Stranger Things v.4's Standout Episode Provides A Pathway For Healing
There can be no doubt that Netflix’s Stranger Things is a cultural phenomenon. Hearkening back to both the stories and the conventions of youth-centric sci-fi/horror films from the seventies and eighties, the show has ridden a wave of nostalgia to massive success, launching multiple child actors (and reinvigorating the careers of some adults) and helping to establish Netflix as must-see TV. Yet the show seems unsatisfied with simply entertaining. From the start, it wanted to be something more than genre-bound popcorn fare, as the writers made clear with their rich characters and drama-heavy plotting. Unfortunately, Stranger Things has struggled most consistently with its trauma plots, failing to reproduce the emotional weight that was so critical to Season 1’s popularity…until now.
Using metaphors to process trauma has become something of a trend in the past decade. Shows like HBO’s The Flight Attendant and Netflix’s Maniac help their protagonists work through buried grief by placing them in fantastical paradigms, enlivening otherwise deeply interior psychological plots. In its first season, Stranger Things also employed this technique, weaving Hopper’s past trauma of losing his child into the twists and turns of the main plot as he investigates the Upside Down. Hopper begins in a state of abject apathy, unable to invest in the present because he is stuck in the past. As he searches for the answers to Will’s disappearance, the audience begins to see Hopper becoming unstuck — but it is only once he is in the Upside Down, confronting the (literally) otherworldly dangers of an alternate dimension, that he is able to fully unpack the grief that has haunted him.
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