Trans-dimensional Lite-Brite chats. An epic D & D-slash-basketball montage.
The scariest bad guy yet. "Stranger Things" is back and bigger than ever,
but with so many plotlines to untangle, you may need some help wrapping your head around it all.
Keep watching for a handy guide to the ending of Season 4, Part 1.
It seemed like "Stranger Things" Season 4 was going to be split between the Midwest
and the West Coast, with the California contingent set to have their own spring
break storyline. But things go downhill out west, and fast.
There's tension between Mike, Will, and El, and that's even before El bashes the local mean girl
Angela in the face with a skate. The Lenora Hills police arrive at the Byers' residence
to book El for assault, but the military and the Hawkins lab are looking for her, too.
Dr. Owens' team assigns a security detail to the Byers' house, breaks El out,
and convinces her to go to his underground lab, where he may be able to restore her powers.
She panics when she sees Dr. Brenner again and has to be sedated, but her telekinetic
abilities start to come back, and she decides to participate willingly in "The Nina Project."
But government forces, led by Lt. Colonel Sullivan,
are hot on their trail. After a harrowing shootout, Mike, Will,
and Jonathan escape with a wounded guard in Argyle's van. The guard dies, but not
before giving Mike a pen that contains a secret phone number that isn't quite what it appears.
"We're not calling a phone. We're calling a computer."
Mike guides them to Salt Lake City, where Dustin's hacker girlfriend lives.
Suzie, who thinks they're trying to win Dusty a video game console,
informs them her PC has been confiscated as punishment for changing Dustin's Latin grade.
However, her many siblings create a distraction that allows them to sneak
into her dad's office and trace the IP address to coordinates in Nevada. When last we see them,
they're ready to hit the road again and rescue El with a printout of the location in hand.
Jason Carver sure thinks he's the good guy, but it's obvious to every "Stranger Things" fan from
his first appearance at the pep rally that he's actually one of this season's many antagonists.
We know that his girlfriend Chrissy was seeing the guidance counselor,
presumably because her mom contributed to her body image issues, but the way she interacts with
Eddie suggests her relationship with Jason may not have been everything the couple presented it as.
Just about everybody suspects Eddie is responsible for Chrissy's murder, but
because her death is so unusual, with no signs of physical contact, there are lingering questions.
The police theorize that Chrissy was at Eddie's trailer to buy drugs,
which Jason refuses to believe, despite it being totally true.
"So how does this work, exactly?"
He doesn't like the way the cops are handling the case, so he assembles his
basketball teammates (including Lucas), and takes matters into his own hands.
Jason beats it out of Eddie's bandmate that Dustin might know something.
Lucas helps his friends evade the jocks, but they catch up to Eddie at Lover's Lake.
Jason and teammate Patrick swim after Eddie as he tries to escape
in a boat. That's when Vecna kills Patrick in spectacular fashion.
Rather than this convincing Jason of Eddie's innocence, the jock doubles down.
Jason interrupts a public forum with a fiery speech that mirrors his Episode 1
pep talk in which he insists that Eddie has made a deal with the devil and that
the Hellfire Club is a dangerous satanic cult. Most of the townspeople join him
to hunt down Eddie and the rest of the gang, defying the curfew.
They're still out there with metaphorical pitchforks raised at the end of Part 1.
The Hawkins gang is desperate to clear Eddie's name and defeat Vecna before Max becomes his
next victim. They follow Dustin's compass, which goes haywire around otherworldly energy,
to Lover's Lake, where Patrick met his end only hours before.
Nancy recalls that passageways between dimensions seemed to appear around kill sites.
The older kids — Nancy, Robin, Steve, and Eddie — take the boat to see if this holds true for Vecna,
while the younger kids — Dustin, Max, and Lucas — stay on the shore.
Steve finds a gate at the bottom of the lake, but he gets ensnared by a vine and
pulled into the Upside Down. He's attacked by demo-bats before he's saved by Nancy, Robin,
and Eddie, who follow each other through the ominous glowing tear.
"Do you guys know if these bats have, like, rabies?"
"What?"
Demo-bats are guarding the "Watergate," so the crew retreats to Upside Down Skull
Rock, then the Upside Down Wheeler house. There,
they can hear the other kids in the real house, where they're being held for questioning.
Eddie uses a chandelier to signal SOS in Morse code, then Dustin and Nancy
communicate via Lite Brite. He reminds them that if every attack creates a gate,
there should be one in Eddie's uncle's trailer,
where Chrissy died — not to mention one near where Fred died, which may yet come into play.
Steve, Nancy, Robin, and Eddie jump on the Wheelers' bikes and
ride seven miles to the trailer park where, sure enough, there's a big,
red gash in the ceiling. It provides an escape route, but it also establishes an important fact
that may be of even more consequence in Part 2: Vecna attacks open gates.
Once they're in the Upside Down, Nancy suggests they arm themselves with guns
she keeps in her bedroom. Unfortunately, when they arrive at the alternate version of the
Wheeler house and rummage through Nancy's room, the guns are nowhere to be found.
Nancy thinks she knows why when she picks up an old diary.
In her real bedroom on the surface, the diary's pages are filled up with entries,
but in this dimension, Nancy's journaling stops on November 6,
1983 — the day Will went missing, back in the series premiere.
"We're in the past."
We don't yet understand the extent to which Nancy's hypothesis is true. Her room is frozen
in time, and it's possible that the whole place works according to the same timekeeping system.
A more likely explanation is that in the Upside Down, time is variable.
Nancy's bedroom is probably standing still at what's either her most guilt-ridden moment (Barb's
death) or her first contact with its otherworldly creatures. Similarly, the Upside Down Creel
house — which appears to be a vital location, perhaps even the dimension's center — may well
turn out to be stuck in 1959, the year in which the horrific tragedy occurred there.
If time is relative on the other side of those gates (and especially if it's tied
to individual experience), that adds a fascinating new component to "Stranger
Things" lore that could help explain quite a bit about the show's mysterious underworld.
The storyline that's the most disconnected from the rest of the show (at least so far) is the
plot involving Joyce and Murray's attempt to spring Hopper from a Russian prison.
Joyce receives a package from Russia that contains a doll. She contacts Murray,
who instructs her to break it, and she finds a ransom note. Someone calling themselves
Enzo wants them to bring $40,000 to Alaska in exchange for their friend.
It's not a very realistic plan — Enzo (real name: Dmitri) gives them 100 to 1 odds — and it goes
disastrously wrong. Hopper breaks his foot to slip out of his cuffs and run, but is captured at the
agreed-upon meeting place when their go-between, Yuri, double-crosses them for more money.
Joyce and Murray manage to overtake Yuri in mid-air thanks to Murray's blackbelt-level
combat training, but since they don't know how to fly, they crash land the plane
Back at the prison, Murray successfully impersonates Yuri and gets them inside,
where they see Hopper, Dmitri, and about a dozen other captives in a pit,
preparing for a fight. A mechanized, reinforced door opens, and out comes a Demogorgon.
It quickly dispatches most of the prisoners, but Hopper manages to keep it at bay with a
makeshift spear torch. Meanwhile, Murray tries threatening the guards into opening the pit door,
but they stay loyal to mother Russia, so Murray resorts to martial arts again.
"I gotta hand it to you commies. You're committed!"
When it's all over, Hopper and Dmitri are on the other side of the door from the Demogorgon,
and Hopper and Joyce get to reunite, but at the moment, they're all still stranded in Russia.
One of the reveals that packs the most punch in Part 1 is Max's realization that her mind has
been corrupted by Vecna. Early on, we're led to believe that her depressive mood,
visits to the guidance counselor, and break up with Lucas have to do with the
trauma she suffered witnessing Billy's brutal death and the impact it had on her family.
Her abusive stepdad left, but she and her alcoholic mother are near-destitute in the
trailer park. Max doesn't want the counselor's help, but she does want information about Chrissy.
When she can't pry any details from Ms. Kelly, Max steals her key and reads her files.
She discovers that Fred Benson, Nancy's deceased reporting partner, was a patient too,
and that all three of them had the same symptoms: headaches, nightmares, nosebleeds, and visions.
Max sees the grandfather clock that appears to Vecna's victims shortly
before he takes them and knows she only has about a day left.
She has a full-blown encounter with Vecna at Billy's grave before she's brought back by
the sound of her favorite song: "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)" by Kate Bush. As long as
she's got her Walkman, she's safe, but that's still a pretty precarious position to be in.
Jumping ahead to the Upside Down rescue plot, Nancy climbs through the gate in
Eddie's trailer, but is possessed by Vecna before she can make it home.
While Max saw visions of Billy, Nancy relives Barb's death and then ends up in the Upside
Down's deconstructed version of the Creel House, where she witnesses scenes from Vecna's childhood.
Steve is left frantically trying to shake her back to consciousness.
Season 4 begins with a flashback sequence that implies an eight-year-old Eleven used
her powers to kill all the children and most of the guards at the Hawkins lab,
on September 8, 1979. What actually happened in the highly classified
facility that night is the central mystery of the first seven episodes.
Dr. Owens and Dr. Brenner think El can restore her abilities by reprocessing her memories in the Nina
machine. When she's floated in water and hooked up to its sensors, El relives a series of confusing
and sometimes painful memories — many of which she's suppressed — until they begin to make sense.
A creepy but compassionate lab assistant named Peter Ballard begins to confide in Eleven,
especially when it becomes clear that
she's been subjected to vicious bullying by the other children.
"Sometimes, Papa doesn't tell the truth."
After one of their attacks leaves her with a concussion,
Ballard tells her that Dr. Brenner intends to let them finish her off next time,
as he fears she's too powerful and difficult to control.
She believes him, as she witnessed the staff beat him for what she assumes was his kindness
to her before. He offers to help her run, and in return, she telekinetically removes
a small device from under his skin. It's at this point that El realizes Ballard has powers, too.
Earlier, he said she reminded him of number One. El replied that Papa told them he didn't exist,
but Ballard countered that Papa often lied. After she
tore out his chip — which may have been a tracker, a device to block his power,
or both — he tells El that he's like her, and then he shows her his tattoo. It reads 001.
El had suppressed the Hawkins Lab massacre,
but her sessions in the Nina machine convince her she was a cold-blooded killer.
She fears she retaliated for their bullying, as she'd done with Angela.
When the full picture comes into focus, she learns the truth. In a way, El is somewhat
responsible for the massacre, but only because she freed One. Through her memories, we see that
One committed the mass murder once his powers were restored. El only caught him in the act when she
didn't stay hidden, which leads to their dramatic and extremely expository final confrontation.
Peter Ballard is actually the son of Victor Creel. The family moved to Hawkins because he
was giving his parents trouble and they thought a fresh start might fix everything. It didn't.
We see the still-disturbed young boy kill a rabbit in the same manner that Vecna killed Chrissy.
The Creels were seeking the wisdom of a doctor when their son, fearing he'd be institutionalized,
possessed and murdered his mother and sister and framed his father.
That doctor turned out to be Brenner, who covered up One's crimes and took
him back to his lab, to study him and make more individuals like him.
One begins to twist Eleven's limbs, but she summons all her strength and basically
dissolves him. This opens what might be the first gate to the Upside Down and transforms One
into Vecna. The incident explains why Vecna lurks around the Creel house,
but we still know very little about the origin of his powers.
It's also notable that El's attack opens the gate in the Rainbow Room,
which strongly suggests her gifts (and by extension, One's gifts) came from the Upside Down.
"Stranger Things" has always made the most of its retro setting, aesthetically speaking,
with period-correct fashion and music as well as details like food packaging and movie posters.
Season 4 takes the historical and cultural references to a whole new level,
as the Satanic panic that gripped the country in the mid-'80s factors directly into the plot.
In the world of the show, basketball captain Jason thinks the Hellfire Club is a demonic cult.
"These murders are ritualistic sacrifices!"
He claims he's heard about the phenomenon on the news, and he has a pretty easy time swaying most
of Hawkins to his point of view. Lucas's sister protests that Hellfire's just a club for nerds,
but Jason and his mob err on the side of hysteria, and even Mike,
Dustin, and Lucas's parents have their doubts.
This storyline is completely based in reality. Around the time the series takes place,
America was irrationally concerned with Satanism.
Kids who liked Dungeons and Dragons or Ozzy Osborne became scapegoats for cultural shifts
that made some people uncomfortable. There was even a "60 Minutes" special all about it.
"The parents actually saw their child summon a Dungeons and Dragons
demon into his room before he killed himself."
Anyone who's actually played D&D knows how silly that is. But edgy teens weren't the
Satanic panic's only victims. Anyone could be suspected of corrupting or abusing children,
including daycare workers whose lives were ruined by accusations.
Since "Stranger Things" isn't finished with its own moral hysteria storyline,
things are probably going to get worse for the Hellfire Club before they get better.
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