’t seem to remember any of this either. And they do not act upon these themes. They suffer from the same selective amnesia that has seemingly made every character outside of our main group forget about Hawkins’ past.
Perhaps the show would work better if the audience had selective amnesia or were expected to not remember the events of the previous season. When you have a cultural phenomenon in your hands, you have to do more than make the same season four times in a row. You’ve just broken into the vault and stolen the most precious jewel, you have to have a plan for what to do next.
What makes a movie or show revered and remembered after its gone is the philosophical questions it asks and/or explores. Judgement at Nuremberg asks us if silence is complicity. Are you equally responsible if you let something happen despite not committing the act? Whiplash and La La Land ask us how much you are willing to sacrifice to achieve your goal. Is that indescribable dream worth it? 2001: A Space Odyssey is a film about mankind’s next step in evolution. Game of Thrones puts a magnifying glass to the corrupting lust for power and our political squabbling in the face of an existential threat. Breaking Bad asks us how far we would go to protect our family and the ones we love.
Stranger Things is a show about… nothing.
I don’t want to diminish the competency of the Duffer Brothers. They understand how to create a television show, they just unfortunately didn’t know what to do with this specific one.
The abundance of plotlines retreading old ground makes the show bloated. The execution of the plot is competent enough to make it watchable. When you have characters that are only used as vessels to solve the plot rather than asking any sort of question or holding a magnifying glass to any semblance of a theme, it makes the show boring. When you combine all of this, you have a mesmerizing mess. The show gives us little reason to believe the remainder of Season 4 — which is yet to release — will be anything different.
