Stranger Things season 4


The fourth season of the American science fiction horror drama television series Stranger Things, marketed as Stranger Things 4, was released worldwide on the streaming service Netflix in two volumes. The first set of seven episodes was released on May 27, 2022, and the second set of two episodes was released on July 1. The season was produced by the show's creators, the Duffer Brothers, along with Shawn Levy, Dan Cohen, Iain Paterson, and Curtis Gwinn.
The season stars Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Noah Schnapp, Sadie Sink, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Joe Keery, Maya Hawke, Brett Gelman, Priah Ferguson, Matthew Modine and Paul Reiser. Jamie Campbell Bower, Cara Buono, Joseph Quinn, Eduardo Franco, Mason Dye, Sherman Augustus, Tom Wlaschiha, and Nikola Đuričko appear in recurring roles.
The season received highly positive reviews from critics, who praised the performances, visuals, action sequences, realistic themes, soundtrack, emotional weight, and the darker, more mature tone, though some criticized the lengthier episode runtimes. The first volume of the season received 13 nominations for the 74th Primetime Emmy Awards, including Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series, winning five; the second volume received five nominations for the 75th Primetime Emmy Awards.

Premise

Set in March 1986, eight months after the events of the third season, the fourth season is split between three different plotlines.
The first plotline takes place in Hawkins, Indiana, where a series of mysterious teenage murders begin haunting the town. Eddie Munson, leader of the Hellfire Club, Hawkins High School's Dungeons & Dragons group, becomes a prime suspect in the murders after senior cheerleading captain Chrissy Cunningham dies in his trailer, so Dustin Henderson, Lucas and Erica Sinclair, Max Mayfield, Steve Harrington, Nancy Wheeler, and Robin Buckley begin investigating to clear Eddie's name. While other classmates, lead by Jason Carver, hunt Eddie. The group discovers that the true perpetrator is a powerful being who resides in the Upside Down, whom they dub "Vecna" after a Dungeons & Dragons character.
The second plotline involves Mike Wheeler visiting Eleven, Will Byers, and Jonathan Byers at their new home in Lenora Hills, California. Due to the events in Hawkins and the imminent danger to her friends, Eleven, after being arrested for assaulting her bully, goes with Dr. Sam Owens to a secret facility in the Nevada desert to regain her powers, an operation titled the Nina Project, where she is reunited with Dr. Martin Brenner and forced to confront her past in Hawkins National Laboratory with the aid of an isolation tank. While the U.S. Military, lead by Lt. Colonel Jack Sullivan, is simultaneously searching for Eleven, Mike, Will, Jonathan, and their new friend Argyle attempt to reach Eleven before she regains her powers.
The third plotline follows Joyce Byers and Murray Bauman as they venture to Russia upon learning that Jim Hopper may still be alive. Meanwhile, Hopper is held in a Soviet prison camp in Kamchatka, where he and the other inmates, including Dmitri Antonov, are forced to battle a Demogorgon that the Russians have captured.

Cast and characters

Main

  • Winona Ryder as Joyce Byers
  • David Harbour as Jim Hopper
  • Millie Bobby Brown as Eleven / Jane Hopper
  • * Martie Blair as Young Eleven
  • Finn Wolfhard as Mike Wheeler
  • Gaten Matarazzo as Dustin Henderson
  • Caleb McLaughlin as Lucas Sinclair
  • Noah Schnapp as Will Byers
  • Sadie Sink as Max Mayfield
  • * Belle Henry as Young Max
  • Natalia Dyer as Nancy Wheeler
  • Charlie Heaton as Jonathan Byers
  • Joe Keery as Steve Harrington
  • Maya Hawke as Robin Buckley
  • Brett Gelman as Murray Bauman
  • Priah Ferguson as Erica Sinclair
  • Matthew Modine as Martin Brenner
  • Paul Reiser as Sam Owens

    Also starring

  • Jamie Campbell Bower as Henry Creel / One / Vecna
  • * Raphael Luce as young Henry Creel
  • Cara Buono as Karen Wheeler
  • Eduardo Franco as Argyle
  • Joseph Quinn as Eddie Munson

    Recurring

  • Joe Chrest as Ted Wheeler
  • Tom Wlaschiha as Dmitri Antonov
  • Mason Dye as Jason Carver
  • Nikola Đuričko as Yuri Ismaylov
  • Rob Morgan as Chief Powell
  • John Reynolds as Officer Callahan
  • Sherman Augustus as Lt. Colonel Jack Sullivan
  • Myles Truitt as Patrick McKinney
  • Gabriella Pizzolo as Suzie Bingham
  • Tinsley and Anniston Price as Holly Wheeler
  • Clayton Royal Johnson as Andy
  • Tristan Spohn as Two
  • Christian Ganiere as Ten
  • Regina Ting Chen as Ms. Kelly
  • Elodie Grace Orkin as Angela
  • Logan Allen as Jake
  • Alex Wagenman as Chad
  • Gabriella Surodjawan as Stacy
  • Hunter Romanillos as Chance
  • Pasha D. Lychnikoff as Oleg
  • Vaidotas Martinaitis as Warden Melnikov
  • Nikolai Nikolaeff as Ivan
  • Paris Benjamin as Agent Ellen Stinson
  • Catherine Curtin as Claudia Henderson
  • Karen Ceesay as Sue Sinclair
  • Arnell Powell as Charles Sinclair
  • Ira Amyx as Harmon
  • Kendrick Cross as Wallace
  • Hendrix Yancey as Thirteen

    Guests

  • Grace Van Dien as Chrissy Cunningham
  • Amybeth McNulty as Vickie Dunne
  • Logan Riley Bruner as Fred Benson
  • Joel Stoffer as Wayne Munson
  • Dacre Montgomery as Billy Hargrove
  • Robert Englund as Victor Creel
  • * Kevin L. Johnson as Young Victor Creel
  • Tyner Rushing as Virginia Creel
  • Livi Burch as Alice Creel
  • Ed Amatrudo as Director Hatch
  • Audrey Holcomb as Eden
  • Trey Best as Jeff
  • Gwydion Lashlee-Walton as Gareth
  • Grant Goodman as Doug

    Episodes

Production

Development

As with seasons past, planning for the fourth season of Stranger Things began before the preceding season's release. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly that ran shortly after the third season's release, series creators Matt and Ross Duffer revealed the series' creative team had already met on several occasions to discuss the show's future. On September 30, 2019, Netflix announced it had signed the Duffer Brothers for a new multi-year television and film deal that was reportedly worth nine figures. To coincide with the production deal announcement, Netflix also announced the renewal of Stranger Things for a fourth season by releasing a brief, minute-long teaser on YouTube.

Writing

Commenting on the previous season's ending, Ross Duffer divulged the process of connecting story arcs between seasons:
Matt Duffer indicated one of the plot's "broad strokes" is the main center of action being moved out of Hawkins, Indiana, for the majority of the season, a series first. He also indicated the several loose ends left by the ending of season three, such as Hopper's perceived death and Eleven being adopted by Joyce Byers and relocating with her new family out of state, will all be explored sometime during the fourth season. The Duffers later expanded on their previous comments, saying that "epic" triptych structure of the fourth season was one of the main contributing factors to its exaggerated length. They likened it to the HBO series Game of Thrones in terms of its sheer scale, runtime, and newer, more mature tonal shift, as well as having split their characters across multiple distant locations.
Another contributing factor to the show's newly extended length was the expressed goal of the Duffers to finally provide answers to uncertainties regarding the series' long-simmering mythology, which they have been slowly revealing like "layers of onion" over the past three seasons. Halfway through writing the fourth season, Matthew and Ross realized they were going to need a ninth episode to include all of their desired plot points, which Netflix "quickly approved". During production on the first season, the duo prepared a twenty-page document for Netflix that explained the show's universe, including what the Upside Down is, in clear detail. In turn, material from the document dictated certain plots while writing the season. The Duffers wanted to spend more time within the Upside Down in this season, as the narrative of the third season gave them little opportunity to explore it further.
Since the fourth season was the longest-running season produced to date, the Duffers and Netflix opted for a two-part release plan. In a letter from the Duffer Brothers posted by Netflix, the duo revealed they wrote nine scripts spanning over 800 pages, and that the fourth season is nearly double the length of any of the previously released seasons.
In an interview on the Netflix podcast Present Company with Krista Smith, Ross Duffer discussed season four's more mature tone, which he indicated would be at least partially achieved by " into" the horror genre:
In a May 2022 interview with Entertainment Weekly on their Around the Table series, Finn Wolfhard stated that this season feels like "five movies into one", comparing it to "Scooby-Doo-meets-Zodiac-killer" while also being a "stoner action-comedy" and a "Russian prison movie".
The character of Eddie Munson is based on Damien Echols, one of the West Memphis Three who was wrongly convicted in 1994 of the deaths of three boys due to his appearance, which residents tied to being part of a satanic cult. The writers drew from Paradise Lost, a documentary covering Echols, for Eddie's story.
As they had done with the Demogorgon from the first season, the Duffers opted to use the Dungeons & Dragons character of Vecna as the basis of this season's antagonist, something that the child characters would recognize and understand the dangers due to their familiarity through the role-playing game. While Vecna was not fully introduced in Dungeons & Dragons materials until 1990 through the module Vecna Lives! and only had been alluded to in the lore prior to that, the Duffers believed that Eddie was an advanced gamemaster that was able to extrapolate how Vecna would behave for purposes of the show. As they worked on the season and the Stranger Things: The First Shadow play, the Duffers came about with the idea that Martin Brenner had used Henry Creel's blood to create more psychic children, with Eleven being his most successful manifestation of that, to serve as living weapons for the Cold War era. Tying the idea into the show's main antagonist, the Duffers started to really explore the concept because of finding interesting the possibility to use it to delve and explain where Eleven's powers actually originated from. Brenner had originally been planned to come back sooner in a big as earlier as the show's second season, but the Duffers realized as they developed that season that there wasn't a place for Brenner to come back that season.
The Duffers originally talked out about having Will Byers step in and come out as gay in the season, which they had been discussed and wanting to do for a very long time, but they realized that they lacked the space to do it properly. In retrospective, they were glad they didn't because it gave them the time to arc the entire season towards Will's eventual coming out as gay in the next and final season, where he finally starts to embrace himself.