If you've made it through the marathon final episodes of Stranger Things Season 4, you likely still have Kate Bush’s voice echoing in your mind. After an ending like that, we could all use a song to save us and grant us patience until the story continues. In the meantime, it’s worth reflecting on what this season accomplished, how our favorite characters have evolved, and what they’re truly fighting against.

The Power of a Past We Never Had

The showrunners, twin brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, are directors who drew deep inspiration from the 1980s culture they grew up in. Their breakout series is steeped in loving references to the films of that decade, skillfully replicating their aesthetic. One need only look at the official posters, which are clear homages to the painted covers of classic paperbacks and movie posters for films like Jaws, The Evil Dead, and Alien.

The story itself, which began with a group of outsider kids in a quiet American town encountering something inexplicable, is classic 1980s fare. It feels like a direct descendant of a Spielberg film, where children face off against secret government organizations, or a Stephen King novel, where supernatural forces bleed into reality.

The first season’s great strength was its ability to make us feel like children again. We saw the world primarily through the kids' eyes, and for a while, it seemed possible that their adventure was just an elaborate game. It didn’t matter where you grew up—in the American suburbs or on a city block halfway across the world—the feeling of inventing incredible adventures with friends is universal. This childhood perspective allowed us to accept the story’s sometimes wild and illogical turns.

This is all part of the show’s masterful use of nostalgia, provoking this feeling even in viewers who never lived through the 1980s. There’s a word for this phenomenon: anemoia, a nostalgia for a time you’ve never known. The pop culture images the series plays with are so iconic that they’ve transcended their own era, becoming familiar to people of all ages and nationalities.

The End of Innocence

As the characters grow, the show grows with them. This isn’t a bad thing, but films about children and films about teenagers operate by different rules. In Season 1, the creators played on the stark contrast between the world of kids and the world of adults. This is what made certain plot twists so effective. Consider the moment in the third episode when Will’s body is seemingly found. In traditional children’s cinema, a missing child is rarely found deceased; showing the body was a shocking move that wouldn't have had the same impact if the characters were older.

By the later seasons, the intuitive ideas of the early days became a more precise calculation. The nostalgia was amplified, and the series became a playground for cinephiles to spot references. Yet, some felt the plot was becoming too convoluted. Where the child’s perspective once smoothed over illogicalities, the more mature tone of the second and third seasons made these questions harder to ignore.

This brought the story to a point of near-ironic absurdity in the third season, with antagonists from the Eastern Bloc operating a secret facility beneath the local mall. This plotline was divisive. Some viewers found the use of cartoonish, stereotypical spies to be a crude misstep. Others argued it was a brilliant continuation of the 1980s aesthetic, embracing the over-the-top, anti-communist spy films that were a hallmark of the era.

In the fourth season, this storyline was expanded, with Hopper's ordeal in a bleak Kamchatka prison. His long, heartfelt conversations with fellow prisoners and grueling labor feel more reminiscent of bleak tales of survival in Siberian labor camps than a fun, pulpy adventure. While emotionally resonant, this plotline often felt too isolated, with its characters on the other side of the world, barely able to communicate with the main group.

The Monsters Within

The nearly three-year gap between seasons allowed the show, like its characters, to mature even further. Season 4 is dramatically harsher, leaving no room for the charming infantilism of the past. The games are over. The characters are navigating the brutal landscape of adolescence, and it is only fitting that the main villain is a powerful telepath from the Upside Down who forces people to confront their deepest fears and traumas.

Vecna’s victims are psychologically vulnerable teenagers, those easiest to manipulate. Tellingly, the very thing that saves them is their favorite music—a coping mechanism familiar to anyone who has ever sought refuge from their own thoughts by putting on headphones. The new antagonist isn't just an external threat; he embodies the internal conflicts the heroes are experiencing.

Accepting oneself is the season's central theme, and it unfolds differently for each character.

• Eleven, in a heroic arc of self-discovery, realizes that destroying monsters is easier than fitting in at a new high school. To reclaim her power, she must voluntarily return to the place of her trauma, accept her past, and mature beyond her symbolic father figures.
• Will quietly grapples with his identity and his profound feelings for his best friend, a struggle captured in subtle glances and coded conversations.
• Max, haunted by the death of her stepbrother, is consumed by a guilt she feels she doesn’t deserve to let go of. Her journey is about allowing herself to acknowledge her complicated, negative feelings and finally accept them as part of her story.

Through these internal battles, the series sends a powerful message: it’s okay to be different. We all have fears and complexes, but those are part of us.

The season finale is both epic and touching, appealing so convincingly to our emotions that it’s easy to forgive a few narrative shortcuts, like the sudden emergence of Eleven's ability to resurrect people. We had to say goodbye to Eddie, a character many of us had just gotten to know and love. His transformation from outcast to hero, capped by his unforgettable concert in the Upside Down, was a highlight of the season. His sacrifice was difficult to watch, but in sacrificing a charismatic secondary character, the creators stayed true to the story's rising stakes.

The main characters, for now, remain standing. We can only wait to see what happens next. The creators are in a winning position, able to answer our many questions with a simple promise: “Wait for the fifth season.” And the questions are many: What will happen to Max? Will Will find the courage to confess his feelings? Who will Nancy choose? Will the heroes finally defeat the darkness consuming Hawkins?

Season 4 was a springboard to the final chapter. It gave us a glimpse of what to expect and raised the level of intrigue so high that the final season is now unmissable. The heroes achieved an interim victory, but the ending was bittersweet and tinged with dread, suggesting a truly mature and perhaps tragic conclusion is on the horizon. Let's just hope we won't have to wait another three years to see it.

References

• Vogel, Joseph. Stranger Things and the 1980s: The Complete Retro Guide. J.V. Books, 2018.

  This guide meticulously documents the specific film, music, and cultural touchstones from the 1980s that the series draws upon. It confirms and elaborates on the analysis of the show's aesthetic, providing direct evidence for the homages to Spielberg, King, and classic horror films mentioned in the article.

• Levitin, Daniel J. This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Plume/Penguin, 2007.

  Levitin’s work explores the neuroscience behind music's powerful effect on our emotions, memory, and identity. His findings scientifically support the show's central plot device in Season 4, where a favorite song can literally save a character by activating deep emotional and autobiographical pathways in the brain, pulling them back from the brink of a trauma-induced state (see Chapter 4, "Anticipation: What We Expect from Liszt (and Ludacris)").

• Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, 2001.

  This seminal work on cultural memory helps explain the show's unique nostalgic appeal. Boym distinguishes between "restorative nostalgia" (a literal attempt to rebuild a lost home) and "reflective nostalgia" (a more ironic, longing contemplation of the past). The article's point about anemoia—feeling nostalgic for a time one never experienced—is a form of reflective nostalgia, which Boym argues is a defining characteristic of modern global culture (see pp. 41-56).