Great. Now I had a visual of Papa giving Vecna a handy.
Just finished the end of S.4 last night. Really, really enjoyable. In spite of the comic book logic and physics, all the references to other popular entertainment, the formulaic story beats and the shameless manipulation of 80s nostalgia… OK, because of it, it’s been a very fun ride. The show plays me like a cheap fiddle and I don’t mind a bit.
Swamp Thing is a good call in terms of physical appearance, but I had a thought last night-- vaguely from Vecna’s appearance and also because he attacks kids…Hollywood pitch idea: a dark, gritty live-action reboot of ‘The Grinch who Stole Christmas’. 
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They really should have had Vecna lose a hand and an eye in the final battle.
After seeing the final episode, I’m baffled by where Season 5 picks up. The Duffers have said "I’m sure we will do a time jump” between season 4 and 5, but that’s kind of tough when the world is on the verge of ending.
Assuming they start filming in early 2023, the “kids” will be 19-21 years old. Maybe they can knock a few years off and pretend they’re now seniors in HS, but that’s still a 3 year jump. What has been happening in Hawkins all that time? I don’t see how this works well.
Judging from this story, the Duffers aren’t planning on a time gap between the seasons – Five will pick right up from Four.
And now you see why life is better in the Upside Down — it’s always November 6, 1983, all the time. No need to worry about this time jump nonsense.
Hmmm. That says it will jump straight into the action, but not that the action would immediately pick up from the end of season 4.
I saw some half-joking speculation that it would join the kids three years into a Red Dawn-type guerilla insurrection against Vecna, which is exactly the kind of bad decision I’m worried about.
Maybe as suggested above, the Star Wars parallels continue, and Vecna encased them in carbonite for 3 years?
In that interview, Duffer is heavily implying if not outright stating that season 5 will pick up at least closely from the end of season 4. He says they normally spend the first 2 episodes getting the audience caught up with the characters because there has been a time jump in between seasons, but that they won’t have to do that in season 5 because season 4 didn’t wrap up like previous seasons.
“One thing about living in Hawkins I never could stomach… all the damn interdimensional monsters.”
In a recent interview, the actor playing Will confirms that Will is gay, and in love with Mike.
I’m way behind the times on this because I don’t like to binge Stranger Things too quickly plus a couple of vacations interrupted my viewing. But because I know everyone has been waiting for them with bated breath, my thoughts on Season 4:
Overall, I enjoyed it a lot. The best part for me was the way they were able to tie all of the previous seasons together into a (mostly) coherent story about what the hell has been happening in Hawkins. I think the difficulty level of that was very hard, but I was pretty satisfied with how they pulled it off.
It was massively sprawling story-wise and suffered a bit from that, but by the end I can see how they’ve started drawing all the plot strings together for a final season. So, maybe overlong but ultimately necessary to explain it all and still have character development.
I didn’t think I was going to like Eddie at all at first, but he really grew on me. Good character arc and excellent performance.
Of course everyone looks way too old (especially Will!) but I choose to look past it 
As a D&D fan, I enjoyed the “satanic panic” sub-plot, and the actor playing Jason was a perfect 80s jock villain. Great casting, solid performance - he reminded me intensely of Troy from The Goonies. And he complicated things enough to be important, plus contributed to Lucas’ character development.
Like many others, I found the Russian prison part of the story least effective, and the fact that Hopper keeps leaving and going back was clearly because they needed to time things out with the main storyline. That said, David Harbour is just such a good actor that I always enjoy watching him. Yuri and Murray together was too much over-the-top for me, though. Ugh.
Speaking of over-the-top, a couple of folks here mentioned how over-the-top the bullying of 11 was in the opening episodes and I agree. Way too elaborate and vindictive. I understand they were calling back to previous 80s movies that also featured similar things (e.g. Carrie), but it still didn’t work for me. I wish that the bullying was more believable. Also, Susie’s wild home was like it came from a completely different show. Really off-puttingly zany; I still don’t know WTF that was all about.
Some folks here are complaining about getting tired of 11 solving everything by screaming and pointing, but that didn’t bother me here. It seemed to me that one of the big themes this season was that she needed significant help this time. If not for Mike’s encouragement (yes, the only useful thing he did all season) and the Scooby gang lighting Vecna up with molotovs, she would not have been able to “defeat” 1.
I could probably go on, but I’ll spare you. Can’t wait for Season 5!!
I’m much too lazy to go back and see if it was already mentioned in this thread, but there was a fan theory that the visit to Suzie’s house is about foreshadowing the ending.
• the kids in the house sword fighting each other = Hop fighting the demogorgon with a sword
• the kid who play-acted choking on the floor saying “I’ve been bitten!” = Eddie dying on the ground with a neck wound having been bitten to death by the demobats and/or Vecna using the vines to choke Steve, Nancy and Robin.
• the kids in the kitchen arguing about salt = the salt they steal from the pizza place to make the deprivation bath for El
• the plan to get into Suzie’s dad’s den = the plans to get into Vecna’s mind/attic
• the dad has to put out a fire = Vecna is set on fire and ostensibly put out the fire
There are others. It sort of works out. Plus, whoever came up with it posted the theory before Volume 2 came out. They were somewhat wrong about the specific events that would be foreshadowed at the time, but the idea that it was being foreshadowed was a good pickup.
Or maybe it’s not. YMMV.
Wow, that does actually seem to work - thanks for bringing that up. It’s pretty cool, in an “empty calories” sorta way. Nevertheless, I still think the tone of that whole sequence was way off the rest of the season.
It felt like a potential stealth spin off to me.
Gods, I hope not. I am a big Stranger Things fan and I wouldn’t go near a spin-off like that with a 10-foot pole.
That is the fate of most stealth spin-offs.
Thinking on it some more, I came to the conclusion that something they got absolutely right in this last season that is totally spot-on for the 80s movies the Duffers clearly adore was having actors play characters unrealistically younger than them.
I went back and watched the previous seasons, and the bump in quality from season 3 to 4 was even bigger than I realized. Season 3 was very enjoyable and season 4 was by no means flawless, but 4 was just so much better.
Even with multiple people being consumed by the Mind Flayer and chasing the heroes, the stakes never felt that high. The brief tonal dissonance of Suzie’s house in this season was ubiquitous in every episode of season 3.
Characters were one-dimensional parodies: Alexi wasn’t a brilliant scientist with some quirks; he was an idiotic goofball played for laughs until suddenly he’s dead and you’re supposed to feel sad. Erica wasn’t a good character who sometimes was a bit of a smart ass like in season 4; she was like a smart-ass bot with a single setting.
And the entire premise of season 3 is ludicrous when compared to the monster and backstory of 4. Russians somehow have a secret research facility under a shopping mall? People eat a bunch of poisonous chemicals which gives them super strength until they dissolve in a pile of goo and merge into a meaty-looking spider? Give me a psycho super-powered kid any day.
I don’t think it was explicitly explained, but I think the super strength comes more from being flayed and being controlled by the Mind Flayer. They eat the chemicals to dissolve themselves into the goo so they can reform into the Mind Flayer spider.