Stranger Things 4 needed to dream bigger

polygon.com:

In the 90-minute penultimate episode of Stranger Things’ fourth season, its heroes — mostly teenagers now, after six years of real-world aging since the series premiere — get ready to battle demons. They hammer nails into trash can lids, saw the barrel off a shotgun, and fashion spears out of knives and rods. It’s not their first time; previous seasons built to similar showdowns. But it is the most grim. While prior climactic battles in Stranger Things were waged with the tools of children, like fireworks and makeshift CB radios, this time the kids are arming themselves with deadly force. With one season remaining, series creators Matt and Ross Duffer take moments like this to underline how the show’s cast has grown up — but it also shows how limited their imagination for them has been.

The hardest thing to parse about the bombastic, supersized Stranger Things 4 is who, exactly, the series is for anymore. The show continues to cycle through ’80s film tropes, its plot unbothered by the notion that its young cast might not be a good fit for the next reference the Duffer brothers want to make. Just like season 3 found room for a Terminator-esque assassin, season 4 carves out a season-long side plot involving Jim Hopper surviving and escaping a Russian gulag, effectively making a second ’80s B-movie in parallel with the ’80s horror pastiche in the main plot.

Tonally, season 4’s story — about an otherworldly, humanoid creature called Vecna stalking teenagers in their nightmares before grotesquely murdering them in the real world, like Freddy Krueger — is all over the place. While the first season (and perhaps the second) could conceivably be pitched for viewers roughly the same age as its tween cast of Dungeons & Dragons