Stranger Things

In short, unless you’re for some reason dying for a reinvention of the wheel, you’re gonna love this. It’s suspenseful, exciting, funny and scary as hell.

It’s hard not to get swept up in the warm, cozy blanket of these familiar settings and endearing characters, and the sweeping blockbuster nature of the thing.

While casual viewers might be put off by the deep dives into the series' lore and episode run times that aren't exactly binge-friendly, the fans who have loved Stranger Things all along should find themselves riveted by Season 4's most electrifying turn of events.

To its credit, the lingering pace doesn’t translate to any boring moments. Stranger Things still injects an enthralling backstory into its well-established universe. It’s an indication that the final two episodes of Volume 2 (dropping on July 1), despite its movie length, will only elevate season four.

This season, Stranger Things is working harder and smarter.

The good news is that “Chapter Six: The Dive” and “Chapter Seven: The Massacre at Hawkins Lab,” reward the audience with a lot of answers, revelations, and pay-offs.

The visual effects are more sophisticated and so is the filmmaking; the transitions between scenes, which track four different running story lines, are more elegant and make a sprawling season feel relatively cohesive. Does it feel bloated given those longer run-times? At times, yes. But by episode three, I was again invested in what’s happening in Hawkins (as well as some new locations), and less concerned about the amount of minutes that investment required.

There is plenty of fun to be had in “Stranger Things 4,” which both celebrates and parodies a decade that pushed conformity, conservatism and questionable style.

Stranger Things is bigger, older, somewhat sadder – and as lovable as ever.

“Stranger Things” is still damn good summertime entertainment.

Too much? Not a bit of it. Stranger Things is a 1980s Americana theme park, and it is all the better when it embraces that fact.

If you liked Stranger Things before, you’ll like it again this time around. Formulaic TV works when the formula is this good.

It may have more characters than it knows what to do with, but Stranger Things’ most sinister season yet still knows how to send shivers up your spine.

Amid the show’s ballooning scale and scope, Stranger Things finds an unexpected anchor not in its ensemble of fan favorites but in its latest villain: a supernatural serial killer dubbed Vecna after—what else?—a Dungeons and Dragons character. Vecna resides in the Upside Down, but unlike previous visitors, he’s humanlike, with a voice, a face, and, most chilling of all, a worldview.

Stranger Things has always been walking a line between tribute and pastiche, and it sometimes ends up on the wrong side. The strange thing is that this cast remains so charming, I don’t really mind watching them going through the motions.

It's still Stranger Things, so die-hard fans will adore it, it's just a lot more not-as-good Stranger Things.

Make the journey worth it, and fans will forgive the bumpy ride to get there. For now, despite the return of “Blockbuster Television,” most of those questions about this show’s place in the entertainment world in the 2020s remain unanswered.

When it’s not rehashing plot elements of past seasons, “Stranger Things 4” foregoes the Amblin-esque, ‘80s movie joy of previous seasons in favor of a more gruesome, horror-tinged story. True believers may not care about this tonal shift but more casual viewers – and those who value not having a TV show waste their time with needlessly over-long episodes – probably will.

The fourth season of Stranger Things is the biggest, scariest, most ambitious Stranger Things season yet. It’s also the least charming, least funny and least inventive season yet, which doesn’t mean that those elements are wholly lacking, just that the effort to concentrate on moments of human relatability often gets overwhelmed by the attempts at scale.

While there's a fine line between Hawkins and the Upside Down, from a narrative perspective the portal separating epic from overkill can be just as narrow.

The nine hours have their moments; a midseason scene in which the combative Max (Sadie Sink) escapes the monster’s grip is particularly affecting. But there’s way too much filler — dull teenage melodrama, jokey but routine action, horror that doesn’t have the authentically creepy charge it used to.

The writers don't balance the series' plots well or make each of these three (eventually four, as Eleven ventures off on her own journey of self discovery) feel vital. It leaves you with the feeling that half of what you've just invested time watching was utterly pointless. But the bigger problem is the wild departure in tone.

The new season has its strengths – Episode 7 is a high point, for example, even at its lengthy running time. But other moments drag, and Hopper’s incarceration in Russia feels particularly endless.

It’s nice to have Stranger Things back, period, especially the Hawkins-based parts. But it would be nicer without having to wade through everything else to get to the scenes that work best.

Its formula is tried and true — but has also grown stale. Hardcore fans of Stranger Things will likely find nothing wrong with the new season, as is their wont. They’ll love the nods to Barb (Shannon Purser) and character reunions. They’ll obsess over potential love triangles and thrill over creepy new flourishes. I personally wish the show had reined it in a bit, focused on the core cast over the newbs, and tried something truly creative with its storytelling instead of just nostalgia baiting.

With all these characters to track, “Stranger Things” certainly does have its work out for it, and mostly manages to keep everything moving at a steady enough clip once it establishes the four or so subplots that end up defining the season. The problem is that pretty much every plot (except for Eleven continuing to explore her origin story) gets less compelling the further they get from Hawkins.

Unfortunately, the positives are overwhelmed by so many disjointed things going on at once. For the most part it doesn’t matter that these are 20-year-olds playing 14. What matters is there’s simply too much that feels like plot fodder for a show stuffed with too many characters.