Can a show get too big? It’s a strange question to ask, but in the age of prestige television delivering the kind of big budget spectacle that usually used to be reserved for the big screen, something usually has to give. You see, while we once had 22 episode shows with rather meager funds for visual effects, now everything is pretty crushed down into 6 to 8 episode servings, which works when being used as an extended movie sort of format, but it tends to get a little crushed when the plot gradually expands to three times its normal size.
Stranger Things 4 has boldly dodged this problem in a way that only a show that’s reached iconic status can – by doing whatever the hell it wants. It it wants to stay at its rigid, 8/9 episode count, that’s fine, but in an attempt to ensure that no plot line is left behind, the length of the episodes has grown faster than the Mind Flayer. But with this pivotal episode clocking in at a weighty hour and fourth one minutes, has Stranger Things gotten too big to fail, or just gotten too big for its boots?
It’s revelation time as some of the various threads finally come together to reveal the origins of the fearsome Vecna – but rather than someone stumbling across all the answers, it’s pieced together almost simultaneously as Steve, Robin, Eddie and Nancy race through the Upside-Down after becoming stranded in the other dimension; Dustin, Lucas, Max and Erica desperately try to figure out how to free them; and still immersed in her enforced flashbacks, Eleven truly discovers that the key to Vecna’s origins lurks within her repressed memories.
However, before we untangle all of that, let’s swing over to Russia to find that Joyce and Murray’s plot to infiltrate Kamchatka prison has worked, but they’re just in time to see Hopper and a bunch of his fellow prisoners about to engage in gladiatorial combat with a captive Demogorgon. In the chaos, many of Hopper’s comrades are slaughtered, but when his rescue team take advantage of the chaos, it looks like there’s a slim chance that they could actually make it out of that frozen hellhole alive.
Back to Hawkins, and after fighting off some vicious Demobats, the quartet trapped in the Upside-Down use their accumulated knowledge of the dark dimension to discover that this twisted version of Hawkins is actually years put of date and it’s representative of the town as it was only a few years ago meaning that it must be relatively new. Using Will’s old trick of manipulating lights from the other side, they communicate with Dustin who realises that the murder site of Vecna’s victims are all now new gateways to the Upside-Down, meaning that Eddie’s trailer park home is a way out. However, as she escapes, Nancy’s mind is captured by Vecna who shows her his past while Eleven’s flashbacks fill in the terrible gaps. Vecna is, in fact Henry Creel, whose psychic powers were responsible for the callous murder of his family – but worse than that, he went on to become a “patient” of Dr. Brenner (the fabled Number One) and eventually became the orderly who helped Eleven hone her abilities. It was Henry who caused the massacre at Hawkins Lab, but after Eleven overpowers him and blasts him out of reality as we know it, Billy Creel becomes something a whole lot worse.
It’s pretty telling that even though The Massacre At Hawkins Lab is the same length as most movies, it’s expanded runtime still can’t find five fucking minutes to spend on the season’s most wayward plotline – the one that’s seeing Mike, Will, Jonathan and Argyle zig-zagging across the Western United States. However, while the complete jettison of an entire plotline may suggest that Stranger Things is starting to get worryingly bloated, there are a few things to keep in mind. The first thing is, this is where the show first took the closest it’s ever come to a mid-season break as Netflix viewers now had to wait just over a month for the last two episodes to drop, so obviously the Duffers needed to come up with a big finish to make the wait all the more agonising.
While this means that Mike’s group is rather rudely left out in the cold (figuratively speaking of course, it looks fairly sunny in Utah), it does mean that the episode can double down on its two major plot points – the rescue of Jim Hopper and the discovering of Vecna’s origin and tell both stories as lavishly as they can. And lavish they are, as the Hopper segment ends in a sizable action sequence as a Demogorgon racks up a sizable (and messy) body count in a manner or minutes and you don’t really realise it until the split-headed beast really gets going that you’ve truly missed watching a Demogorgon in action. Still, as savage as the action is (the released creature ragdolls more men in a short amount of time than Brock Lesnar at a Royal Rumble) the real meat here is the belated reunion between Hopper and Joyce that is communicated only in a wordless, yearning look that won’t be explored more until June, but it’s balanced enough to both be enough and simultaneously make you want more.
The rest of the episode is dedicated to explaining the origin of Vecna that reveals that we’ve zeroing in on his backstory from multiple angles. While one plot line finally plainly lays out what the puckered motherfucker is doing and why, another reveals that Vecna did indeed have something to do with Creel murder as he was the misanthropic son of the family who fancied using his telekinetic brain to punish his peers. But we find out that Eleven was on his case too as her flashbacks reveal that a pre-Vecna Henry Creel was one of Brenner’s first experiments and subsequently responsible for the Hawkins Massacre that Eleven mistakenly blamed herself for. With that, we watch the diminutive powerhouse mind wrestle with her former mentor and push his psychotic ass into another dimension which not only ravages his body into the twisted form that’s been haunting Hawkins. However, while this noticeably long episode is truly obsessed with laying down the plot, admirably it never does so at the expense of the characters – Dustin may be an exposition machine, but the legitimate joy in his eyes as he breaks it all down is catching. Elsewhere, there’s a truly nice moment between a shaken Eddie where he bonds with Steve over the fact that Hawkins’ most prominent haircut is actually a good dude. Visually, it’s good to be back in the Upside-Down once again as the sight of several characters biking through a landscape dotted with crimson lightning amusingly looks like The Goonies are cycling through Hell and those Elm Street shades grow ever more vibrant when Vecna targets Nancy to lay out his childhood (Nancy is also the name of Freddy Krueger’s most persistent nemesis). Even those old Poltergeist vibes return when Dustin and company throw a sheet up into a portal leading to the physics-busting sight of the real world literally sitting on top of its inverted dark twin.
However, while Netflix is obviously all-in with throwing as much at Stranger Things as it can, and the Duffers have now finally fully revealed its dastardly villain through and through – this really is a 101 minute set up/trailer for the last two episodes. It also doesn’t help that it either alters or complicates the existing continuity (Why can’t Demogorgons dimension-hop anymore? When exactly was Kali at Hawkins? How does the zapping of Henry into another dimension line up with Eleven first opening up a gate after her encounter with a Demogorgon?). But while all this may annoy obsessives and be an excruciating tease for fans who can’t wait a month to see how it all ends – it’s genuinely thrilling to see how everything’s grown just as much as the rapidly aging cast.
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