Dev F
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59 minutes ago, Sarah 103 said:
I thought it was the same spot. After we saw her accidently create the gate in 1979, I thought it looked very similar to the gate that we see in 1983. I thought it was the exact same place. They remodeled the rainbow room and turned that into a space to study the Upside Down. It was the shattered mirror and the way the gate was framed that made me think the 1979 gate was the same gate we see in 1983.
The 1983 gate was created in the sensory deprivation lab, a much larger room (two stories tall, to accommodate the water tank) on a lower floor than the living quarters (which we know because Hopper had to take an elevator down there when he broke into the lab in season 1).
And I don't think it's a situation where they completely gut-rehabbed the Rainbow Room into a sensory deprivation lab and moved all the living quarters up to the ground floor, since the Rainbow Room seems to already be on the ground floor when El's mom breaks in during the flashbacks in season 2. (In that we just sort of see her fumbling around at every door she finds after pulling a gun on the security guards, and nothing about her finding an elevator and somehow getting downstairs while alarms are going off.) It also doesn't really make sense that the lab would be like, "Whoops, this angry woman with a gun broke into our basement living quarters, so we'd better move them to a less secure location!"
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53 minutes ago, Clanstarling said:
The 1979 gate got bigger and more dangerous as the years went on? I don't know, the 4 years earlier bit has thrown me.
The 1979 gate immediately closed, and when El tried to make first contact with the demogorgon in 1983 she opened a new, larger, and apparently not self-closing gate.
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12 hours ago, iMonrey said:
I did enjoy the discussion about Annie's success in making Gene look . . . (insert various adjectives here then say "no"). Tall.
And then in the subsequent scene between Gene and Papa Moss, the angles on Gene make him look really short.
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10 hours ago, Redrum said:
My interpretation of Will in season three was a kid who saw everyone in his circle growing up and moving away from him while he was still suffering from some trauma and really wanted things to stabilize and be exactly as they were before the trauma happened. No girls, best friends who wanted to be friends with him and play D&D, and the whole thing with Mike was Will realizing things were never going to be the same and that he needed to move on and accept that things were different.
I don't think that's inaccurate, I just think the text supports a more specific reading than that. Why is Will's initial state of delusion characterized by him insisting "I'm not gonna fall in love"? Why is he so specifically distressed by Mike having a girlfriend, but totally fine hanging out with Lucas and Max and actually smiling with excitement at the idea of meeting Dustin's girlfriend? Why do the moments when he represses the knowledge of the Mind Flayer's return happen to correspond to the moments when he's sitting next to Mike at the movies on a quasi–double date, or watching glumly as Mike skips down the hill with his girlfriend? And that's not even taking into account the hints seeded in earlier seasons, from the homophobic bullying in season 1 to the talk of Will's "rainbow ship" of which Joyce was "so proud" in season 2, and so on.
Which is not to say that I'm right and you're wrong. We all take from the show what we choose to take from it. But this is my answer to your question What bearing does Will's sexuality have on the story being told? To me, assuming that Will is struggling with his sexuality renders the story more coherent and specific than any reading I've seen that assumes he isn't, and lends meaning to things that, under any other framework I'm familiar with, end up meaning nothing.
QuoteWhat affect does Dustin's heterosexuality have on his struggles this season? What about Robin being gay - is that actually affecting the story line? To me, neither has any impact. It just is.
It's interesting you'd pick those two examples, because I'd argue that in season 3, Dustin's relationship with his girlfriend and Robin's coming-out scene are both quite central to putting across the story and themes of the season.
Basically, I see S3 as being largely about the fact that these previously tight groups of friends and loved ones are going their separate ways -- and that this is actually a strength rather than a weakness. In their fight against the Mind Flayer, a symbol of conformity so literal that it joins its victims together into a hive mind before mashing them together into a giant blobby monster in an episode titled "E Pluribus Unum," our heroes draw strength from their disunity, fracturing into smaller groups that each play a unique role in thwarting the Mind Flayer's plans.
Dustin's role is one of the clearest articulations of that idea. He spends the whole season insisting that he got this girlfriend when he was away at camp, and all his friends think he's totally making it up. But in the end, this personal connection that no one believed in and no one else could possibly duplicate is essential to cracking the Russian passcode and saving the world. And it's revealed in a strange and beautiful duet, embodying the idea that drifting apart from your friends isn't just sadly necessary but can even be joyous and ennobling.
Robin's coming-out scene has more of a thematic than a literal connection, but it embodies another facet of the idea that rifts between friends don't have to be a negative thing: Steve realizes he and Robin will never be together romantically, but it doesn't mean he has to stop caring about her.
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9 minutes ago, janie jones said:
Was it here I was reading about Will's birthday? The Duffer Brothers have explained it. It makes me wonder if that date has significance to one of them in real life.
My theory was that it was precisely the opposite: they just sort of backed into the dates for this season based on when spring break would kick off that year, and didn't even think about whether they'd match up to anything meaningful.
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12 minutes ago, Redrum said:
I mean honestly I could care less if Will is gay or straight. It has literally no bearing on any of the stories running. Would it be good to have a little more representation, sure.... but would it make any difference overall? To the whole Vecna Upside-down battle of good and evil?
I mean, it made a difference last season. By my reading, Will's entire S3 storyline was about how he was in denial about both his sexuality and the Mind Flayer's return, burying them under the comforting fiction that he's just a kid who wants to play D&D, and when the confrontation with Mike forced him to come to terms with the former, it also allowed him to finally accept that the Mind Flayer was back.
In fact, season 3 is what tipped me from "These are just passing hints that might not amount to anything" to "This is a legitimate subtextual storyline." I honestly don't see a way that's Will's S3 story makes sense, even on the most basic literal level, without the subtext of his repressed crush on Mike. Without it, the storyline is "Will is repressing his knowledge of the Mind Flayer's return, and then he has an unrelated fight with Mike, after which he is randomly able to accept that the Mind Flayer is back." That's what I mean when I say my dog in this fight is that I want subtext to mean something: I would rather not knock down the subtextual underpinnings that turn a series of choppy plot points into an elegant character arc.
And, in more general terms, of course the story of the season will be meaningfully affected by who the characters are and what they're going through. If their personal struggles didn't factor in to the story being told, what would be the point?
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20 minutes ago, Taryn74 said:
I think that's a real possibility, too. But, if I'm being blunt, I fear for the showrunners' career if they DON'T have Will be gay at this point. They've hinted at it too much - even if they did intend for it to be a red herring - and the blowback if they don't follow through will be huge. Today's cancel culture is VICIOUS.
I mean, if they spent four seasons layering in gay subtext just so they could be like, "Psych! He's actually in love with El!" they'd deserve every bit of blowback they got.
I'm not saying that as a shipper, by any means. I think the chance the Mike reciprocates Will's feelings is quite remote, since I've always read Mike's arc as being about him struggling with the fear of being ordinary rather than anything related to his sexuality. But I am very much in favor of subtext being meaningful, instead of us having to assume that oblique character development means nothing until and unless someone explicitly says, "Yes, Will is gay."
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3 hours ago, Redrum said:
I don't think Chrissy was the cheerleader in season three. I thought that girl was named Robin and was mind flayed and all the mind flayed died.
Heather the lifeguard? We see her disintegrate and become part of the Flesh Golem, and Jason mentions her in his pep rally speech as one of the people who died in the "mall fire." Chrissy is a different, new character.
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Am I the only one who's such a huge TV nerd that when Deborah recommended Elaine to direct her special by saying, "It was her idea for Mary Tyler Moore to throw the hat," I was immediately indignant on behalf of Iranian American TV director Reza Badiyi, the guy who came up with the hat gag in real life?
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10 hours ago, Dev F said:
Looking back over the flashback scenes, I could find the following examples of the sixteen remaining child subjects possibly using telekinesis:
- Two: The TK champ
- Three, Four, Five: Good enough to help Two smack Eleven around
- Seven: Can move the little ball around the maze
- Eleven: Duh
- Thirteen: Can keep a few tops spinning
- Fourteen: Possibly uses TK on the plinko board, but might just be playing around with it
- Sixteen, Seventeen: Can push around little toy cars
- Eighteen: Possibly helping to spin the tops, but might just be watching Thirteen do it
Quoting myself here to point out something else I found interesting: Eight, Nine, Ten, and Twelve are never shown successfully using telekinetic powers, and Ten is shown being trained on remote viewing. And Eleven's mother was mostly skilled at psychic projection, so that may have been the power El was originally expected to manifest.
So you could imagine a backstory where Two through Seven were trained on telekinesis, and then with Eight through Twelve they started training on psychic projection and remote viewing, but when Eleven started displaying a special gift for telekinesis as well, Brenner started to focus on TK again, so that most of the later subjects are shown to be telekinetic as well.
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2 hours ago, Kel Varnsen said:
Does it seem weird to anyone else that all of Papa's other kids developed telekinetic powers but 008 somehow developed mess with your mind/vision powers?
It's possible that it just looks that way because of selection bias: in most of the scenes with the kids, they were preparing for or participating in telekinesis training, so we only see them attempting telekinesis. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's what all of them are best at, or even if some of them can do it at all. Most of them don't do anything in the training but stand around and get knocked down, after all.
Looking back over the flashback scenes, I could find the following examples of the sixteen remaining child subjects possibly using telekinesis:
- Two: The TK champ
- Three, Four, Five: Good enough to help Two smack Eleven around
- Seven: Can move the little ball around the maze
- Eleven: Duh
- Thirteen: Can keep a few tops spinning
- Fourteen: Possibly uses TK on the plinko board, but might just be playing around with it
- Sixteen, Seventeen: Can push around little toy cars
- Eighteen: Possibly helping to spin the tops, but might just be watching Thirteen do it
So that's about half to two-thirds of the subjects who demonstrate some telekinetic ability, But it's possible there are subjects who have other abilities in addition to or instead of TK. Ten, for instance, shows a gift for remote viewing, but I don't think we ever see him do TK.
(I mean, I suppose it's possible that he's telekinetically manipulating the magic eight ball while also using remote viewing to determine which answer to move into the window, but that seems at odds with the amount of effort it takes him to RV in the next scene.)
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49 minutes ago, neptunewaves said:
But he did verbalize it, remember? "It's not my fault you don't like girls!". We can choose to read it as an unfortunate choice of words, but Mike is inmediately aware of the implications of what he said (and so is Will) and apologizes. Not reason to apologize if he meant it any other way.
Quite the contrary, I think: Mike apologizes because he didn't mean it that way, just blurted out a thoughtless insult in the heat of anger, but from Will's caught-out expression immediately realized that he'd said something more penetrating than he intended. Which is why he quickly backs down, and then drags Lucas across town in a storm to make sure Will doesn't think he was actually trying to be that hurtful.
QuoteI don't Mike will ever become the kind of nut who protests gay funerals or actively works to make queers people lives a living hell, but he IS visibly uncomfortable around Will in a way he isn't around any of the straight coded characters.
Again, I read it the exact opposite way: Mike is actually sweeter and gentler with Will than with any of his obviously hetero male friends. Mike, Lucas, and Dustin will be crude and bust each other's balls, but Mike and Will are more apt to sit quietly and talk about their fears or how much they mean to one another.
I always took that as the point of Mike's "It was the best thing I've ever done" speech to Will in season 2. That was him realizing that, for all his posturing that he's a normal kid who's best friends with all his friends, and maybe Lucas most of all because he lives next door, he's actually drawn to people who need him more earnestly, the way both Will and El do. He sees himself as the paladin, the knight in shining armor rescuing the princess or prince in the tower.
Which is why I'm puzzled by the talk about Mike's homophobia and the worry that he'll react badly if Will confesses feelings for him. (A confession that will, I very much expect, include a direct call-back to Mike's season 2 speech; I'd be willing to bet Will's painting is of five-year-old Will and Mike on the swings.) Regardless of whether Mike reciprocates Will's feelings, he's positively desperate to be loved desperately, and starved for the opportunity to show that he's a good and decent person who deserves that love. So I think he'd make a point of being understanding and supportive.
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44 minutes ago, Blue Plastic said:
I think Nancy is still in HS also unless that’s supposed to be a job at a newspaper. But I think it’s high school.
Yeah, Nancy and Jonathan are both still in high school. Their jobs at the real newspaper in season 3 was a summer internship before their senior year.
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2 minutes ago, Chicago Redshirt said:
Robin has feelings for her bandmate, but is scared to explore them for fear of rejection and fear that she will be exposed in her small town as a lesbian. Will presumably has feelings for Mike, who he knows does not have romantic feelings for him, and is afraid that he will lose his best friend if he tries to make a move.
Yeah, I woke up this morning with the realization that this is probably how the whole Will/Mike/El storyline is going to fit together: Just as Will has been reluctant to confess his feelings to Mike for fear of how he'll respond, perhaps Mike has been reluctant to declare his love for El because he doesn't feel worthy of a "superhero" girlfriend. And when Will finally opens up about his crush, Mike will assure him that it doesn't make him feel any different about him and it'll bring them closer together—and this will help Mike realize that his fears are also misplaced and give him the courage to open up to El about his love for her in turn.
Now, if that is what we're headed toward, I've got pretty mixed feelings about it. Philosophically, I don't love the idea that a gay character's story might be just the grist for the mill of a straight relationship. And narratively, it pulls against any justification for Will and El starting the season as such sadsacks, since giving them happy lives in California that Mike feels disconnected from seems like better setup for that sort of triangle of alienation (and would also make Will's queerness less of a means to an end, if he's otherwise well-adjusted and happy being out to himself and only anxious where his feelings for Mike are concerned).
But it all fits together logically in a way only one other possibility I can think of really does. And that possibility, that Mike hasn't expressed his love for El because he's struggling with his own sexuality, has always seemed unlikely to me despite the fervent (and sometimes surprisingly cogent) arguments of the Will/Mike shippers, just because I've always read Mike's arc as being more about his struggle with a fear of being ordinary than any sexual identity issues.
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4 hours ago, steelyis said:
I'd feel a hundred percent better about Will and his possible queerness if the show did something tangible with it. I understand the series takes place during a period in American history when being anything other than straight would be a serious and dangerous issue for Will to deal with, but all this... pussy-footing, if you'll pardon the expression, is frustrating. It feels cynical and queerbait-y. A way for the creators to say: "Hey, we have a kinda sorta maybe gay kid (who we don't actually showcase all that much lately) as a main character! Aren't we inclusive?"
I would argue that at this point Will's storyline is meaningfully centered around the fact that he's queer, to the point that I would actually struggle to make sense of his season 3 arc at all without the gay subtext that connects his personal story to the sci-fi story. That is, over the course of the first few episodes of S3, he goes from A) denying the darkness in his past by insisting that he's just a carefree kid who wants to play D&D, to B) getting into a jealous fight with Mike that ends with Mike snapping "It's not my fault you don't like girls!" to C) realizing his childhood fantasy is "so stupid" and literally beating it to splinters with a bat, so that he's finally able to admit that the Mind Flayer is back and warn his friends.
The only way that A leads to B leads to C is if the confrontation in B somehow snaps him out of the childish delusion in A. And as far as I can tell, the only way that works is if "I'm not going to fall in love" is part of that delusion—if what he's covering up is not just the fact that the Mind Flayer is back but also the fact that he's gay and has a crush on his best friend, and Mike snapping him out of the latter delusion also snaps him out of the former.
Which is how Will gets to where he is this season: out to himself about his feelings but agonizing over how/whether to confess them to Mike.
Now, if you want to argue that Will's storyline should've gone somewhere else post-self-acceptance, I'm not sure I disagree with you. (I expected a very different story for Will/Mike/El this season: for them to reverse the triangle, showing Will and El as surprisingly well-adjusted, simpatico siblings who giggle over their normal teen adventures, while Mike, who's always recoiled at normalcy and was drawn to both of them because they were damaged weirdos, worries that he's losing the two most important people in his life to each other.) But it's hard to judge the writers' chosen alternative without knowing where it's going, and regardless of whether it ends up being any good, it's still a question of how the series chooses to portray a queer Will Byers, not whether they should portray him as queer at all, which I think is a long-since-settled question.
3 hours ago, MamaGee said:What annoys me is they already have a gay character.
Heh, that's kind of how I felt when they introduced Robin. But a part of me suspects that they gave another character an overt coming-out story as a dry run for Will's story, and maybe as a way to demonstrate to Noah Schnapp and his people that they could be more overt about the character's sexuality without alienating fans.
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1 hour ago, eleanorofaquitaine said:
I think one of the things left hanging is why is the Upside Down stuck on November 6th, 1983. Presumably it connects to El's escape from the lab but I wonder if there is more to it.
There are two overarching motifs in season 4 that haven't really been paid off yet: all the stuff with clocks and the variable speed of time and El's comment that "We are all time travelers if you think about it," and everything about people being split in two or combining or deciding whether to be made whole. I wonder if all that relates to the weirdness in the Upside Down. Like, maybe there was some sort of temporal split on the night of November 6, 1983, so that in one timeline the world as we know it was destroyed, and in the other it continued more or less as normal, and the gates are actually connecting those two divergent timelines?
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47 minutes ago, Redrum said:But I don't like "and btw Will IS gay" because I hate it when shows go with stereotypes. Who is gay here? The athletic black kid? The ugly kid who is intellectually arrogant? The kid with the physical disability issue? Nope, all three have girl friends. But the quiet artistic kid who is actually good looking and who has a mother who is kind of over protective and no real father figure? Yup always gay.
Or they're finally revealing that he's gay because he's always been written as gay, all the way back to the original pitch packet for the series, in which he was described as "a sweet, sensitive kid with sexual identity issues" who "only recently came to the realization that he does not fit into the 1980s definition of 'normal.'" (A description that persisted even after Noah Schnapp was cast, when the character was described as "a small and sensitive boy who doesn’t fit into the 1980’s definition of normal," so it doesn't seem to be one of those things, like Lucas's parents being in the middle of a divorce, that the writers rethought in the development process.) I'm all in favor of confounding stereotypes, but more than that I'm in favor of not dropping the ball on three season's worth of subtext.
Which is to say, once it's been established that a character faces homophobic bullying, with his own father calling him a "f*g" and his own mother refusing to confirm or deny whether that's accurate, and there are queer-coded references to him painting a "rainbow ship" of which his mom was "so proud," and when his awkward dance with a girl is scored to the line "Every smile you fake" from "Every Breath You Take," and his entire arc for season 3 centers around his jealousy over his best friend's relationship with his girlfriend, and he dresses up in a sparkly purple robe to declare a day without girls while he sasses his friends, and finally the whole thing comes to a head with his best friend snapping "It's not my fault you don't like girls!" it's maybe more likely that all those things are happening because the writers are following through on their initial plans for the character than because of a series of crazy coincidences. "Whoops, we accidentally suggested, over and over again, that the character who we was originally supposed to be gay might be gay!" is not really a thing that happens.
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14 minutes ago, Brn2bwild said:
I think he has great bone structure, but he got saddled with a terrible wig. He's looked more attractive in real life. Same with Will - he looks less attractive because they stuck him with that terrible and fake-looking bowl cut rather than another 80s-appropriate hair style that would have allowed him to use his own hair.
At least with Mike, his unflattering look seems to match where the character is at this point, how he's not quite sure who he is -- awkwardly trying to be a cool guy by combining his new hero Eddie Munson's look with what he imagines Califonia style to look like. With Will, on the other hand, whose storyline seems to center around him having finally come to terms with the part of himself that he could previously only express by putting on a sparkly purple robe and declaring a day without girls, it's weird that he's still walking around with a little boy's bowl cut.
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42 minutes ago, eleanorofaquitaine said:
Also, as I note above, Chrissy didn't ask for Special K specifically, she just asked for something "stronger." Eddie was getting her something stronger based on his experience.
Yep, and the scene ends right at that point, so presumably she went on to explain what she meant by "stronger" and Eddie suggested ketamine as the drug most likely to produce the results she wanted. If she had said, "It's for an abortion," Eddie would presumably have said "I don't have any drugs that can do that," or at least not suggested a drug like Special K, which has no abortifacient properties.
And if she didn't actually explain what she wanted it for, she'd have no reason to think whatever she got would induce abortion, since that's a very particular effect that doesn't map to how "strong" a drug is in a recreational sense. To me it seems clear that what she was looking for was something "strong" in the commonly understood sense -- something especially good at getting her high so she wouldn't have to deal with the headaches and nightmares that were plaguing her.
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35 minutes ago, Clanstarling said:
With Chrissy, there was a brief moment when a family portrait was shown, and the father looked familiar to me. I don't think he was the mayor, but I think was one of the ones who died - so maybe she has some trauma regarding that. I still think that she might have been pregnant (even the fat shaming text could be a clueless mom).
I assumed that the painting was probably based on the (uncredited) actor who played her father for his brief appearance in Chrissy's hallucination with his eyes and mouth sewed shut. But I saw a tweet the other day in which someone speculated that the painting of her father was meant to resemble actor Olan Montgomery, who had a minor role as one of the asshole newspaper reporters in season 3 and died of COVID early in the pandemic. Maybe that's why he looked vaguely familiar?
In any event, the particulars of Chrissy's nightmares all seemed to point in one direction. The rotting food, the cruel mother who calls her daughter a pig while obsessing over whether she fits into a dress, the father who can't see or say anything about what's happening—add to that the scene of her vomiting in the lavatory, and it adds up to "Abusive mother obsesses over her daughter's weight, causing her to develop an eating disorder."
As for the ketamine, I assume Chrissy was looking for a powerful sedative that would suppress her nightmares and let her get some sleep.
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3 hours ago, DoctorAtomic said:No, he's pissed he missed the game winning shot and now he's taking his dainty manpain out on everyone. Chrissy wasn't anything more than a trophy that was taken from him. He may not have been physically beating anyone at school, but he clearly thought Eddie was a 'freak' and has no problems thinking he's the cream of the crop. Who missed the game winning shot.
This seems like a hugely uncharitable interpretation of a character who's presented as being genuinely devastated by Chrissy's death and genuinely happy for Lucas for making the game-winning shot. When the show is portraying someone as unambiguously villainous, it's usually pretty obvious about it -- see, e.g., the California bullies -- so I think it's meaningful that Jason is presented not as cartoonishly cruel but as generally well-meaning but shallow and misguided.
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1 hour ago, Chicago Redshirt said:
As to One, I suppose calling him a project failure is a little harsh. He was the wellspring from which the project grew. He obviously had the abilities fully manifest, and Brenner thought he could keep him in check with the implant. It was potentially worth it to keep him around for future lab rat purposes as well as to potentially mentor the younglings.
It did occur to me that there's another possible reason they might keep One around, though it's quite dark and unpleasant and I don't think anything in the season thus far has alluded to it. Which is to say, if One is actually the father of any of the younger subjects, he doesn't seem to be aware of it.
1 hour ago, Harvey said:Well....because that would be freaking terrifying? Cutting yourself with a cut glass? Yeah, can't blame him for not going that route.
It's also possible that the chip has defenses against self-removal—say, if One tries to tamper with it, it disrupts his nervous system so he can't go through with it.
Speaking of which, I wonder if I was the only one who interpreted the story of Eleven freeing One from his chip as an explanation for how she lost her abilities. That is, I wonder if when she used her powers to dig the shard of the Mind Flayer's monster out of her leg, it triggered her repressed memory of digging the chip out of One's neck and kicking off his massacre, and the stress of having to repress those memories all over again scrambled her powers.
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28 minutes ago, Redrum said:
The Upside Down does seem to encompass One's love of spidery things.
Yep, which seems like it suggests a couple different possibilities: that One's mind created the Upside Down as we know it, including the black, many-legged Mind Flayer; or One's fascination with spiders drew the attention of the Mind Flayer, and as he progressed to creepy spider worship that was him falling under the Mind Flayer's influence.
QuoteHow did Eight miss out on this?
One talks to Eleven about the time when her mother tried to rescue her, which he says happened "when Eight was still here." That means she'd already escaped by the time of this season's flashbacks.
In season 2, Eight says, "I remember the day I came to the rainbow room and you were gone. So when my gifts were strong enough, I used them to escape." And Eleven didn't have any memories of Eight beyond the one her mother showed her, so it doesn't seem like they had much if any contact once El was old enough to really remember her.
What I'd guess is that Brenner probably kept the girls apart after Terry's rescue attempt, so that Eight couldn't remind Eleven of her mother's visit.
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Interesting and fun first run of episodes. While season 4 echoes season 3 in having too much thoughtless '80s shtick -- the faceless Russian villains, the implausible crowds of over-the-top-awful bullies -- when the writers give it a little effort, they're still among the best in the biz at investing simple ideas and shopworn characters with nuance and a sense of fun. Even Chrissy, the popular cheerleader and inevitable First Girl of horror convention, is allowed to have a real, endearing personality. And even a visit to Suzie's big Mormon family avoids the easy gags about strict religious households to offer a joyous rundown of her siblings' creative idiosyncrasies.
But what struck me most is that season 4 is, for good or ill, the season best suited to binge watching since super-binge-friendly season 1. Whereas season 2 was too intricate to appreciate in one lightning-fast burst, and season 3 was too wide-ranging, season 4's super-sized runtime and budget mean that it spends more time than necessary on every essential story/character point, and between those narrative anchors are a lot of flashy setpieces that burn through money and time without demanding much of us. (For instance, I was especially amused by the new secondary villain "Important Military Guy with a Helicopter," whose main role in the season seemed to be to give the producers an excuse to include not one, not two, but three scenes of his chopper dramatically taking off or landing.) The result is that you can rocket through the episodes in a pleasant blur without feeling like you're missing anything about what the season is saying or how it all fits together.
And the way it's fitting together, though not terribly complex so far, is pretty interesting. By my reading, the themes of seasons 1 through 3 are, respectively "Find the ones you love," "Hold them close," and "Let them go," so I was pretty much expecting the theme of season 4 to be something along the lines of "If they come back to you . . ." And sure, enough, that's what this season seems to be about -- but what surprises me are the ways in which coming back does not seem to be a foregone conclusion. The show is at least seriously considering the possibility that some of what's fallen apart may not be destined to be put back together, to the point that for the first time I'm even wondering if the seemingly inevitable Mike/El ship is necessarily endgame for those characters (eyes those dramatic Mike/Will scenes curiously). Obviously, there's still two episodes to go, so it's possible everything will be tied up neatly in the end, but at least there's some intriguing inquiry along the way.
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S04.E07: Chapter Seven: The Massacre at Hawkins Lab
in Stranger Things
We see it at a slightly later point, when Brenner demands of young El, "What have you done!" By then it's just a spidery brown mark on the wall—more "closed" looking than, say, the gate in season 3 after the portal drill blew up.