The end is finally here, and the fate of Hawkins has never been more perilous. With Max in a coma,
the gates to the Upside Down completely open, and the mystery surrounding the Soviets' role in all
of it, it's time to explain what went down during the ending of Season 4 of "Stranger Things."
The final images of "Stranger Things 4" show us an escalation of Vecna's assault on Hawkins. What
started as a series of rifts opening beneath the town expands to include the familiar, snow-like
particles of the Upside Down drifting into the real world, while the rifts begin to bellow smoke
and red lightning crackles in the clouds over the city. Our heroes know very well what this means,
even if no one else in town does. Something bigger is coming to Hawkins, and soon.
The question that remains as the season ends, though, is what exactly that bigger something
will look like. We've become very familiar with the various kinds of creatures who exist
in the Upside Down over the years, so is Vecna simply going to stage an all-out assault with
as many of those beasts as he can summon? Is he going to bring the Mind Flayer to colossal life
over the Hawkins skyline? This is what our heroes have to figure out as they head into Season 5.
Mike and Eleven began Season 4 with serious issues in their relationship. For Mike, a big part of the
problem was not just the physical distance from El, who moved to California with the Byers family,
but a perceived distance in their personalities. For him, El is an exceptional person,
and he's simply not, and he's sure that one day she'll realize that and decide she doesn't need
him. For El, who's been struggling with the loss of her powers at the end of Season 3,
the problem is that she believes Mike doesn't feel as strongly about her as she feels about him.
She thinks her outsider status has made her into a kind of monster that she can never rehabilitate.
By the end of the season, they both learn they're wrong. Will helps
convince Mike that he's vital to their entire friend group,
and Eleven's life, as the heart of the party and the person who keeps everyone buoyed by hope.
"See how you're leading us here? You're guiding the whole party and inspiring us.
That…that's what you do."
Through her work with Dr. Brenner, Eleven comes to realize that she's not a monster and
that she's simply been manipulated into perceiving some kind of wrongness in her mind and body. That
leads to an emotional reunion and reconciliation at the end of the season, but the happiness
is short-lived. Will they get a happy ending, or are they destined to be ripped apart again?
The Hawkins kids face an unimaginable force of darkness as Season 4 transitions into Season 5,
but that doesn't mean their personal lives are completely lost in the shuffle. That's perhaps
clearest in the story of Robin, who reveals a crush on a fellow student
named Vickie at the beginning of the season, then sees things come a bit full circle by the end.
In Episode 8, Robin learns that Vickie has a boyfriend from out of town. But one episode
later, when she finds herself volunteering beside her crush at Hawkins High School,
she learns that they broke up. Robin and the newly single Vickie are left to bond in a real way,
making sandwiches for refugees of the earthquake and laughing and joking together. Right now,
it's hard to imagine what anyone's life will look like at the end of this fight,
but Robin seems closer than ever to the kind of happy ending she deserves.
Jonathan Byers and his girlfriend, Nancy Wheeler, are separated by geography for much of the fourth
season, but there's also something else in the way of their relationship. Since moving to California,
Jonathan has developed doubts about his ability to ever be enough for Nancy,
particularly since he won't be going to the same college she's hoping to attend.
Meanwhile, back in Hawkins, Nancy is very aware of how distant Jonathan's been,
and that awareness coincides with the re-emergence of Steve Harrington in her life. As they battle
Vecna together, Nancy realizes that Steve has grown a lot since they broke up. It
seems like a reconciliation might be in the cards, but then Jonathan returns to Hawkins,
putting whatever might have happened on pause. We don't know what that means for Season 5 just yet,
but it's pretty clear that something has to give in this love triangle.
Joyce Byers and Jim Hopper spend most of Season 4 trying to get back to each other.
This is triggered when Joyce receives a message from Hopper that reveals he's being held in a
Soviet prison. Joyce finally finds her way to the prison, only to find that Hopper's life is
in a fresh kind of danger. It's only at the very end of the season, as they're working to find a
way to get back to America, that the two can come together as a proper couple once again.
The happy reunion doesn't hold out for long. Hopper and Joyce make it back to the States
in time to find that the kids' fight against the Upside Down has gone very wrong. Hawkins
is now engulfed in a full-on disaster as rifts open up across the town. The big question as
we head into Season 5 is just how Hopper and Joyce will make it through this fight intact.
They lost each other once already. Now they have to fight to make sure it doesn't happen again.
All of the Hawkins kids are going through their own major struggles in "Stranger Things 4," but
Will Byers is going through one of the hardest rough patches of his young life,
in part because he's doing much of his struggling alone.
It's been speculated ever since a key moment in Season 3 that Will is gay.
"El's not stupid. It's not my fault you don't like girls."
Fans think that eventually, he'll come out to his friends,
and perhaps even reveal that he's in love with his best friend, Mike Wheeler.
In Season 4, we get more than one moment in which Will seems to allude to his secret.
In one very potent moment near the end of the season, it seems like he's almost going to say it,
but he keeps silent out of concern for the larger fight. Will's personal narrative remains stalled,
but it's clear that he's aching to tell someone something about the secret he's keeping.
Then there's Will's other inner turmoil, something that hasn't been addressed directly
since Season 2. Will still has at least some connection to the Upside Down,
thanks to his possession by the Mind Flayer. Once Vecna launches his invasion,
Will's been feeling it more and more. Will he be able to hold himself together in the fight
to come, or is he destined for an inner battle that's just as dangerous as the external one?
Near the end of "Stranger Things 4," Eleven makes a devastating discovery about her "Papa," Dr.
Martin Brenner. She realizes, as Brenner pushes her to stay in his secret lab and cultivate her
powers even further, that the experiments she remembers from Hawkins Lab were never about her.
They were always about using her to get closer to Henry. He was Brenner's first patient who Eleven
sent to the Upside Down. In that hellish place, he transformed into the creature the kids call Vecna.
"Sometimes, Papa doesn't tell the truth."
It's a major moment of catharsis for Eleven, who realizes that the problem was never her and
her powers, but it's also an interesting wrinkle in the ongoing saga of what was
going on at Hawkins Lab. It's clear in Season 4 that there are still plenty of
dark forces within the U.S. government who are squabbling over the nature of the lab,
the Upside Down, and Eleven herself. What's less clear is whether or not anyone
else knew about what Brenner was really trying to achieve. If someone did know,
are they out there trying to finish his work? Does anyone else know what Henry has become? These
are questions that could have major implications for what's coming in the final season.
About halfway through Season 4, Dr. Martin Brenner and Dr. Sam Owens form an uneasy alliance with
the shared goal of getting Eleven's powers back to full strength through the use of the NINA machine.
By the end of the season, they're at odds again, as Owens tries to let Eleven leave to help her
friends, and Brenner is determined to keep her in the lab longer to try and reach One in the Upside
Down. Then the entire operation is disrupted when Lt. Col. Sullivan and his troops arrive, killing
Brenner, capturing Owens, and trying to end the operation once and for all by killing Eleven.
By the end of the season, Eleven is a fugitive from the evil forces in the human world pursuing
her, who wants her not just contained, but dead. This explains why she's going back into hiding in
Hopper's cabin at the end of the season, but what we still don't know is just how far the
government will go to capture her, especially now that rifts have opened all over Hawkins. It's a
conflict that's arguably just as important to her survival as the fight against the Upside Down.
The end of "Stranger Things 4" reveals many things, and not all of them come
from the United States. During the process of escaping from Hopper's Soviet prison,
Hopper and Joyce discover a secret lab full of preserved Demogorgons and Demodogs,
as well as a chamber full of swirling particles the Soviets dub "The Shadow." This strange entity
is later revealed to be the dark material that makes up the Mind Flayer. By the end of
the season the facility is basically destroyed, but its presence, and Brenner's insistence that
his experiments were all about fighting the Soviets, raises some interesting questions.
The Soviet government has its own operation tied to the Upside Down, perhaps geared toward
the weaponization of its creatures for a fight against the West. What remains to
be seen now is how that fight will progress now that the prison facility is destroyed.
In an effort to defeat Vecna before he can invade Hawkins,
Max Mayfield stages a daring, self-sacrificing trap for the creature,
using her previous connection to him to lure him out. After some coaxing, the plan works,
but what doesn't work quite as well were the parts of the plan surrounding Max's effort.
She's able to lure Vecna in and hide in a happy memory for a while, but the Upside Down's pressure
on her friends means that the plot to kill Vecna is delayed, and Max is caught in the
same psychic force that killed three other Hawkins teenagers. By the end of the battle,
Vecna is driven away, but Max is dead, revived only by the force of Eleven's powers.
At the end of the season, Max is in a coma in a hospital bed, her limbs broken, her sight
apparently gone, and worse, her consciousness seemingly unreachable. Eleven tries to go into
her mind and find her, to search for some sign that Max is still in there somewhere, and isn't
able to locate her. So where is Max? It's a big, potentially devastating question for Season 5.
The final two episodes of "Stranger Things 4" reveal several new elements of the show's
backstory, including how Vecna began to shape the Upside Down to his will.
"I want you to tell her everything you see."
It's revealed through the discussion of his backstory that once he was sent to the Upside
Down by Eleven's powers, he wandered the landscape until he found the Shadow. From there, he sculpted
it into the Mind Flayer, making him the real power behind the entire invasion of Hawkins.
Even with that reveal, there's a good deal we still don't know about the Upside Down.
It seems that many of the dimension's creatures, including Demogorgons, were already inhabitants
when Vecna got there. Now they're all part of an extended hive mind of which he is the master,
with the Shadow retaining a sort of symbiotic connection to his will. So what is the Shadow,
why does it work for Vecna, and what does that mean for the larger fight?
There's still so much we don't know about the nature of this other dimension, and
that feels like one of the biggest open questions going into Season 5.
At the end of Part One of "Stranger Things 4," Nancy Wheeler makes a shocking discovery about
the Upside Down, or at least about the version of Hawkins that exists within the Upside Down.
The entire landscape is frozen in time, a version of Hawkins as it existed in 1983
when Eleven first opened the gate in the Lab and released the first Demogorgon.
It seems that somehow, at that moment, a duplicate version of Hawkins emerged
in the Upside Down landscape, only to remain frozen in time.
"We're in the past."
At the moment, it's not clear what that means. It's possible that Eleven's powers accidentally
created a weird mirror image of Hawkins Lab and the surrounding town at the moment she opened
the gate. It could have something to do with Vecna's invasion plans. Whatever's going on,
it's clear that the mirror image of Hawkins in the Upside Down
will remain an intriguing centerpiece of the conflict going forward into Season 5.
Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus,
even more Looper videos about "Stranger Things" are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.