Looks like
Stranger Things Season 4 was broken into two uneven parts (maybe because of production work needing to be done on the final two episodes? I have no idea. The first seven released at the end of May, the final two air this coming Friday.) I figured I might as well try to catch up by the time the final two drop, just to avoid spoilers. Some comments below, no real spoilers.
Episode 1: Definitely feels darker while a bit better done in terms of production, script, and so forth. The kids are a lot older, especially the boys appearance-wise. They're also 17-20 years old but supposedly freshmen in high school? (and Joe Keery AKA Steve is 30 now.) I guess I can't bitch a ton, considering the two Spiderman casts before Holland, but it's a hard sell in spots. There was some nice parallel edits between the basketball game and the D&D game. They are still playing 1st edition based on time period + the DM screens / book pages I saw, I don't think 2nd edition still came out for some years yet. (I was playing 1st edition at college in 1987.) Joe Quinn is great as Eddie. This episode has some pretty creepy crazy moments in it and definitely feels like it took a step into more mature content; most of the last 15 minutes feels like it's totally channeling
Nightmare on Elm Street, just with better production quality. It's a hell of an episode ending -- gratz ST, you actually managed to weird me out rather than being a kiddie pseudo-horror show.
Episode 2: I'm going to complain a little bit up front about the two things I didn't like or didn't find authentic (because this is literally my teenage years here, I graduated hs in 1986 from a rural out-of-the-way high school similar to Hawkins).
- One: Despite my living in a rural and very religious area, and despite the anti-D&D groups being out there on a national level, no one really knew what they were because they weren't typically relevant. So seeing people in Hawkins getting anti-RPGs was a little much. In HS I knew about six other people who played D&D and other TSR games. I actually gave a speech in my high school class (persuasion speech, was the assignment) to persuade why RPGs like D&D were productive and healthy, and afterwards people said they liked it but didn't really know what RPGs were -- and this is traditional religion / people who have since gone evangelical and are dancing in glee over the Roe decision. Basically that whole social issue was a handful of dumbass anti-gamer moms making a stink because their druggie kid did something self-destructive or criminal while also having dabbled in D&D, but there was never a pandemic of RPG maniacs out there doing anti-social shit nor were many people outside of gaming even aware of the games.
- Two: Bullying happens, but I'm so sick of the crazy tropes where it is always ratcheted up to eleven. I say this even as someone who was bullied in middle school. (For example, when I was on crutches for six weeks, people during class would steal the foam pads on the tops of my crutches and pass them around during class to keep them away from me / do obscene things with them and not give them back. I was bullied in other ways as well.) A lot of the bully sequences in here are just crazy, were more likely to happen in middle school (in high school people tend to be more focused on their own things), and far too public -- typically the bullying was a little more behind the scenes, so the perps could get away with it and gaslight you after. I consider this tropey plotting to be rather lazy, and it was all to force El into the crazy situation that plotline is currently at.
Aside from this, the Russian hostage plotline seems kind of bonkers too. I'm just like "yeah, fine, it's Stranger Things, whatever," but seriously? // But the Vecna plotline is going as expected, and is decent enough.
All in all, season 4 seems a marked improvement on earlier seasons. However, the episodes are all too damned long. Some shows might be able to pull off 80 minute episodes routinely, but not you, ST. They all feel too long and I keep pausing and looking at the time left. COuldn't they have broken these down differently? And couldn't they have made a better season split, unless there's a reason they are front-loading seven episodes? You'd think they would have had a more even split, and could have split it up into more episodes versus these overlong ones.
EDIT: Not much to say about Episode 3 (the primary takeaway is that El is going to try to regain her powers), but... I think
Episode 4 might be my favorite of the entire show so far. They do crib from Silence of the Lambs (not an 80's film) briefly, but there's a number of things that happen in this episode that either caught me off-guard or actually made me feel something emotionally. There are actually action sequences of urgency. There's three different plotlines in general; one of them actually pissed me off (I'm still kind of mad and want a particular character to die in a fire); another one has a great impromptu Bluff roll in it; and the third arc actually choked me up. It might be the only time I have been moved by something in this series -- and it's tied to actually focusing on a particular character's arc, and the cast member nails their role so well in this episode. Pretty great performance. I wish the entire series had been this solid. I'm surprised and a little impressed. This might be the only episode I would rewatch on its own.
EDIT2: Finished the season last night. This might be the first season I'd call "solid." More mature approach, cast is older, storytelling is actually better. There's still some dumb stuff (like, does JIF still come in glass jars? Not sure, but not here in the USA at least -- but they needed it as glass, not plastic, for a convenient plot point) -- that kind of thing is sloppy to me -- but they actually managed to pull the multiple parallel plots together by the end while having a lot of cathartic moments. I can't say I'm keen on the Duffers picking up duties for King's "The Talisman," but to be honest that story isn't much different than what they are doing now with the Upside Down, so they've had practice.
This season also has some interesting guest casting. For example, this guy:
who most of us are far more acquainted with as this guy:
