Stranger Things 4

March, 1986. Six months after the Starcourt Mall disaster, the town of Hawkins, Indiana is still struggling to return to normal. The gang who have repeatedly defeated incursions into our world from the parallel universe of the Upside Down are split between Hawkins and a new home in California, whilst Sheriff Jim Hopper is missing, presumed dead. However, a trail of clues leads Joyce Byers to realise he is still alive and in prison in the Soviet Union. A new spate of murders in Hawkins leads the authorities to believe a satanic cult is at work in the town, but the truth is that the Upside Down has once again found a way of worming into our world...and this time it wants to stay for good.

Back in 2016, Stranger Things felt like a breath of fresh air. A show rooted in nostalgia that also remembered to bring to bear some original ideas, some great characterisation and a soundtrack to die for. When it came back for the sequel, it took a cue from James Cameron by ramping up the visual effects, the stakes and the emotional throughline of the story to make something outstanding. For its third go-around, the show faltered a little with some silly storylines and some iffy characterisation (remember when Hopper suddenly turned into a massive arsehole for a whole season for no reason?), and a vague sense that maybe the writers were running out of ideas, but rallied at the finish to deliver something very enjoyable.

Going to the well for a fourth time is dangerous. You might come up with something so terrible humanity as a collective whole might recoil from any memory of it existing (or worse, or even worse). You might come up with something that is clearly stupid but also highly enjoyable. Or you could strike out and make something genuinely terrific.

For its fourth season, Stranger Things has decided to really up the ante. Which is a tall order since for both previous seasons it already upped the ante quite a bit. So this time around they smash through the absurdity barrier with budget (several episodes cost more than $30 million apiece), cast size (there are 20 regular and major castmembers, and around a dozen more with important roles) and episode length (the season finale is a bum-numbing two and a half hours, and only one episode is under 70 minutes). If Stranger Things was a network show with 44-minute episodes, its fourth season would be 17 episodes long, but condensed down into nine. It's a lot of television and a lot of show to watch.

The show does its best to pull off its huge scale by emulating The Lord of the Rings, which to be fair if you're going big or going home is definitely a good template to use. The season sets up a new, powerful and singular enemy with "Vecna" (not his real or assumed name, but part of the ongoing Dungeons & Dragons IP-referencing approach which Wizards of the Coast is absolutely loving) and our titanic cast has to split into three subgroups to deal with him and other assorted subplots the show has been generating. Team 1, consisting of Eleven, Will, Jonathan, Jonathan's wholly superfluous stoner friend and a visiting Mike, is out in California where the Byers clan is desperately trying to pretend that everything is fine. Joyce and Murray soon abscond, forming Team 2, who decide to embark on a two-person rescue mission to Kamchatka in the Soviet Far East to rescue the missing Hopper, who was (somehow) captured by the Soviets and taken to a prison. This is actually far more ridiculous than even a brief plot summary can do justice to.

Then, back in Hawkins, Team 3 (Dustin, Lucas, Max, Nancy, Steve, Robin, Erica and New Guy Eddie) get involved in investigating a series of grisly murders which, thanks to a nice tie-in with the real-life Satanic Panic that gripped Americans over Dungeons & Dragons (albeit several years later than in reality), get turned back on them and they find themselves in the frame for it. Obviously new big bad Vecna is behind these events and, once everyone gets on the same page, they decide to take the fight into Mordor the Upside Down to try to vanquish him once and for all.

It's a classic structure and it gives us the prodigious cast of characters - which at times it feels like even George R.R. Martin would frown over and make him reach for the murder pen - plenty to do, especially because the writers also continue giving each character personal crises, romances, thwarted crushes and challenges to overcome. This is all laudable - character development is obviously a good thing - but it does tie in to making this season stealthily almost twice as long as the first, and contributes to sometimes stodgy pacing and some very weird plot transitions. At one point three of our heroes are imprisoned and being systemically choked to death by evil tendrils of doom, and it's a good twenty minutes before the writers have rotated between other characters to get back to them, which is not great for tension.

What remains great are the performances. Previous seasons had put the lion's share of work on a few players, like Millie Bobby Brown and David Harbour, but this season everybody knocks it out of the park. Caleb McLaughlin, who was ill-served by the last season, has a great arc and a fantastic emotional moment in the finale, Noah Schnapp gets an equally brilliant moment of emotional catharsis, Natalia Dyer gets a crowning action moment of awesome and Joe Keery gets plenty of fanservice moments which threaten to topple over into cheese, but his charisma keeps it on track. The MVP of the season is Sadie Sink as Max, who gets easily the season's most powerful scenes (with backup from Kate Bush) and maybe the most emotionally bruising ride for a character we've ever seen the show pull off. Only Charlie Heaton as Jonathan is left really hanging with nothing to do, and I think bringing back Matthew Modine as Dr. Brenner was a mistake since he has nothing really major to accomplish except to reiterate his love of making Eleven go through trauma and whine about how it's justified (especially as it means less time for Paul Reiser as Dr. Owens, who was basically Brenner's replacement). Yeah, we got that in Season 1, thanks.

It's to the show's credit that it manages to spin all these plates and move things forward, but the pacing is uneven and sometimes stodgy. I'd have been happy dropping entire subplots and characters if they serve no role here (give Charlie a year off, say he's at college and bring him back for the final season), and certainly condensing others. The Soviet storyline in Season 3 was ludicrous and its sequel in Season 4 is only marginally more interesting, with new arrival Tom Wlaschiha (late of Game of Thrones) doing some heavy lifting to keep this story vaguely compelling. Also, we already have an American Murray, I'm not sure why we need a Russian clone of him as well, who's even more annoying. The fact that the Joyce/Murray/Yuri side of the Russian story is played almost entirely for comedy whilst the Hopper/Enzo side of is played for gritty prison tropes and outright horror is also grating. Stranger Things has terrific form for balancing comedy and horror, but Season 4 definitely feels like it drops the ball a few times with tonal mismanagement.

Stranger Things does a lot right with its fourth season but it also does a lot wrong, particularly as it winds up. It's bum-numbing finale in particular feels off, recursively pushing a character to the brink of death and then wimping out at the last minute (the exact same character they did it to earlier), making sure that only guest stars or people we hate are killed off for real, and then deploying the exact same method of plot resolution that we already saw in previous seasons (it's not a massive spoiler to say that Eleven is involved). The only big shift here is the producers knowing that they have a fifth and final season greenlit already, so we actually get a full-scale cliffhanger this time around, one that does promise to go really big...but that's for a while down the road.

Stranger Things' fourth season (****) is still a big-budget spectacle, watchable and often fun, with great characters whom it's fun to spend time with. It also struggles to balance its huge cast and myriad subplots satisfyingly, and when given the opportunity to do something new or shocking, it decides to fall back on safely emulating tropes and repeating plot points from earlier, better seasons. But if the shine is starting to fade on the show (and ending it after five seasons feels very wise), there's still a lot here to enjoy. The season is now available in full worldwide on Netflix.

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Stranger Things 3

Hawkins, Indiana, 1985. School's out for the summer and the kids are enjoying themselves...apart from Will, who is annoyed at his friends constantly dropping him to hang out with their girlfriends. There's a new shopping mall in town and things seem to be on the up...until Dustin and Steve uncover evidence that the Russians are in town.

Stranger Things is the jewel in Netflix's crown, the show that made the streaming service must-watch television in 2016 and then exceeded that with its second season a year later. The streamer has had mixed success in replicating its appeal, with the ending of old mainstays Orange is the New Black and House of Cards making it even more dependent on the old favourite to deliver in its third season.

Fortunately, the third season delivers despite facing a number of obstacles. These include the young child actors growing up, something the show chooses to lean into and make the focus of a series of storylines, and the show of course simply not being as fresh as it once was. The 1980s nostalgia and the borrowing of tropes from Spielberg, Carpenter, Dante and Hughes movies was interesting in Season 1 and Season 2 kept things fresh by mixing things in with the increased spectacle of a James Cameron movie, but Season 3 faces the problem that the show is running out of 1980s tropes to exploit. Fortunately, the Duffer Brothers are canny enough to find new angles to tell their story (even if this means drawing inspiration from other decades), this time leaning on films like Red Dawn, The Terminator, The Thing, Mallrats and Dawn of the Dead, and exploiting themes of paranoia and the fragmenting of friend groups as they age.

Structurally, Season 3 splits the main cast up early on and has them taking on their own individual missions. Dustin, Steve, newcomer Robin and Erica (the ultra-sassy sister of Lucas, promoted from a scene-stealing role in Season 2) discover evidence of Russian agents working at the mall and investigating. Hopper and Joyce become embroiled in a battle of wills with a mercenary with a Terminator-like focus. Much of the rest of the gang discover evidence that the Upside Down is still impacting on events in this world, despite Eleven closing the gate in Season 2, and find themselves in a battle against a new monster, this time one that is exceptionally gross. Once again, for a show with so many young protagonists, it's a bit odd that you don't really want to be watching this with sub-teenage kids due to the amount of gore and swearing on display.

Splitting the cast up, Fellowship-style, allows their individual stories to rattle along nicely and the show is confident enough to hold fire on realising the full stakes and scope of the threat until the end of the fourth episode, devoting the first three episodes to set-up work and seeing our heroes having fun instead. This mostly works quite well, although Stranger Things is starting to feel like fanservice central. So we have Dustin and Steve's slightly incongruous friendship, simply because fans loved their bromance in Season 2, and we have the morally ambiguous Billy walking around without his shirt on. A lot. The show dodges a bullet this time around because those stories end up being good enough to maintain the viewer's interest (Billy even becomes somewhat sympathetic by the end of the season, a major feat given how under-developed he was in Season 2) and them leading to some genuinely good moments, such as the friendship between Steve and co-worker Robin which goes in a somewhat unexpected direction. The show even finds ways of subverting audience expectations, like not over-relying on Eleven's powers to get the kids out of every jam they find themselves in.

For a show with dimension-hopping kids fighting horrendous biological horrors, criticising the show for being unrealistic may be churlish. But, that said, there are some moments that do stretch credulity way past the breaking point, like a hostile foreign power somehow building a massive base of operations in the middle of rural America and running huge, energy-draining experiments without anyone noticing. There are also some storylines that are definitely under-developed, like dozens of people going missing and no-one really seeming to care, the kids vanishing from their homes for days on end and their parents shrugging it off with, "it's summer, what can you do?" (bearing in mind it's only two years since Will's disappearance traumatised the town). Cary Elwes gets some nice material as the town's corrupt mayor, but his story abruptly halts halfway through the season and is paid only lip service in the finale, whilst a subplot (begun in Season 2) with Karen Wheeler being tempted into an affair with a younger man also ends up fizzling out with no real resolution. Of course, with at least one more season to come, some of these elements may be explored further.

The third season of Stranger Things (****½) remains highly compelling viewing, with spectacular visual effects and production values, outstanding performances by the excellent cast and the writers finding surprising ways to take what might have been otherwise a stale story. However, the show also suffers from some issues with repetition, credibility and some undercooked subplots. With the Duffer Brothers still split on whether to end the show with its fourth or fifth season, I'm thinking that wrapping it up sooner, whilst it's still fresh (and before the kids enter college) might be a better idea. The show is streaming worldwide on Netflix now.

Stranger Things 2

Halloween, 1984. A year has passed since a young girl named "Eleven" escaped from Hawkins Labs into the outside world and unleashed chaos in her wake. Will Byers has been rescued from the mysterious realm known as the Upside Down, but is still suffering the consequences of his time there. The disappearance of Barbara Holland has also had unforeseen ramifications. The arrival of strangers in Hawkins coincides with a resurgence in activity from the Upside Down...and the beginning of an even larger, graver threat to the town.

Stranger Things came out of nowhere last year to become one of Netflix's biggest-ever hits, a show that was both an indulgence in 1980s nostalgia but also remembered to tell a really good, interesting and brilliantly-characterised story at the same time. The renewal for a second season was both welcome, because this world is compelling and deserves more exploration, but also worrying, because Stranger Things had a story with a well-defined beginning, middle and end, and artificially introducing another mystery in the town might feel like a tacked-on move.

Fortunately, it doesn't. After a slightly haphazard start, Stranger Things 2 (the official name of the season, denoting that this is a proper sequel, not just a continuation of the first season) soon matches and, in some areas, outstrips its forebear. The Duffer Brothers made it clear that for this season they wanted to make a sequel along the lines of Aliens or Terminator 2: Judgement Day, a story with bigger stakes, more action and a larger threat, but also more compelling characters and greater emotional resonance. They bring in some new characters, expand the world further with more information about the Upside Down and the experimental subjects at Hawkins Labs (giving rise to a very good one-episode side-story set in Chicago) and also up the stakes in a massive way.

This increase in scale does not come at the expense of characterisation. In fact, the multi-pronged threat faced by Hawkins results in the characters splitting up into smaller teams to deal with what initially appear to be unrelated storylines. Nancy and Jonathan team up to find justice for Barb, Dustin and Steve join forces to tackle a new creature issue and Mike devotes his time to helping Will overcome his issues from the Upside Down. A bit like Lord of the Rings - or the later part of Aliens - the team is forced to split up only to rejoin forces later on for the grand finale...and it's a massive finale, with huge ramifications for the world.

The show's cultural touchstones continue, with more classic 1980s tunes being referenced, movies like Ghostbusters and The Terminator being namechecked and scenes being included which homage everything from Poltergeist to Aliens to The Goonies. The new castmembers include several shot-outs to the period, most notably the addition of Sean Astin (The Goonies, Lord of the Rings) and Paul Reiser (Aliens), albeit with both playing very well-rounded and interesting characters.

On the negative side of things, Stranger Things 2 does start to overdo it with the CGI. Season 1 made a point of not just being set in the 1980s, but even aping the style of a 1980s movie, with minimal CGI and the use of practical effects wherever possible. The second season has no truck with this, and CGI is used quite extensively. A lot of the time it's of the highest quality and the creature scenes would be difficult to do without it, but some CG establishing shots feel unnecessary. In particular, the use of CG to create school corridors in the Upside Down version of Hawkins feels a like a bit mid-2000s video game.

Still, that's a very minor complaint. Stranger Things 2 (*****) gives us greater insight into the existing characters, introduces interesting new faces and expands the world and scale of events whilst not selling out the show's heart and soul. The biggest question when the season ends is "now what?", because I can't see the third season getting bigger still. We'll have to wait until 2019 to find out the answer to that question. In the meantime, Stranger Things 2 is available to stream on Netflix worldwide.

Stranger Things: Season 1

Hawkins, Indiana, 1983. Four young schoolboys spend their time watching movies, playing Dungeons and Dragons and avoiding bullies. One of the boys, Will, abruptly vanishes. Shortly afterwards, a mysterious girl appears in the woods. Known only as "Eleven" she agrees to help the three boys find their friend, if they help keep her safe.

A few moments into watching the first episode of Stranger Things it is entirely possible you will forget you are watching something made in 2016 and come to believe that the Duffer Brothers have somehow opened a space/time portal to 1983 and gotten their hands on a contemporary TV show that they have spruced up with modern editing and effects. Setting a story in the early 1980s is one thing, but Stranger Things takes a step forward in authenticity by making it feel like it was written and filmed then, with a battery of different techniques used to sell the period detail. It is a remarkable achievement.

It would be, however, all for naught if the show was not well-written and good enough to stand on its own feet. And it certainly is that. Stranger Things takes its cue from the 1980s but is clever enough to use more than just a few tropes and basic ideas. Stretching a single Steven Spielberg or Joe Dante movie idea across eight hours would, no matter how good the plot, result in a badly padded and stretched story. Instead, the Duffer Brothers throw a lot more into the mix. You have a kid-focused storyline reminiscent of The Goonies or E.T., a teenage-focused storyline that seems to be riffing briefly on The Breakfast Club but also every teen horror movie ever (and occasionally even The Evil Dead and John Carpenter's films) and an adult-oriented mystery story riffing more on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (with lightbulbs replacing mashed potato), The X-Files and Twin Peaks. But Stranger Things uses these things as flavourings and touchstones. The story and characters are more than strong enough to stand on their own.

At the heart of the story is the disappearance of Will and the impact this has on his friends, his older brother and his mother Joyce (played with aplomb by Winona Ryder, whose casting provides a neat, authentic tie-in to the decade in question). This ties with themes of childhood, innocence lost, the worst fears of parents and helplessness in the face of an uncaring world. This very relatable theme informs everything else that goes on in the story. Similarly, the discovery of Eleven (12-year-old Millie Bobby Brown providing the breakout performance of the story) and the abuse she suffered at the hands of a coldly uncaring government institution only interested in results and advantages taps into societal beliefs about the innocence of children, the morality of scientific research and notions of corporate responsibility. The complexity of these elements, emphasised by Eleven's Stockholm Syndrome-like relationship with Dr. Brenner (a career-resurging move for Matthew Modine), is an element where Stranger Things differs from its forebears, where the likes of Close Encounters and E.T. ultimately had well-meaning government agents whom the heroes eventually team up with. In Stranger Things the bad guys remain relentlessly bad.

Other elements of the story also evoke traditional tropes but stand them on their head. Nancy (Natalia Dyer) is caught in a love triangle between the cool Steve (Joe Keery) and the shy, more geeky photographer Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) which is so 1980s it hurts, down to Steve's cruel jokes and Jonathan being almost too shy to talk to Nancy but later proving his worth with a baseball bat ordained with nails. However, the show complicates things by showing Steve as having more nuance and depth than it first appears and by giving Jonathan some rather unlikeable traits (like taking pictures of people without their knowledge or consent). Nancy herself is also a more interesting character than many of her inspirations, with her later belligerence and disregard for her own safety (but deep concern over the safety of others) in tackling the monster being quite impressive. Police Chief Jim Hopper (David Harbour) feels a bit under-developed as a protagonist in the opening episodes but he acquires more layers as the series proceeds and the final episode sets his character on a path which is downright intriguing.

The heart and soul of the show, however, belongs to the kids: Brown's Eleven is the absolute Emmy-baiting stand-out, but Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) all feel like they've stepped onto the show fresh from trying out for The Goonies. They're funny, intense when needed, act with credible kid logic at all times and play a mean game of Dungeons and Dragons. If Stranger Things's tight eight-episode run is to mostly be lauded (for the tightness of the story and excellent pacing), it's the fact we don't get to see more of the kids' adventures which makes it regrettable. These kids are going to grow up and move onto other projects faster than you can blink.

The show also does atmosphere very well, with a terrific synth-driven score adding to the excellent design work and well-judged use of effects, particularly in the creation of the "Upside Down". Everything down to the juxtaposition of sleeping horror and the cheery Christmas spirit in the finale (riffing off both Stephen King and Gremlins) is pitch perfect.

The show is not flawless. The villains are somewhat one-note and it feels a bit of a shame to cast an actor of Matthew Modine's history and stature only to have him not do very much. Most of his character is explored in Eleven's flashbacks and these hint at a more complicated character than the one-note, science-obsessed, amoral person we seen in the present scenes, but it's not really enough to add real depth to the character. In addition, the show sometimes invokves "1980s movie logic" to further the plot and have characters make stupid mistakes. Two characters are standing right next to each other and one somehow manages to disappear without the other noticing. Characters are reticent to share information which would break open the story earlier (and with less bloodshed), even when there is no reason they wouldn't. A few characters, like Jonathan and Will's deadbeat dad, show up, don't do anything and then disappear, all equally pointlessly. And the show feels like it fumbles badly with supporting character Barb (Shannon Purser), whom, despite an excellent performance, it under-utilises badly before dismissing from the story rather abruptly (and, bafflingly, with no real consequences to the story when there should be).

But such flaws are niggling and easily borne. Stranger Things (****½) is nostalgic without being over-indulgent, well-acted throughout and features a brilliant soundtrack and some very good characterisation. It is available to watch through Netflix now worldwide, and a second season is in the planning stages.