I wish this piece was a love letter to “Stranger Things”. Like many others in my age group, I grew up watching the show, excited to see kids on TV that were actually my age. Season one was fantastic, lightning in a bottle, and still some of the best TV I’ve seen. But Netflix couldn’t just put a profitable show out to pasture. Instead, the Duffer Brothers dragged the cast of child actors out, again and again, kicking the cash cow that has since become the “Stranger Things” franchise. What once was an original and mysterious show has become a painfully marketed expression of nostalgia and one of Netflix’s crowning jewels. 

 “Stranger Things” writers and directors Matt and Ross Duffer, as always, were concerned with going bigger and better in season 4. “We had characters spread out in 3 different locations and a lot more plot,” Matt Duffer said of the episodes’ extended runtimes and the delayed release of Volume 2 in an interview with TheWrap. “It must be quadruple the plot we had in Season 3.” While runtimes in Seasons 1 and 2 of “Stranger Things” hovered around 50 minutes to an hour, Season 4 runtimes ballooned past the 80-minute mark. Volume 2 is made up of two feature-length episodes that contain almost 4 hours of content in total. 

The long episodes themselves were not a problem, but they felt bloated by too many plotlines and unnecessary details. While the “satanic panic” plot was fun, in which Hawkins’ Dungeons and Dragons club was targeted as satanic worshippers, it seemed insignificant in comparison to the main antagonist Vecna. Hopper’s plot in a Siberian work camp was disconnected from the main story and some of the needle drops within it were too on the nose. I can imagine the script reading “cue communist choral music”. 

“Stranger Things 4” rocked a budget of $30 million per episode, and it’s easy to see where that money went. The practical effects and CGI paired together seamlessly. Behind-the-scenes footage of Millie Bobby Brown, who plays Eleven in the show, reveals that Brown was wearing an intricate bald cap rather than shaving her head for her role. Jamie Campbell Bower donned a 18-piece prosthetic suit when getting into character for Vecna, which took six to seven hours according to his makeup artist Barrie Gower. Although CGI was used to put the finishing touches on many scenes, having a practical base for them makes “Stranger Things 4” appear that much more real.

Season 4 was Sadie Sink’s season. Her character Max had more of a supporting role in prior seasons, but Sink acted her heart out this time around, specifically in “Chapter 4: Dear Billy”. The Duffer Brothers did a great job harnessing the trauma Sink’s character experienced and turning it into a compelling plot. Sink’s performance in Volume 2 was also stunning, carrying the entirety of “Chapter 9: The Piggyback” on her back. 

While the visuals of season 4 were unimpeachable, “Stranger Things”’ writing suffered. Many characters –– but specifically, Will, Robin, and Nancy –– were reduced to shells of what they previously were. Maya Hawke is an amazing actress, but the Duffer Brothers gave her character Robin nothing to work with but quippy one-liners. Natalia Dyer’s Nancy took on an archetypal soft-girl-gone-hard role in “Stranger Things” and becomes almost unlikable. Noah Schnapp’s Will had next to no time on screen except when he was pining over Finn Wolfhard’s Mike, which was heartbreaking. Schnapp is one of the best actors of the lot, and to see him so obviously underutilized was frustrating. 

“Stranger Things” was just renewed for its fifth and final season, which will surely be the longest and most expensive of them all. I love “Stranger Things”, but I think the show should have wrapped up in three seasons maximum. The plot feels overworked and stretched too thin, and the “grand finale” of season 4 did almost nothing to move the story forward. “Stranger Things 4” is fine on its own, but in comparison to the show’s first few seasons it drags and oversimplifies.