Stranger Things

This excellent penultimate season of Netflix’s golden goose is the perfect antidote to lowest common denominator television: a show that offers much more than its audience asks for.

Stranger Things at this point feels nostalgic for itself: its characters, its lore, and more importantly the emotional connection its fans feel towards it. ... The show’s scope is getting bigger, its cast more expansive, and its stakes more universal. And it’s a miracle that it manages to keep all these plates largely spinning, even as its runtimes threaten to give Titanic a run for their money.

Ultimately, it speaks to the strengths of the show and its cast that Season 4 manages to extend moments of hope and poignancy even in the midst of greater circumstances that could quite literally signal the end of the world. The performances in these final episodes are staggeringly good.

Thanks to a powerhouse ensemble, Stranger Things overcomes its hurdles to punch out season four with an electrifying, tear-jerking finale. Jumping between multiple narratives might seem arduous (and at times, it really is), but patience is well-rewarded here.

As big as Stranger Things has stretched in season four, the avenues by which its parallel narrative threads will converge are becoming more clear with the revelations of volume two. And that’s exciting, watching as all of these characters, long broken apart, find their way back to each other.

With an enormous ensemble cast, perhaps the Duffers felt they needed four hours to give everyone their due, which they almost do to perfection.

What Volume 2 lacks in surprises, it more than makes up for in heart, soul, thrilling direction and heart-wrenching performances. A strong closing chapter that makes the idea of returning to Hawkins one last time more appealing than ever.

The fireworks finally begin and they don’t disappoint, with no big surprises (various characters find themselves on the edge of defeat in a fight to the death before visions of what truly matters to them give them the strength to rally at the last second) but a lot of impeccable judgments.

Plotlines individually were good, meh, or bleh. ... But the finale's crosscutting was symphonic, bangs and crashes and screams across realities. ... I mean it as a massive compliment when I say Stranger Things' weird kids are growing into weird adults.

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.

On a visual level, the season’s second volume delivers a blockbuster experience, full of epic special effects, though it’s moved much closer to a gory horror movie than to the ET and Goonies-style adventures of its early years. This overarching darkness, combined with the endlessly frenetic pace of the season, can make the long episodes exhausting to watch. ... Even so, I wasn’t prepared for the immense melancholy of these last two very long episodes.

Much of what got us here worked well: The Duffers remain gifted stylists. Their tendency to restate themselves, though, shows up in large ways and small.

These last two episodes do a good job of paring down the action to four basic threads (instead of the eight or nine we had in Chapters Five through Seven). ... Most of it [the reunions and all the emotional beats] feels earned; some of it could go. As for the fun, these last two episodes have their moments, but the only new pop culture references one could dig into might be the role metal music plays in the group’s plan.

It’s a massive production with characters that fans truly love finding their moments to be actual heroes instead of just playing ones in Dungeons & Dragons. And, despite its bloated, cluttered failures, it is a show that truly attempts to satisfy its fan base in every way possible.

While there are some nice small moments – a few Will (Noah Schnapp) scenes indirectly address his sexuality; Max (Sadie Sink) and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) have some welcome interactions – it’s all the overheated bombast that feels like filler that disappoints.

Stranger Things has taken the idea of playing the long game to heart a bit too literally, capping its super-sized fourth season with two sprawling episodes that total nearly four hours. Whether that's a reward to fans or self-indulgence by the producers rests in the eye of the beholder, but after this, it's hard to imagine many concluding that ending things with season five qualifies as premature.