‘Stranger Things’ Season 4 Recap: What To Keep In Mind As Final Season Arrives

Hold onto your butts, brochachos, because a lengthy — yet abbreviated — summary of the penultimate season of Stranger Things lies in wait.

Launching in two parts on Netflix — the first volume containing seven episodes launching May 27, 2022 and the second volume containing the final two episodes arriving July 1, 2022 — Season 4 contained many longer episodes, by 15 minutes to almost a full hour. The finale clocked in at 141 minutes. The beloved party was also split across the U.S. and in Russia, making for lots of back and forth between Hawkins, California and Kamchatka, Russia.

The Massacre at Hawkins Lab

Season 4 opened on what started out like any ordinary day for Dr. Martin Brenner (Matthew Modine), except September 8, 1979 became a terribly traumatic day for Millie Bobby Brown’s Eleven aka Jane Hopper. After showing the details of Brenner’s morning routine like completing the newspaper crossword with a timer, trimming a plant and more, the first episode takes viewers into his work at the Hawkins Lab where he once had 17 children just like Eleven (011) on whom he would run experiments for their psionic powers. All that is hinted at in the first episode is that a brutal murder of all the children except Eleven — — occurred, their bodies broken in gruesome ways. When Brenner returned to the scene of the crime, he found Eleven, blood running from her nostrils and eyes, making it seem like she was responsible, but viewers learned of the true culprit later.

California Dreamin’

Set to “California Dreamin’” by the Beach Boys, Eleven’s voiceover reads a letter she wrote to long distance boyfriend Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard) from Lenora Hills, where she is now living with Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) and her two sons Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) and Will (Noah Schnapp). Joyce took her kids and Eleven away at the end of Season 3 after the Mind Flayer wreaked havoc on Hawkins. She had been toying with the idea since Season 2 when Bob Newby (Sean Astin) suggested it before his tragic death.

RELATED: ‘Stranger Things 5′: First Five Minutes Of Final Season Take Viewers Back To Will Byers’ 1983 Disappearance Into The Upside Down

While Eleven tries to make things seem all hunky-dory in terms of her new life in California, she is not telling Mike the complete truth. A girl named Angela (Elodie Grace Orkin) constantly bullies El, and even when she makes a diaorama of Hopper’s cabin for a historical hero assignment, Angela does not hold back. Mike is coming to visit Eleven and Will in California for Spring Break. Jonathan is distraught because Nancy won’t be coming with Mike to visit, and the reason is unclear. Their relationship seems to be on the rocks. He has found a new friend in Argyle (Eduardo Franco) who introduced Jonathan to weed in the form of Purple Palm Tree Delight. Argyle also works at Surfer Boy Pizza, which comes in handy later.

Hopper Is Alive! Or So A Russian Doll Says

While the kids are at school, Joyce receives a mysterious package that is not Jonathan’s college acceptance letter. (He and Nancy have a plan to go to Emerson together and he is waiting for news that he got in. Nancy has already been accepted. It has at least 20 Russian stamps on it, and it contains a glass doll that turns out to house a letter written in cut and paste magazine letters claiming Hopper (David Harbour) is alive and to call Enzo. Joyce enlists Murray Bauman (Brett Gelman) to help her, at first over the phone, and then in person.

Hawkins High School

The ghostbusters minus Will are now in part of the Hawkins High School student body, and while Mike and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) are in Eddie Munson’s (Joseph Quinn) Dungeons and Dragons Hellfire Club, Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) has a conflict with the final night of Eddie’s campaign because he is needed for the basketball team’s championship game. Mike and Dustin therefore recruit Erica Sinclair (Priah Ferguson), Lucas’ sister to play that night. Lucas ends up shooting a buzzer-beater basket that wins the Tigers their game and gives him a leg up with the other guys on the team after mainly sitting on the bench. Before the game, Lucas tells Mike and Dustin that he’s tired of getting bullied and wants in with the popular crowd, which shows tension in their friend group.

Max (Sadie Sink) is noticeably quieter and listening to Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” on loop on her Walkman. She broke up with Lucas, and she noticed Chrissy (Grace VanDien) throwing up in the girl’s bathroom.

Nancy is Editor in Chief of the Hawkins High school newspaper. She seems firmly set on the journalism track after her internship at the Hawkins Post in Season 3 over the summer.

The Hellfire Club & Its Leader

Joseph Quinn’s Eddie Munson is the leader of The Hellfire Club, where Mike and Dustin found other Dungeons & Dragons players in high school. Eddie’s big campaign introduces the character Vecna, who presents a way for the crew to interpret the new big bad villain of Season 4 once he makes himself known.Eddie unfortunately becomes implicated in Vecna’s activities and takes the brunt of the blame before the truth comes out.

Chrissy’s Death

Eddie meets Chrissy in the woods to do a drug deal after she has creepy visions that portray her mother as a negative influence in her life. Vecna is behind these hallucinations. Eddie first offers Chrissy weed, but then she asks for something stronger, so he brings her to his trailer where he lives with his Uncle Wayne (Joel Stoffer) to get her ketamine, or Special K as he calls it.

Unfortunately, while he is searching for the stronger drug, Chrissy has her final, fatal Vecna vision, and she dies a gruesome death, first levitating and then her limbs snapping and her eyes being pulled into their sockets. Her death marks the first of a series that haunts Hawkins, leading police (without David Harbour’s Chief Jim Hopper) to deduce that a serial killer is on the loose and that Eddie Munson might be that killer. Lucas’ basketball teammates Jason Carver (Mason Dye), Andy (Clayton Royal Johnson) and Patrick (Myles Truitt) go after Eddie because Jason believes his D&D hobby has led Eddie, who they call a freak, into Devil worship. Jason, who was dating Chrissy, thinks Eddie channeled Satan to kill her.

Chrissy’s death also brings in Lieutenant Colonel Jack Sullivan (Sherman Augustus ) to examine what is going on in Hawkins. Max witnessed Eddie run away from his trailer because she now lives with her mom in that neighborhood.

Steve & Robin Work at Family Video

Steve Harrington (Joe Keery) and Robin Buckley (Maya Hawke) now work at Family Video. In Season 3, they slung ice cream at Scoops Ahoy in the new Starcourt Mall before it burned down thanks to the Mind Flayer. They remain purely platonic ever since Robin came out to Steve in Season 3, and now they give each other dating advice. Dustin and Max bring Chrissy’s death to Steve and Robin’s attention, and they end up using the video log system to track down Eddie, who hides at Reefer Rick’s cabin.

Joyce and Murray Fly To Alaska

After Joyce calls “Enzo” who is actually Dmitri Antonov (Tom Wlaschiha), a Russian prison guard who Hopper bribed to send the message that he was alive, she and Murray get on a plane to Alaska under the guise that she has a conference for her remote job selling encyclopedias. In Alaska, they take the cash in Eleven’s trust to Yuri (Nikola Djuricko) a smuggler who is supposed to fly Hopper back from Russia. Unfortunately, Yuri drugs both Joyce and Murray and takes them on the plane, planning to keep the cash for himself after he turns Antonov in. Hop worked so hard to escape, too, but Yuri tipped off the guards as to where he was hiding.

While on the plane, Murray and Joyce outsmart Yuri, but this brings the plane to crash. They tie him up in the wilderness and eventually figure out that Murray can pose as Yuri to get into the Russian prison and try to save Hopper. Hopper and Antonov, meanwhile, have figured out that a Demogorgon lies in wait for them and a group of other rebel laborers. Hopper snags a lighter to try and create torches to scare off the monster. Luckily Murray and Joyce get to the prison when they do because they aid in Hopper and Dmitri escaping the creature. The reunion between Joyce and Hopper is very sweet.

The Nina Project

Dr. Sam Owens (Paul Reiser), who received a visit from Lt. Col. Sullivan asking about the gruesome deaths in Hawkins, comes to Eleven’s aid after she gets arrested for smashing Angela’s nose with a roller skate. He takes her to Nevada to a secret ICBM storage facility where they work to restore Eleven’s powers by reintroducing her to the traumatic memories from that scene back at Hawkins Lab hinted at in Episode 1.

Unfortunately, this means she has to work with Dr. Brenner, who was thought to be dead after Season 1 when a Demogorgon was roaming the halls of Hawkins Middle School. Dr. Brenner has video recordings of everything that happened in the lab, so he plays footage of her lessons and development with her brothers and sisters, which starts to spark her powers. They have to speed up the process to clear everything up for her and show her that she didn’t murder all those children.

Vecna’s Past

In the memories Eleven relives, Henry (Jamie Campbell Bower) is first introduced as an orderly working at the Hawkins Lab. He slowly starts to advise and encourage Eleven in using her powers, telling her to draw from a memory that made her angry and sad. He even offers to help her escape the lab after an incident when some of the older kids start bullying her after she beats Two at a challenge Brenner aka Papa creates.

When she realizes Henry can’t escape with her, she offers to take out his Soteria the small tracker that inhibits him that had been surgically placed in his neck. She had seen people punishing him for helping her, and she felt bad. Freeing him, though, unleashes the boy who used to be 001, the first of Brenner’s experiments, who had already developed his own powers. Henry is Henry Creel, the son of Victor Creel (Robert Engleund), whom Nancy and Robin visit to ask about the demon he claimed haunted his mansion and killed his wife and daughter. That demon was actually Henry, whose family relocated to Hawkins to try and give him a fresh start after he caused problems with his powers. After murdering his mother and sister, Henry fell into a coma because he didn’t know his limits with his powers, and Brenner took him to try and control. In Henry’s own words, Brenner tried to recreate him once he realized he couldn’t control the young boy, and thus the children like Eleven were born.

As if this weren’t a big enough reveal, Eleven’s traumatic memory involves her sending Henry into the an alternate dimension to become Vecna. Now in his slimy vine-coated state, Henry aka 001 aka Vecna haunts Hawkins from below in the alternate dimension where Eleven sent him, which he reshaped and molded.

Vecna’s Vengeance

Vecna went after three more teenagers after first killing Chrissy in Episode 1 of Season 4. In Episode 2, he killed Fred Benson (Logan Riley Bruner), Nancy’s Deputy Editor at the Hawkins High School newspaper. They had gone to Eddie’s trailer park together to investigate the crime scene, telling the policeman there it was because to check on Max (her mom moved there after Billy’s dad left.) Fred had past trauma of a car accident that ended with a passenger dying. Vecna lorded that over him and killed him on a road near the trailer park.

After Fred’s death, Nancy, Steve, Dustin, Max and Robin began to piece together how Vecna staked claim on his victims, but this revelation came in part because Max was one of his victims too. She had experienced the same symptoms of Vecna’s curse — nosebleeds, headaches, nightmares and overall depression and anxiety or bad mental health — and he started appearing to her in visions at the end of Episode 3. She went through Fred and Chrissy’s paperwork in the school counselor Ms. Kelly’s office.

Vecna almost took Max in Episode 4 of Season 4, titled “Dear Billy,” but Robin and Nancy had visited Victor Creel at this point, who was first mentioned by Eddie’s Uncle Wayne Munson, and Robin realized that music helped victims escape Vecna. Just in the knick of time, Max heard her Kate Bush anthem, which guided her out of Vecna’s nightmare-scape, which she later drew. Nancy pieced together the parts of the Creel mansion as what Max was seeing, and this included that creepy clock that always signals Vecna’s victims running out of time.

Patrick (Myles Truitt), was Vecna’s third victim, and his death led Dustin, Eddie, Steve, Robin, Max and Lucas to investigate a theory Dustin posited when his compass was thrown off trying to navigate to Skull Rock where Eddie was hiding after he was spotted at the sight of Patrick’s death over Lover’s Lake. Jason, Patrick and crew had found Eddie at Reefer Rick’s cabin, which was on the water. Dustin theorized that there was another gate in conjunction with Erica asking who could have opened a new gate if not Eleven or a the government. Dustin, Lucas and Erica figured out that Vecna killing people helped him open gates to Hawkins from The Upside Down, and this happened after they drew police away from Robin, Eddie, Steve and Nancy investigating if the gate was in the lake by boat.

Steve, champion swimmer on the Hawkins Swim & Dive team, dove down first to examine what Dustin later nicknamed “Watergate,” and tendrils pulled him through it into The Upside Down, so Nancy, Robin and Eddie followed him there to save him from ferocious Demo-Bats that were biting chunks out of him. Were it not for Nancy who followed him first, he could have been strangled to death.

The Upside Down Is Frozen on November 6, 1983 (The Day Will Went Missing)

In leading Steve, Eddie and Robin to the Wheeler house in the Upside Down, Nancy’s aim was to get some guns she stores in her room, but she finds that they aren’t in her room in the alternate dimension. She sees her sophomore chemistry flash cards from Season 1 in her room and then looks through her diary to see that the entries stopped at November 6, 1983, the day Will was taken by the Demogorgon back in Season 1.

Nancy’s search for the guns was an idea to help the four young adults defend themselves while trying to get back to The Rightside Up. They hear echoes of Dustin’s voice as he, Lucas and Erica theorize about Vecna. Nancy remembers that Will communicated through the lights, so she tries with a chandelier in her home. Eddie, who knows Morse code, signals SOS in the lamp, leading Dustin to realize that they all went through Watergate.

Dustin, Lucas and Erica take Holly’s Lite Brite to see if they can communicate that way, with Nancy drawing letters in the light-up beads to spell out their situation.

Papa’s Death

While training Eleven with The Nina Project, Dr. Sam Owens offered her to go help her friends once she said she felt ready. Her powers had returned enough for her to lift the Nina tank (in which she submerged for her isolation baths) several feet off the ground. Dr. Brenner, though, didn’t feel that she was ready. He called in his military men to stop Owens from taking Eleven to Hawkins, but then Lieutenant Colonel Jack Sullivan came in with his own men and tore apart the shelter with the aim of killing Eleven. They found Doc Owens, and a sniper in a helicopter shot Brenner. They almost got Eleven too, but then she destroyed the helicopter with her powers.

Mike, Will, Jonathan and Argyle, who visited Dustin’s girlfriend Suzie (Gabriella Pizzolo) in Utah to ask her to trace the coordinates of Nina, arrived at this point to reunite with Eleven.

The Piggyback

The finale episode of Stranger Things Season 4 is titled “The Piggyback,” and it involved all three units of the Hawkins heroes fighting various forms of Vecna and the Upside Down from their respective locations. When it became apparent that a flight to Hawkins that evening was not available, Eleven had the idea to “piggyback” into Max’s mind via Vecna and fight him in there. Argyle helped out by scoping a Nevada Surfer Boy Pizza where they turned the freezer into an isolation bath for Eleven.

Meanwhile, Max, Lucas, Steve, Nancy, Erica and Robin aimed to bait Vecna so that they could attack him in the Creel mansion in The Upside Down while he was busy in Max’s mind. An elaborate plan using lights and paper with writing to signal various stages was partially foiled by Jason and his friend Andy, who caught word of Erica signaling the house with her flashlight and apprehended the Sinclair siblings in a violent way.

Hopper, Joyce and Murray return to the Russian prison that they busted Hopper out of to fight the monsters there, with Antonov encouraging Yuri to be a good man and fix Katinka the helicopter to rescue them from the air. Hopper cut off a Demogorgon’s head, and Murray torches quite a few.

Max’s Coma, Hawkins’ Devastation and Eddie Munson’s Death

Eddie, after absolutely shredding his black guitar playing Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” to lure the Demobats away from Vecna’s lair, decided to stay and fight the creatures when he could have returned safely to the Rightside Up with Dustin. Dustin climbed back through the gate in Eddie’s uncle’s trailer, breaking his ankle in the process, to be with Eddie when he died. Eddie was glad to not have run away that time.

Unfortunately, Vecna still gets to Max, lifting her body into the air despite Eleven fighting him and snapping Max’s limbs. But then she falls, and she can still talk to Lucas, who has just suffered a brutal beating at the hands of Jason. Eleven resolutely decides that Max cannot die, and it seems that she sends her somewhere, though the exact location is not known because Eleven can’t find Max in the void when she tries. Max remains in a coma for the rest of the episode.

Max’s “death” was the fourth and final one to allow Vecna to crack open the barrier between the Upside Down and Hawkins, with four giant gashes dividing the Midwest town into quadrants and converging at the library. His clock chiming four times was evidence of that. Steve, Nancy and Robin, after a close call with the vines in Vecna’s lair, managed to barbeque him pretty good, and he crawled away. The supernatural event was viewed as an earthquake by those unaware of the alternate dimension, and it sent most of the residents of Hawkins away for good.

Mike, Will, El, Jonathan and Argyle reunited with Nancy, Steve, Dustin, Lucas and more, and then Hopper and Joyce joined in later, with an emotional reunion between Eleven and Hop. On top of the destruction the town was still recovering from, a mysterious storm with spring snowflakes — which more closely resembled the spores and detritus that floats around in the Upside Down — descended on Hawkins as Will got goosebumps on the back of his neck and the reunited party stood near Hop’s cabin. The Stranger Things theme played in a foreboding nod to the final season and what is in store for the war with Vecna as the completed party stood in a decaying meadow and a Mind Flayer-esque storm loomed above Hawkins.