The fourth season of “Stranger Things” shifts from the spooky to the psychological—from the unknowable to the explicable—one of the ways in which the show has become more grown-up.
,” the psychically gifted girl Eleven spells out the show’s central premise by flipping over a Dungeons & Dragons game board and revealing its dark underside. A little boy has gone missing, and searchers have found nothing; Eleven says that he is “hiding” in an evil alternate dimension that the show’s characters come to call the Upside Down. It’s a great scene for many reasons. There’s joy in the simplicity of the idea of the Upside Down, and in the directness with which it’s expressed.
The new season is long—eight episodes of more than an hour each, capped by a two-and-a-half-hour finale—in part because it has to pull the preteen version of the show into a more adult frame. It’s a labor-intensive process, which seems to require almost every character to have an extended heart-to-heart conversation . But the over-all effect is to raise the stakes of the show so that, by the end of the season, it’s a team of grownups that’s confronting possible doom.
Season 4 changes the story. In the finale, a flashback to 1979 shows us a surprising, primordial Upside Down—a version that existed before the series began. It’s not a nice place—a small, homuncular version of the show’s tulip-headed monster roams the rocks—but it’s also oddly pristine, as Earth might have looked during some previous evolutionary era. Henry Creel, the villain, has arrived there after killing everyone in the psychic-experimentation lab beneath Hawkins.
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