Stranger Things Season 4 (Part 2)
Spoiler warning: If you haven’t watched the final two episodes of Stranger Things Season 4, there are spoilers below.
With each of the seasons, I’ve blogged about my favorite moments (one, two, three, four part one), now here are my favorite things about Season 4 part two.
[Eldritch Thrumming] has joined [Ominous Synth Music Playing] as my favorite caption. Some self destructive part of me is still considering a rewatch of all seasons drinking every time the closed captions say [Squelching Sounds].
Joyce and Hopper first scene brought me to tears in the first 3 minutes of the first of these two feature length episodes. It was so good seeing them together at last which only got better as the episodes played out.
“You’re the heart.” The scene where Will shows Mike the painting El had him do of themselves as a D&D party is full of wonderful moments. Mike having the heart emblem on his shield, and Will explaining that Mike is the heart of the group, which gets an excellent call back in the scene where Eleven needs their support during her psychic combat with Vecna. Will’s speech about the difficulties of saying what you feel is full of subtext, Jonathan seeing how emotional Will is after delivering the speech… this is all incredibly moving and well handled by the writers and actors alike.
“I needed to lose weight anyway” I’m not saying I think Russian prison camp style weight loss plans are a good idea, but I suspect that many of us overweight middle aged men watched this scene and thought about it for at least a moment.
“Crawl Forward.” Steve Harrington’s excellent speech about improving himself is wonderful. Stranger Things is mostly focussed on entertainment rather than delivering messages, but the messages it does have are great. If only more of us would make the effort to crawl forward and improve ourselves despite how hard it can be.
“I piggybacked from a pizza dough freezer.” My new favorite explanation. When ever anyone asks me anything in the future I’m going to be tempted to answer with this.
Of course the crazed Christian jock would be the one to bring about the end of the world, we’re witnessing in real time in reality as Christian extremist assholes control the Supreme Court and are overtly anti civilization and anti reason.
I loved so much more about these episodes: Eddie’s metal performance, all of the actors performances, the soundtrack (in addition to Kate Bush, great usage of Siouxise’s Spellbound in the end credits). I keep coming back to Will’s speech though. It reminds me of one of my favorite moments from season 2, where Hopper and Eleven have this tender moment between action scenes and finally say all the things they’ve been unable to say to one another until now on the verge of cataclysm. I love Stranger Things for these quiet moments. The Stranger Things writers handle these moments brilliantly: these moments tend to come at the end of the seasons, they resolve some underlying real world tension in a manner that in no way diffuses the supernatural threat tension, and come through in a way that makes the viewer care all the more for the characters.
I can’t wait to see what happens in the final season, and I suspect I’ll be watching the whole thing again before then.
