Argyle the gentle stoner. Eddie the Dungeon Master. Victor the boogeyman.
"Stranger Things" has always had great characters, and Season 4 is no exception.
Keep watching for a rundown of the newest members of this iconic cast. Warning: Spoilers ahead!
We meet Eddie Munson in the cafeteria of Hawkins High, where he initially
comes off as kind of a jerk. Eddie runs the Hellfire Club, a roleplaying game group our
protagonists have joined since their old Dungeon Master, Will, moved west.
Mike and Dustin are genuinely worried about breaking the news that Lucas won't be joining
them for the culmination of Eddie's "Dungeons & Dragons" campaign, and when they finally tell him,
he doesn't take it well. Eddie appears to be a proud troublemaking loser who brags about having
not graduated the year before, but this first impression is designed to throw us off balance.
"Welcome to Hellfire."
Eddie isn't a saint, but he's also not the devil that most of Hawkins will soon believe him to be.
Once we learn more about the Dungeon Master of the Hellfire Club,
he becomes a much more likable character.
When troubled cheerleader Chrissy meets him in the woods to buy drugs,
they bond over shared insecurities. Chrissy acts like she doesn't know him,
then remembers he used to be a quiet kid with short hair who liked to play guitar.
When they go to his uncle's trailer, we can tell that life has been rough for Eddie Munson.
He clearly doesn't have much family or many resources, and his edgy personality
is probably a defense mechanism. However, his life's about to get a lot rougher,
as most of Hawkins suspects him of being a devil-possessed serial killer.
Jason Carver is pretty much the exact opposite of Eddie Munson. A golden boy
with perfectly coiffed blonde locks, Jason is the captain of the Hawkins High basketball team.
Like Eddie, we meet him while he delivers an impassioned speech to his classmates.
However, while Eddie rages against conformity,
Jason rallies the student body to his conformist point of view. His pre-championship tournament
pep talk is full of the empty rhetoric that often follows real-world tragedies.
"What did they die for? For us to lose to some crap school?"
Jason also makes sure to publicly profess his love for Chrissy.
The fact that she stands him up later that night might have nothing to do with their relationship,
or it might be a red flag that things aren't so perfect between the cheerleader and the jock.
We soon see that Jason's good-guy persona is as much a façade as Eddie's bad boy act.
He doesn't see himself as a lawbreaker, but he doesn't think twice about breaking into
someone else's property to party or bragging about underage drinking in front of the cops.
He also has a violent temper. He beats up Eddie's bandmate to
get information and seems poised to do worse if he ever catches up to Eddie.
The end of Season 4, Volume 1, reinforces that Eddie and Jason are indeed diametrically opposed.
Once Jason has witnessed Vecna in action, he goes all-in on the Satanic Panic and
blames the Hellfire Club for the murders. The audience might see him for who he is,
but Hawkins is still mostly on their golden boy's side.
Argyle is the only friend Jonathan has made since moving to California. He's a delivery driver
for Surfer Boy Pizza and a gentle stoner whose product of choice is Purple Palm Tree Delight.
"Why don't you just go to the van and do your thing?"
Argyle is a supportive best bud who actively listens to Jonathan's
concerns about Nancy and gives him sound advice, but he doesn't seem cut out for
the kind of hijinks that Will and Jonathan always seem to get into.
"More weed? Is that really a good idea right now?" "What, you got a better idea to keep him calm?"
Take, for example, when Jonathan, Will, and Mike scheme to order some
Surfer Boy pies so that he can arrive at the Byers house and rescue them,
as they're basically being held under house arrest by Dr. Owen and Dr. Brenner's goons.
However, the military gets there first, and Argyle finds himself in the middle of a gunfight.
He barely keeps it together when an injured guard dies in the back of his
vehicle while fleeing and he loses his mind as they're burying the man in the desert.
Though Jonathan tries to explain that the point of an unmarked grave is to hide the dead body,
empathetic Argyle imagines that he must have had a family and makes a makeshift tombstone
out of a pizza box. When the group road trips to Suzie's house to trace El's location,
Mike warns Argyle that they're very religious. He takes offense and says he's spiritual, too.
More proof that Argyle's a lover and not a fighter? He instantly falls for Eden,
Suzie's foul-mouthed older sister.
We should probably hate this season's otherworldly evil monster the most,
but Angela gives Vecna a run for his money. In her letters to Mike, El makes it seem
like things are going swimmingly since she's moved to California. But Will knows better.
It's not just that El's an unpopular wallflower. She's the target of intense
bullying at her high school, and Angela is the ringleader of the mean kid circus.
Like Jason, Angela manages to get away with pretty vile behavior while,
for the most part, staying on the good side of the authority figures around her. She gives an
insufferable slide show presentation about why Helen Keller is her hero,
then turns around and torments the differently-abled kid in her class.
When she interrupts El as she explains her diorama of Hopper's house,
it's obvious that the teacher is aware that Angela's a bit of a pill. However,
she doesn't do anything to protect El, even as the kids are snickering about her dead father figure.
"I made a dee-ray-ah-muh of our cabin." "More like diarrhea."
In short order, Angela demonstrates the full extent of her cruelty, first by tripping her,
leading to her project being destroyed. El doesn't snitch, but the truth is so obvious that Angela
gets reprimanded. As revenge, Angela orchestrates a humiliating skating rink attack, which is made
even worse by the fact that El lied to Mike and told him that she and Angela were friends.
Nobody deserves a roller skate to the face, but seeing Angela with a
bloody nose is a little satisfying. We don't know if we'll check in with this
meanest of mean girls again in Volume 2, but it's doubtful she learned her lesson.
On the surface, Chrissy is an idealized girl-next-door type. With her bouncy ponytail,
wide eyes, and bright smile, she fits the part of head cheerleader and the basketball
team captain's girlfriend. However, when Max crosses paths with Chrissy, first coming out
of the guidance counselor's office looking upset, then in the bathroom, we know something is amiss.
The way Chrissy holds her stomach as she's leaving Ms. Kelly's room suggests that maybe
she's pregnant. Only moments later, we see what's really going on. Chrissy is bulimic.
As she's purging, she begins to hallucinate monstrous feet.
Then she hears her mother's voice. The sound bites seem like snippets from Chrissy's past.
Her mom was apparently critical of her weight and put far too much emphasis on looks.
Chrissy soon snaps out of it and comes back to reality worse for the wear. Though Chrissy
does smile at Jason during the pep rally in a way that implies she returns his affection,
the fact that she stands him up could mean that she felt the same kind of pressure from him.
She visits Eddie shortly after, hoping he can sell her something to make the pain go away.
Chrissy, who is extremely fragile at this point,
confides in Eddie that she feels like she's losing her mind.
She and Eddie have the kind of chemistry that, for a few minutes in Episode 1,
makes the audience think they could be something.
Unfortunately, the cheerleader with a dark secret doesn't have much time left.
Fred Benson works with Nancy on the Hawkins High School newspaper.
He's trying hard to fill the vacancy that Nancy's boyfriend and former reporting
partner Jonathan left when he moved to California.
"You're not Jonathan." "Clearly not."
Too bad for nerdy Fred, his flirtation comes off more like antagonization.
Nancy doesn't respond well to his negative attitude or his judgment of Jonathan.
Even though Nancy's his senior and the superior journalist, he doesn't show her much respect.
But whether or not Nancy likes him or his writing is the least of Fred's problems.
When a cop comes to the car window to see what Fred and Nancy are doing at a crime scene,
Fred experiences the same hallucinations that plagued Chrissy just before her death.
In Fred's case, he relives a car accident in which the other passenger was killed.
Vecna, in the form of the officer, implies that Fred was responsible for the fiery crash.
Around the same time, Max breaks into the guidance
counselor's office to look for information in Chrissy's file.
She discovers that Fred was seeing the counselor too and suffering from the same symptoms.
Before he and Nancy finish interviewing the witnesses,
Fred succumbs to his visions and goes missing. Vecna forces him to join the ranks of his
guilt-ridden lost souls after he levitates and crushes him in the middle of the highway.
Whether it's because they love him or fear him,
Jason's teammates follow him as if he really is their leader. When he goes after Eddie,
the prime suspect in his girlfriend's murder, all of them — including Lucas — join him.
Lucas's loyalty may have been torn early on, but once he watches Jason turn violent, he sticks
around to protect his friends. Another teammate, Patrick, also looks conflicted as Jason's behavior
becomes increasingly problematic. However, Patrick has other things weighing on his mind.
"Patrick thinks he's cursed."
Once Max goes through Ms. Kelly's files, the Hawkins kids and the audience know that Vecna
picks on teenagers who have trauma in their pasts. We never see what happened to Patrick
to make him vulnerable to Vecna's curse, but we do see Vecna take possession of Patrick's mind
as Jason's posse rides in his car, which results in a nosebleed. Not long after,
Patrick spots the tell-tale grandfather clock from the Creel house at Chrissy's funeral.
When his teammates finally figure out where Eddie's been hiding,
Jason swims after Eddie, who's trying to row away in a speedboat that won't start.
Patrick still looks conflicted, and we can't tell if he's trying to help Jason
catch Eddie or stop him from doing something he'll regret.
But before Patrick can reach them, Vecna pulls him under the surface of Lovers Lake, then lifts
him high into the air and kills him just as he did Chrissy, right in front of Jason's eyes.
Rather than prove to Jason that Eddie is innocent, the basketball captain is now
sure the Dungeon Master had something to do with the death of his girlfriend and his teammate.
When Joyce discovers a ransom note in the Russian doll that came in the mail, she enlists Murray to
help her figure out her next move. The message is from someone who calls themselves Enzo, which
happened to be the name of the restaurant where Hopper and Joyce were supposed to go on a date.
Only she and Hopper would know that, convincing Joyce that Jim might still be alive.
She and Murray contact Enzo, record the conversation, determine from the ambient
talk that Enzo is a prison guard, and agree to an exchange in Alaska: $40,000 for Hopper's life.
Enzo's real name is Dmitri, and though he has to play the part of a sadistic guard, he's keeping
his fingers crossed that his prisoner can beat the odds and make it outside of the prison walls.
Unfortunately for Hopper and himself, Dmitri seems pretty green when it comes to covert operations.
His go-between double-crosses him and secures a better deal with the Russian government
for exposing his duplicitousness. That means Dmitri and Hopper end
up in a cell together. They aren't exactly friends, but necessity makes them allies.
They and a handful of their fellow prisoners are all but sentenced to
death in a fight against a Demogorgon. Hopper knows Demogorgons hate fire,
so with an assist from Joyce and Murray in the control room, he and Dmitri manage to slip
away from the monster in the nick of time, and Joyce and Hopper are finally reunited.
Enzo gives Joyce and Murray instructions to fly to Alaska where they're supposed to
deliver the $40,000 to a pilot-for-hire and peanut butter smuggler named Yuri.
Upon meeting him, Murray proclaims that he really doesn't care for the guy.
Maybe that's because Yuri and Murray have a lot in common. They're both big personalities
with odd senses of humor who get involved in some seriously dangerous shenanigans.
"I don't like him."
At first, it seems like the outlandish plan to free Hopper from a Russian prison might
work. However, Yuri soon realizes that a turncoat
and three American prisoners are worth more than one, and he switches sides.
As Yuri transports Murray and Joyce to the prison, they cut their bindings with glass
from a broken peanut butter jar, and a comical mid-air fight ensues. Murray comes out on top,
and his new plan is to impersonate Yuri while infiltrating the prison.
Since Yuri and Murray bear a strong resemblance to each other in appearance and personality,
the plan works — at least, the first step is a success. Now Yuri, Joyce, and Murray are all
inside the facility, along with Hopper and Dmitri, not to mention a Demogorgon. Fickle, goofy Yuri
will likely see how the wind blows and buddy up with whoever can help him — or pay him — the most.
"Stranger Things 4" tells the story of the Creel family several times,
and there are important discrepancies in each retelling. Nancy first hears about
them from Eddie's uncle, who heard it through the once common urban legend that Victor Creel
mercilessly murdered his wife and two kids by breaking their limbs and cutting out their eyes.
When Nancy and Robin go to the local library to search through microfilm,
they happen upon a tabloid from 1959 in which Victor Creel claims demons killed his loved ones.
Wanting to hear the truth straight from the source, Nancy and Robin disguise themselves
as psychology students and request an interview with the now elderly and imprisoned Victor Creel.
His account seems to confirm the kids' suspicions. His family bought the big blue house and were
very happy there for about a month. Then, upsetting supernatural phenomena started to
occur. Victor believes his home in Hawkins was haunted by a demon who tortured and killed his
wife Virginia and daughter Alice while it kept him occupied with nightmarish visions.
His son Henry, he says, was found in a coma and died days later.
Victor was so destroyed by what the supposed demon had wrought that he gouged his own eyes
out in hopes it would take him, too. He's a shell of a man when Nancy and Robin come to
question him, and as of yet, he doesn't know the real story of what happened.
One of the more confusing elements of "Stranger Things 4" is all the various
uniformed agencies pursuing Eleven. After "Jane Hopper" concusses the bully Angela with a skate,
the local police show up at the Byers house to take El into custody.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Colonel Sullivan arrives at Dr. Owen's personal residence in Nevada.
He plays nice at first, but then he lets Owens in on the real reason for
his surprise middle-of-the-night helicopter visit.
The U.S. military thinks the Hawkins Lab was training kids like Eleven to be remote assassins,
and they suspect El, not Eddie, actually killed Chrissy and Fred. Owens swears she's dead,
but Sullivan ransacks the house and intends to tail him if he goes looking for Eleven.
Dr. Owens gets to El first when his people intercept her on her way to
juvie. But Sullivan's thugs aren't far behind. They open fire at the
Byers house with little concern as to whether the kids are collateral damage.
Sullivan himself later interrogates a guard who survived the shootout to get the underground
lab's location. When Episode 7 ends, he has the information he needs, but so do Mike,
Will, Jonathan, and Argyle — who are all headed to the same place on the map.
Jamie Campbell Bower is credited with playing Peter Ballard on "Stranger Things," but he's
actually playing a kind of quadruple role that serves as the fourth season's big reveal.
"Sometimes, Papa doesn't tell the truth."
Eleven meets Ballard in the memories she revisits thanks to the Nina machine, where he's a lowly
lab assistant who occasionally stands up for her. Ballard earns her trust and promises to help her
escape, but really, he just needs El to remove the device preventing him from harnessing his powers.
That's because Ballard is the mythical "One" that Dr. Brenner claims doesn't exist. He — not El –
committed the Hawkins Lab massacre. But that's not all. One is also Henry, the son of Victor Creel.
Henry seems to have demonstrated a proclivity for evil since early in his childhood. Since
the family moved to Hawkins to try and rid him of his demons, we know that Hawkins and
the lab aren't specifically tied to his predicament or the Upside Down.
The young Henry Creel resented his parents for trying to make him conform.
When they seek the help of a doctor, he kills his mom and sister in the same way
Vecna disposes of his victims and frames his dad for their incomprehensibly gruesome murders.
In the aftermath, he ends up confined to the Hawkins Lab anyway, where El used her powers
to send him into the Upside Down where he transforms into this season's big bad, Vecna.
This development ties up a lot of loose ends from Seasons 1 through 3,
but — whether we call him Peter Ballard, One, Henry Creel, or Vecna — his story isn't over yet.
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