Did the ‘Stranger Things’ Season 4 Finale Really Have to Kill Off That Character?!

I finally finished running up that hill, and I am tired.

Watching Stranger Things is an exercise in torment. The show is good. There are legitimately thrilling sequences and plot ideas rooted in deep character relationships that you cling to along the ride. But did that ride have to take 12 hours?

At one point while watching the final episode of Season 4, I paused and thought that surely this must be the end. There were over 90 minutes left. (Episode 9 clocked in at 2 hours and 30 minutes.)

Later, after what seemed like an eternity, there was another point where it felt like surely that had to have been the last scene. A gorgeous, emotional sequence that brought closure to nearly every storyline—save for one that it made sense to keep a cliffhanger until the next season—had just happened, and the screen faded to black. But then it faded back to color again and I looked and saw that there was still 35 minutes to go.

It’s not a logical experience and I don’t understand the goal here: A person shouldn’t think a TV show is good but also spend the entire time watching it hoping for it to end soon, and being annoyed when it doesn’t.

(Warning: Spoilers ahead for Season 4 of Stranger Things.)

The splintered storylines and separation of the cast across the globe and alternate dimensions, a creative decision that made the first seven episodes of the season (as in first 8+ hours) such a slog, finally paid off.

Yes, there were still so many storylines and random character groupings that by the time one of them was revisited you totally forgot those characters were even in the show, let alone what they were doing. Each time we flashed back to the Mike, Will, Jonathan, and Stoned Guy Who Delivers Pizza (if they gave him a name, I missed it) quartet, it was a genuine shock to be reminded that they still existed. Never mind trying to remember why they’re driving across the country.

But there was finally rousing gratification to what had, over the course of more than 10 hours, seemed like pointless creative larks. Joyce and Murray’s buddy-comedy trip to Russia and Hopper’s whole storyline there—the biggest drag of the season until the finale—delivered a handful of great action scenes and the emotional reunion. Joyce and Hopper kissed! I cheered! I wanted to see them bone! Stranger Things: If you think it is OK for me to watch children be massacred—multiple times!—and random characters have their limbs cracked and twisted, then you can show me Hopper boning Joyce.

Millie Bobby Brown does the best acting of her career in this episode, and her showdown with Papa made up for how annoying it was to have her cordoned off in her own little show most of the season. The scene where she forces the helicopter that’s shooting at her to crash in the desert is stunning. It’s one of my favorite shots of the year.

The trio of Steve, Robin, and Nancy really works—the Golden Rule of this show is that Joe Keery as Steve will have chemistry with anybody—which is why it was such a bummer to not be able to see any of their scenes together, which amounts to about an hour and a half of the final two episodes. I get that the Upside Down has to be dark, but does it have to be that dark? I made the foolish mistake of watching these episodes in the daytime and the sun had the audacity to shine light into my apartment, rendering those scenes entirely black on my screen.

One could argue that the benefit of stretching these episode running times so long and the trade off to so much plot stalling is that you get to spend more time fleshing out characters and deepening their relationships.

That doesn’t work when the core relationships of the show are separated for 90 percent of a 12-hour season. That doesn’t work when the characters you’ve taken great care to set up in a certain way are treated narratively in a manner that feels like an act of betrayal to the audience. And that doesn’t work when your show isn’t about the characters anymore. As critic Emily St. James wrote on Twitter, the core that originally provided the foundation of Stranger Things was the friendship between the four young boys, but they “are kind of vestigial organs at this point, as the mythology becomes more of the series’ focus.”

By the 14th monologue a character gives explaining an exhausting new discovery they’ve made about Vecna, the Upside Down, and how the gates are going to open all over Hawkins, it’s clear that setting up this universe so that the final season could feature some grand battle of good versus evil has replaced the human intimacy that initially was the show’s hook.

What was good about the season, specifically these last episodes, was magnificent—especially the major action set pieces in the finale. When in its sweet spot, what it means to struggle through the emotional trauma of being a teenager while shouldering the burden of saving the world really lands. The ambition, some could argue over-ambition, of Stranger Things wouldn’t work if that didn’t feel so rooted in humanity.

But what was frustrating was also hard to shake—and not just the length.

I don’t quite understand what they’ve done to the character of Will Byers, who used to be the pivotal focal point of the series and now seems to just exist. He’s literally in the back seat of the plot.

Yes, he had two emotional scenes in the finale, but I feel like they may not have landed in the way that the series expects. If you’re extremely online and know there are internet theories that Will is gay, these scenes are incredibly heartbreaking. If you are a normal person watching this series, which has done very little in the way of character development and has danced around this coming-out arc like Gene Kelly when he sees a street lamp in a rainstorm, you’re likely just wondering why in the hell this guy keeps randomly crying.

And then there’s the fate that befell Eddie, the new breakout character of the season and, it turns out, its sacrificial lamb. Especially thanks to Joseph Quinn’s performance, the character that at first seemed like he was going to be a cringe-inducing ’80s pop-culture stereotype, a relic that the show typically avoids leaning into, evolved into something much more.

There ended up being a lot of depth. When he was accused of being a satanist and a murderer, he never self-victimized. He was cajoled into camaraderie when he would have likely preferred to be alone. He banded together to fight. He cared. And, most touchingly, he transformed the guilt over his presumed cowardice into heroics in the end.

To do all of that, and then just kill him in the end? What if he got to be the hero, and lived? What if he got to avenge his name? What if his budding friendship with Dustin, which was played so beautifully by Gaten Matarazzo in a tear-jerking finale scene, could continue to grow?

It felt like a cop out to kill him off—a rare case of Stranger Things not just paying homage to the films of the ’80s, but replicating one of its laziest clichés.

I think the finale should have ended before the flash-forward to two days after the “earthquake” ravaged Hawkins. I think Eddie should have lived. I think Will should just be gay-as-hell already. But I also think that, as much as I was ready to quit this show, those final two episodes featured enough spectacular storytelling to make me want to see it through to the end next season. I made a deal with God, it turns out. Gotta keep running up that hill.