Stranger Things 4 promised “epic scope,” but luckily the Netflix outing undid a major season 2 and 3 mistake by limiting its villain (and heroes).
Although Stranger Things season 4 promised to have the most “epic scope” of any season so far, the Netflix hit managed to avoid the biggest mistake made by seasons 2 and 3 when it comes to this increasing scale. It is never easy for a long-running TV show to increase its scope and ambitions. Particularly when a series becomes popular, the choice to open up its worldbuilding sometimes proves the adage that bigger isn’t always better.
One of the biggest mistakes made by Stranger Things seasons 2 and 3 was the decision to expand the scope of the series — or rather, how the Netflix show attempted to pull this off. Stranger Things season 2 featured an infamously ill-judged standalone episode that sent the show’s heroine El to Chicago, introducing characters like Kali (aka Eight) and new elements of Hawkins Lab that have still not been fully addressed. Meanwhile, Stranger Things season 3 added a massive multi-story monster to the show’s cadre of villains, turning the Netflix hit from a small-town horror mystery into a broader sci-fi action series pitting the teens against a kaiju from the Upside Down.
With this in mind, the news that Stranger Things 4 would have the biggest scope of the series to date was worrying. The fact that Vecna attacks victims in their minds, however, means that Stranger Things can experiment with ambitious horror ideas without depicting large-scale calamity. Stranger Things 4 gained the Fear Street trilogy’s dark edge with its creepy new villain and felt bigger because of the choice to split up the cast. However, the villain’s limited size made his attacks feel more personal and less epic, and splitting up the characters made the stakes higher without turning. Stranger Things into a show about its heroes saving the entire world instead of just their small hometown.
Why Stranger Things 4 Didn’t Need To Be Bigger
Mike noting that El already “saved the world twice”In the season 4 premiere proves that Stranger Things 4 couldn’t really go bigger without the show having to uproot its action from the small town of Hawkins. The Byers moving out to California meant that the series already had more major locations to keep track of, along with Hopper’s Siberian exile, but this did not turn Stranger Things season 4 into a globetrotting adventure show where Hawkins was now irrelevant to its proceedings. While splitting the cast across the country gave season 4 more locations, the last thing Stranger Things 4 needed was massive-scale action like season 3’s Battle of Starcourt. More of this action-movie style writing would make character-focused writing harder, trading small scenes of subtle development for big explosive set-pieces. However, the creation of Vecna allowed the writers to give Stranger Things the smaller season 4 that the show needed without sacrificing the stakes.
How Stranger Things 4 Increased The Scope of Its Horror
Vecna’s ability to create nightmarish versions of reality allowed Stranger Things season 4 to increase the scope of its horror with ambitious hallucination sequences. However, Vecna picking off townspeople does not require huge-scale destruction like season 3’s mall-smashing Spider Monster. This meant that, since these scenes were hallucinations, there were no gaping plot holes like how no one noticed the editors of Hawkins Post staff died well before the Starcourt mall fire. These storytelling snags were inevitable when Stranger Things season 3 brought a building-sized monster into a small town, only for none of the locals to see the Mind Flayer marauding through the town’s Fourth of July celebrations. In contrast, Vecna’s terrifying hallucinations worked because they only affected one character at a time, allowing the Stranger Things season 4 villain to create nightmarish, immersive horror without leaving fans asking how no one else noticed his presence.
Stranger Things 4’s Bigger Story Doesn’t Sacrifice Its Stars
While Vecna’s modus operandi was key to the success of Stranger Things season 4’s scope, there are a lot of other factors that helped the series avoid its biggest season 2 and 3 issues. For one thing, Stranger Things season 4 has a far longer runtime than season 3, giving the show time to establish a clear plot for each set of characters. Characters who had little to do in season 3, like Jonathan and Max, have clear objectives and character arcs — even if their progress can be frustratingly slow at time. In particular, Sadie Sink’s Max proves how much Stranger Things season 4 benefited from its longer runtime. In season 3, she facilitated Mike and Eleven’s brief break-up, feuded with her boyfriend Lucas, and essentially served no other purpose in the story. In Stranger Things season 4, her grief over Billy’s death makes her one of the show’s most important main characters and the series has time to ground the extent of this loss well before Vecna uses it to nearly murder her in episode 4.
Stranger Things 4 Is About Saving Hawkins (Not The World)
It is very likely, judging by the events of the mid-season finale, that Stranger Things season 4 could end with Eleven once again saving the world by closing a gateway to the Upside-Down. However, the fact that the season’s story is split across four different locations does not change that, at its heart, Stranger Things season 4 is about Hawkins being in peril rather than Russia invading America, the Upside-Down swallowing the world itself, or any other similarly massive plots from earlier seasons. Those threats still linger in the background, but the show’s grounded storytelling keeps the focus on the characters rather than the settings or action pieces. Stranger Things season 4 brought back Hawkins Lab to tie together stray plot threads from seasons 1 and 2 of the series, proving that there is an overarching plan for the characters and their stories.
Similarly, while Jonathan, Will, Argyle, and Mike spend most of their time crossing America and Hopper, Joyce, and Murray spend a lot of the season across the world, all roads lead to Hawkins in Stranger Things season 4. Even Eleven’s lengthy isolation is spent training her to return to Hawkins, making it all the clearer that the small-town roots of the show are being honored in a season that does not forget where it came from despite its bigger budget and broader ambitions. While Stranger Things season 4 is as visually big as the creators promised, it is also a more personal and contained story for the series, allowing the show to rely on its strong suits over sheer costly spectacle.
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