I don’t know if I think it’s much scarier, but it’s definitely very violent so far!
Happy to see Murray is back and I love how quickly they managed to turn Derek Turnbow into a member of the team.
Not sure if we are spoiler-tagging everything in this thread or what, so I won’t go into specifics.
But after those 4 episodes, I’m very worried that those of us that are mainly watching at this point just to get a satisfying conclusion are going to be disappointed. They seem to be going down the Lost path of just throwing out more questions and mysteries rather than trying to answer the old ones. And then resolving them with lots of special effects and moments of badassery rather than actual answers.
But I guess they have 5(?) more episodes to make it all make sense.
So I guess Argyle either got out of Hawkins (somehow) before the quarantine or he’s still gathering mushrooms?
It feels like everyone has moved on to Pluribus.
He had my favorite line of the season (so far) when he gave the name “Austin Millbarge” when he was driving his truck in through the fence.
Yeah, it’s not very convincing when the “nerds” getting picked on are now full-grown 30 year old dudes.
When I heard that name, I immediately thought “where’s Emmett Fitz-Hume?”
On the road to Dushanbe.
I’m trying to think of which questions are still unanswered other than “where has Vecna been hiding?” and “what’s the deal with that wall?” (neither of which sound like they will require more than 7 hours of TV to solve, IMO).
The main kids (not counting older brother Jonathan) are all 21-24, so you can subtract a year for when it was filming. But, yes, Jonathan Byers’ character is 31 now IRL. He’s almost the Andrea Zuckerman (90210) of Stranger Things.
Hm, perhaps things have been explained better than I am aware then. I guess a lot of it can be just be explained with “A wizard (Vecna) did it”. I guess we are supposed to just write off everything from Seasons 1-3 that way, even though he wasn’t really introduced as the villain until Season 4.
My big question is “who/what created the Upside Down?” We saw Eleven send Henry there during their big battle, so I don’t think Vecna created it. It also seemed the Russian (and Americans too?) where investigating it. So what is it? Is the Mind Flyer in charge there? Did Vecna somehow conquer it when Eleven sent him there?
I don’t know how old they actually are. The bullying scene just struck me funny as they didn’t look like scrawny little kids anymore.
Yeah, anyone less than 30 to me looks like a late teenager to me these days. 
I’ve also never been good at guessing ages, so this bit of disbelief is easy for me to suspend. When I watch it, I think of them as high school seniors.
My understanding is that:
- Henry was thrown into a pre-existing alternate dimension with pre-existing inhabitants, with the Mind Flayer as the leader of a hive mind.
- Henry somehow imposed his will on the Mind Flayer and the hive mind.
- Henry’s actions in the alternate dimension were also responsible for making the Upside Down version of Hawkins.
I think you’re right that they won’t devote a lot more time into expanding those points, but you never know.
As it turns out, there was a limited run stage play that touched on Henry’s youth and some incidents with that cave in Nevada that the Duffer brothers decided was canon. I suspect given that almost no one is aware of that play, much less the story points it outlines, they’ll spend some time recapping it. Based on what I know, I think your numbered points are pretty close to right.
I just read through the plot of the play on Wikipedia and now I’m more confused than when I started. 
The play is not limited run, it’s currently playing on both London’s West End and on Broadway. There is a fun nod to the events in the stage show when Max is walking though the Hawkins High School hallway and young Joyce hands her the flyer for the school play. I saw the Broadway show twice but I don’t remember anything about the caves in the play, even though the Wikipedia summary does mention them. I think that scene was maybe just described rather than acted. It definitely did not seem like incredibly important information at the time.
It’s uncanny how much Will now looks like Daniel Radcliffe.
When has a story featuring parallel universes ever explained why they exist? They just exist. Wonderland, Oz, Neverland, Narnia… in their stories, they’re just part of the natural order of things. They don’t need explaining.
That’s still younger than Allison Hannigan, Nicholas Brendon and Charisma Carpenter in Season 1 of Buffy, whose characters were supposed to be the same age.
Anyway, my problem with the season so far is that absolutely nothing surprising has happened. All the big twists and revelations have been visible a mile away. It’s disappointing.
Two things:
- The Buffy actors were chosen based on the fact that they could portray actors 7-10 years younger than themselves in season 1. The Stranger Things actors were chosen because a decade ago, they could portray kids a year or so younger than themselves, without any notion that they would eventually have that larger age gap - and the portrayals with that larger gap are now less than convincing.
- We’ve seen the Stranger Things actors age throughout the seasons of the show, and their aging took place across a phase of life when bodily changes are larger and more apparent than in later phases, so it’s more jarring to make that comparison between seasons when there was no record of the earlier phase for the actors of Buffy and hence no comparison to make.
So it make sense that it’s more significant. For me, it didn’t take me too far out of the moment after the first appearance.