Stranger Things season 4: full recap, episode by episode, and ending explained

Episodes 1 and 2: Chrissy and the Hellfire Club

On March 21, 1986, cheerleader Chrissy Cunningham dies in Eddie Munson's trailer, lifted into the air, bones broken, eyes sunken. Eddie runs; the town takes him for a satanic killer. In Lenora Hills, California, Eleven, without powers, is bullied by Angela and ends up hitting her with a roller skate in front of Mike, who came for the holidays. In Russia, Hopper is alive, a prisoner in Kamchatka, and gets a message to Joyce through a guard, Enzo.

In Hawkins, Dustin, Steve, Robin and Max find Eddie, who describes what he saw. The killer strikes a second time: Fred, Nancy's classmate at the paper, dies at the trailer park.

Episodes 3 and 4: Victor Creel and Dear Billy

Eleven is arrested for the assault on Angela, then picked up by Dr. Owens: Hawkins is in danger, and he has a way to give her powers back, the Nina project, in Nevada, run by a ghost: Brenner. Nancy and Robin visit Victor Creel at Pennhurst asylum, who tells of the 1959 murders and the music that saved him. Max has the symptoms: the migraines, the visions, the clock. She writes her goodbye letters.

At the cemetery, in front of Billy's grave, Vecna takes her. Dustin, Steve, and Lucas press her Walkman to her ears: Running Up That Hill opens a breach in the trance, and Max runs toward her friends. She survives. Joyce and Murray, for their part, fly to Alaska to join Yuri, the smuggler.

Episodes 5 and 6: the Nina Project and the lake

Eleven, plunged into Nina's bath, revisits her 1979 memories with Brenner, where an orderly helps her survive the other children. Hopper is sent into the prison arena, facing a Demogorgon; he survives, and Yuri, who betrayed Joyce, finds himself in his own plane, tied up. Jason Carver raises a militia to hunt Eddie; Patrick, one of his players, dies in front of him at Lover's Lake.

Nancy understands that the gate opens where Vecna kills: the lake. Steve dives, lands in the Upside Down, and is attacked by the demobats before Nancy, Robin and Eddie join him.

Episode 7: The Massacre at Hawkins Lab

The longest episode of the show until then (98 minutes) stacks three revelations. In the Upside Down, the lake team understands they are in 1983, the day of Will's disappearance, and they go back through the gate in Eddie's trailer. In Eleven's memory, the orderly asks her to take out his chip: it is Henry Creel, subject One, who massacres all the children in the lab. Eleven faces him, and throws him into the Upside Down, where lightning turns him into Vecna.

Three monsters, one man: Henry shaped the spider-shadow in his image, and commands everything the party has been fighting since 1983.

Episodes 8 and 9: Papa and The Piggyback

Lieutenant Colonel Sullivan's army attacks Nina; Brenner dies asking Eleven to tell him she understands; she refuses. Eleven, her powers back, leaves with Mike, Will, Jonathan, and Argyle. Hopper, Joyce, Murray, and Enzo escape Kamchatka by killing the Demogorgon in the arena. In Hawkins, the plan plays out in three teams: Max serves as bait, Eddie and Dustin create a diversion with Master of Puppets, Nancy, Steve, and Robin attack Vecna's body in the Upside Down Creel house.

Eleven, from a pizzeria freezer in Nevada, enters Max's mind to face Vecna. She is defeated, then gets back up. Nancy, Steve and Robin burn Vecna, who vanishes. But Max, in Hawkins, has broken bones and her eyes gouged: she dies for a minute in Lucas's arms, before Eleven brings her back. Eddie dies under the demobats. Four gates open, and the ground of Hawkins splits.

The ending explained

Season 4 ends like no other: without a victory. Two days after the “earthquake” in Hawkins, the group watches, from a hill, the sky turn red. Season 5 starts eighteen months later, in a town under quarantine.

The nine chapters, with who wrote and directed them

The ninth episode was not planned. Midway through writing, the Duffers understood they would need one more chapter to fit everything they wanted to tell; the platform “quickly approved.” The nine scripts totaled more than 800 pages, nearly double any previous season, hence the split into two volumes, seven episodes on May 27, 2022 and two on July 1.

A season in three parts

For the first time, most of the action leaves Hawkins. The season follows three fronts thousands of kilometers from one another: California, where the Byers and Eleven have moved and where Mike comes to spend spring break; Nevada, where Eleven finds Brenner and the Nina project again; and Kamchatka, where Hopper is a prisoner of the Russians. Hawkins remains the fourth front, that of the curse, with Max, Dustin, Steve, Nancy, Robin, Lucas, Erica and Eddie.

The Duffers compared that structure to Game of Thrones, for the scale, the runtime, and the more adult tone. To distinguish the fronts on screen, costumes and lighting each got their own palette. It is also the season where the creators wanted to answer the questions asked since 2016 about the mythology, revealed “layer by layer like an onion”: where the Upside Down comes from, who Number One is, what the 1979 massacre was.

What the season pulled off

In three days, the season accumulated more than 287 million hours of viewing, beating the platform's first-week record. In 28 days, it reached 1,352 billion hours, the second program in the service's history behind Squid Game and the first English-language series. On July 1, at the release of the second volume, the service went down under the influx.

Critics followed: 88% favorable reviews on Rotten Tomatoes for 193 reviews, with a consensus saluting a “darker and denser” season; 69 then 74 out of 100 on Metacritic for the two volumes. The main complaint was about the length of the episodes. The music had its own record: Kate Bush's “Running Up That Hill,” released in 1985, saw its streams jump by more than 8 700%, and Metallica's “Master of Puppets” entered the charts for the first time since 1986.

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