'Stranger Things' season 4 still has plenty to say

After four seasons on Netflix, and six years at the forefront of pop culture consciousness, I'm suddenly hearing a lot of people ask what "Stranger Things" is all about, even though its focus has hardly shifted.

"Stranger Things" is set almost entirely during the 1980s, and mostly in the American Midwest, and revolves around a loosely affiliated group of teens and tweens, plus their occasionally present parents. The group members have overcome their adolescent relationship drama to band together as fiercely loyal friends so they can stand against what has become semi-annual incursions into our reality of a dark and decaying alternate dimension they've nicknamed the Upside Down.

Not only does this series gleefully wallow in the kid-centric pop culture ephemera of the Eighties, but it also shows our nerdy protagonists using the lessons they've learned from their favorite fantasy storytelling, most notably the "Dungeons & Dragons" roleplaying game, to figure out how to defeat real-life monsters, all while navigating the pitfalls of youth, from bullying and first love affairs, to childhood friendships coming under strain as they grow up and grow apart.

The scenarios and character portrayals intentionally and liberally borrow not only from the boys-on-bikes sub-genre of slice-of-life Americana mixed with fantastical adventures, as seen in "E.T." and "The Goonies," but also from the atmospheric suburban horror largely pioneered by "A Nightmare on Elm Street," in which the hidden sins of well-meaning but misguided elders inflict ghoulish traumas upon the innocent and unsuspecting younger generations to follow.

But that's not actually what people mean when they ask what "Stranger Things" is all about.

What they really want to know is, why do so many people care about this show - enough that Kate Bush's 1985 song "Running Up That Hill" shot to the top of iTunes after being featured in this season - beyond indulging their nostalgia for the trappings of an era four decades distant?

What season 4 of "Stranger Things" is about is the pull of separated partnerships. It's 1986, less than a year after the previously superpowered Eleven joined the Byers family in moving from Indiana to California, and both she and Will Byers miss her boyfriend, and his best friend, Mike Wheeler, just as Will's older brother Jonathan misses his own girlfriend, Mike's older sister Nancy.

But even those who still live in Hawkins, Indiana, are growing estranged from each other, as Maxine Mayfield has split from her former boyfriend, Lucas Sinclair, whose promotion to the popular crowd, as part of joining the high school basketball team, is also threatening to end his membership in the D&D circle shared by Mike and their fellow nerd friend, Dustin Henderson.

Meanwhile, Will and Jonathan's mom, Joyce, receives a message indicating Jim Hopper - the presumed-dead former police chief of Hawkins, who became Eleven's adoptive father and Joyce's almost-boyfriend - is still alive, but in a Russian prison, all as a new sinister mastermind masses his forces in the Upside Down, to commit a string of supernatural murders in Hawkins.

Everybody got that?

Relationships end because even the closest of companions often don't grow at the same speeds, or in the same directions, and that's because we each want and need different things.

Mike and Dustin don't care that they're seen as dorks, but Lucas wants to be cool for once. He also wants more emotional closeness than Max feels comfortable with, since she still harbors conflicted feelings over the loss of her bullying stepbrother, Billy Hargrove, who sacrificed himself to save her and her friends from the Upside Down in season 3.

Nancy and Jonathan haven't fallen out of love, but Nancy has higher aspirations for her higher education than Jonathan, so he'd rather she break up with him than waste her potential by lowering her ambitions. And while Mike's feelings for Will as a best friend have faded, Will's feelings for Mike appear to have grown deeper than platonic friendship.

Such shifting-sand connections are the foundational narrative template for each season of "Stranger Things," which kicks off by breaking its cast of characters apart like billiard balls, as they careen in opposite directions in pursuit of their respective goals, stumbling across seemingly random and unrelated mysteries along the way, until they wise up enough to reunite and realize they've each blindly grabbed hold of different parts of the same elephant.

"Stranger Things" is not subtle in sending the message that we're stronger together than we are apart, especially as that strength in numbers (and in diversity of personalities and perspectives) is enhanced by each season's expansion of the gang. Max was added in season 2, and actress Sadie Sink delivers a standout portrayal of the pathos and complexities of unresolved grieving. Gonzo journalist and conspiracy theorist Murray Bauman was another season 2 addition, and veteran character actor Brett Gelman gives him a hilarious rhythm with Winona Ryder as Joyce.

Snarky, socially awkward, closeted lesbian Robin Buckley (played by Maya Hawke) joined in season 3, and watching her claim her own voice has been a delight, while Lucas' ruthlessly mercenary, cannily perceptive kid sister Erica (played by Priah Ferguson), who was promoted from a recurring to a regular cast member in season 3, has proven a formidable player.

The most notable addition of season 4 has been the theatrical, drug-dealing metalhead Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn), dungeon master of "the Hellfire Club," Hawkins' D&D circle, and his connections to this season's murders help bring the real-life Eighties hysteria over "Dungeons & Dragons" to town, as the supernatural conditions of those murders lead Hawkins' townsfolk to believe that there is indeed something satanic in the roleplaying game, and in its young players.

It's beneficial to be reminded that each era, including the present, has fallen prey to its own mass-media hysterias.

It's also been inspiring, over the four-season arc of the show, to witness the unlikely evolution, enlightenment and redemption of Steve Harrington (Joe Keery), who began as a shallow, selfish, bullying, slut-shaming popular d-bag, before he became the nail-spiked baseball bat-wielding slayer of other-dimensional terrors, the begrudging guardian of younger kids, the surrogate big-brother mentor to Dustin, and a bona fide LGBTQ ally to Robin, all while retaining his fabulous moussed hairstyle.

So if "Stranger Things" is about anything, beyond pop culture nostalgia and echoing earlier mass-media, I suppose it's about the belief that what was once good can be brought back, and what came before can be made better.

But the Easter eggs are still fun to hunt for on their own, so keep an eye out for a notable "Nightmare on Elm Street" star this season.

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
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