Not sure if we need to blur spoilers, but just in case:
Vecna’s attack isn’t pulling someone physically into the Upside Down (physically, they’re floating in mid-air in the “real world”); all of the action is happening inside the victim’s brain. The later attacks only have a connection to the Upside Down in the sense that the connection between Vecna’s mind and the victim’s mind runs in two directions (which is how Max was able to see what Vecna’s lair looked like).
Perhaps, but I’m somewhat skeptical of this, as it seems that they paused at a perfect cliffhanger moment, all the elements for a big finish in place. I don’t object to a pause, mind you, especially with batch releases and binge watching being common, these days.
I had the same suspicions, unless by “not ready” they meant polishing up a little CGI or some very minor reshoots.
For a time, I was semi-convinced the orderly was only a figment of older El’s imagination, so I was pretty thrown off by the final reveal.
From a financial standpoint, there’s a very good reason that TV shows have historically been released one per week. When Netflix streaming first started being a thing they used that as a differentiator, but now that essentially all episodic shows are available via streaming, I think you’ll see the economic reality of a normal episodic release schedule reasserting itself.
There has been a lot of discussion about what will keep people from jumping from streaming service to streaming service every month, and while annual discounts are part of the solution, a show that spans multiple subscription months is a much stronger inducement to stay subscribed.
I’m really liking S4. At first the big bad felt a little out of character for the show. There has always been a direct D&D monster → Upside down monster connection, but in the past it felt like the upside down monster was more of a… force of (twisted) nature and the D&D connection was a model for our heroes to understand it by, while Vecna was clearly a humanoid necromancer wizard, which felt strange. But they connected it all nicely.
I’m enjoying all the plotlines. Joyce and Murray infiltrating the secret Kamchatka prison is certainly the silliest of them, but Brett Gelman and Winona Ryder are just such a fun duo that I don’t care.
My wife and I twigged to the fact that Vecna had killed the other Hawkins Lab kids fairly early, and also that the Orderly was #1, but did not connect the two together until the reveal.
I was really surprised about how much Eden (in Suzie’s house) looked like a young Ally Sheedy, specifically from The Breakfast Club.
I thought the same thing, and Argyle reminds me of Slater from Dazed and Confused. Although I suppose there are a lot of “stoner dude” type characters in various TV and movies.
The hair and clothes especially made her look like Ally from the Breakfast Club.
The still seen here highlights it: Eden Bingham | Stranger Things Wiki | Fandom
I’m also quite confused about what it’s supposed to mean that the upside down stopped updating the day that El made the rift in Season 1. That implies a creation event. Someone upthread suggested that the Upside down existed before that, but that’s when it became unlinked to reality (by virtue of an actual physical link). The problem I have with that is… who’s updating Nancy’s diary before that. The tentacle vines? The bat leeches? It’s just magically being filled out in the drawer?
If the upside down is just going on updating based on what’s happening in the normal world, when does the decay occur? Everything is broken down and dirty and crumbling apart.
When 11 opened the portal - the ‘mirror universe’ became the ‘upside down’ - before the portal it was essentially a duplicate?
(thats a question, not a statement)
Like a duplicate without tentacles and monsters, but then on that fateful day in 1983 all the monsters got in and killed everyone. The reason we don’t see any more updates is that all the people in the upside down died. Seems plausible, and it means that there’s some other dimension that the monsters come from.
I expect there will be a good resolution to this question. It’s a weird thing to write in without a reason, and near-term plot-wise they could just have had the guns in Nancy’s closet be wrecked by the tentacle vines or something.
One Monster got in - and his name was Vance - he was angry, hurt and recently discovered neargod-like status in this new world.
With two episodes and one final season to go, I really hope they don’t introduce an entirely new dark dimension distinct from the Upside Down.
Dammit, that’s it. She looked familiar and yet not familiar; I was like “dammit, it feels lie I’ve seen her before” but in fact I’ve never seen that across (Audrey Holcomb) before.
If I look at a picture of Audrey Holcomb without the 80s hair, she isn’t recognizable to me at all.
I’ll be interested to see how they deal with what Red Letter Media called the Ending Multiplication Effect, in that, in an effort to fit in more characters and stuff, we’ve been following four distinct quests:
Buried in all this is an interesting meditation on grief, when the show takes the time to concentrate on Max or Hopper. It’s going to be hard to bring all this shit back to Hawkins in a way that makes any sense.
It also seems to be trying to tell a similar story with Eleven, but… and maybe this is heresy… I find her very boring. The superhero kid whose job it is to act as a way to beat the monster at the end is just getting tiresome; to be honest, I thought the best thing they ever did was kill her off in Season 1, when she was still interesting, and it gave the show some weight.
What’s cool about El story-wise is that she can be both Superhero (obviously) and Fish Out of Water, given how isolated she has been and how naive she still is. That latter aspect is good for comedy but can also help us invest in her story and round her out as a character. Surprisingly, the show seems to have very little interest in exploring this; the only thing it can think to do with El this season when she’s not saving the world is make her the target of a massive, borderline-psychotic bullying campaign. Every time she came back on camera I cringed, knowing there was more, even worse psychological torture in store for her. Is the show really trying to say she is no better off in the outside world than she was back in the lab?
I think they’re setting up that she’s better off in Hawkins than California. But it will be hard to keep her out of the hands of nefarious government agencies and foreign agencies.
The Lenora Hills, California psycho teen bullies really were over the top. Though common enough in 80s movies to be fair.
I find it funny that after a century of California doubling for everywhere else, Albuquerque doubled for California in Stranger Things.
Yeah, but he got in several years before that. So why does the diary stop the day that El makes the S1 gate?
The other way in which they’ve done the character poorly is, to be honest, her being in love in Mike, who is literally the first boy she’s ever met who wasn’t some weirdo back in the Matthew Modine lab. What Exit’s “she’s better off in Hawkins” theory as to where they’re doing is, to be honest, kind of depressing in this regard; they’re effectively saying the kid cannot grow.
I don’t mind love stories, but teen love stories that are treated with the sort of “this has to be permanent or it’s a disaster” approach just seem stunted and immature to me, and in a way, kind of gross. It’s not normal or healthy for a couple to stay together starting when they’re 12, especially in the very strange dynamic here. (The Max-Lucas storyline is easier to swallow, as it’s just inherently way more normal.)
That said, this sort of thing just pisses me off, and maybe that’s just me, but it seems perpetually the case that there’s this drag on female characters saying they have to limit their horizons to meet the requirements of the love story.
I agree it seems awkward and I hope for a cleaner resolution than that.
No - that was the day he got in - atleast my interpretation of the scene(s) - he was far older than 11, but he arrived in the ‘upside down’ when 11 opened the gate and put him there.