After a month of waiting, the last two episodes of the fourth season of Stranger Things finally arrived on Netflix. Everything is ready for the decisive battle against Vecna, which promises to leave the group of protagonists noticeably damaged.

Next, a review of the best and the worst that the end of the season left.

Best: Long live Eddie

Eddie (Joseph Quinn) needed only one season to enter the podium of the great characters of Stranger Things (and why not, of 21st century television). His introduction scene, the one in which he puts on horns and makes fun of the popular basketball players, was enough to conquer the hearts of the public, by dint of off-road charisma.

This nerd, metalhead, antisocial, lover of role-playing games, and occasional soft drug dealer, condenses all the mystique that the heroes of this fiction have., able to escape the cliché by dint of nuances that humanize them, to the point of turning them into endearing friends.

Throughout the season, Eddie has a perfect arc, in which he begins as an essentially antisocial creature, to culminates in his days as a warrior of great nobility. Like all the heroes of this series, Eddie unexpectedly finds himself faced with a supernatural threat, which he accepts and decides to fight ( in Stranger Things, the heroes are precisely those who understand the impossible, compared to the villains who decide to deny that fantasy that surpasses them, such as happens to Jason – Mason Dye – or Sheriff Powell – Rob Morgan -).

Over the course of his fight, Eddie finds vindication, but more importantly, he discovers his strengths. As the school tries to fit him into a gray mold, reducing him to just a diploma, his fight against Vecna shows him that his life is much richer and that he can be a sensitive person, a powerful guitar player, and a brave strategist, and even a father figure. In this adventurous framework, he musters courage that he did not know he had and does not hesitate to sacrifice himself for a greater good, in one of the most moving scenes of the series. The injustice is that in the eyes of Hawkins, Eddie will always be a serial killer, but that is something that Stranger Things has already told us many times: the greatest acts of courage do not always need big banners, but great heroes.

As in all series, the arrival of new seasons also marks the appearance of new additions. Each character that bursts into this universe has a reason for being, and they all respond to the logic of this fiction. They may be more or less relevant within the framework of the plot, but it is undeniable that screenwriters Matt and Ross Duffer accurately build each character that bursts into Hawkins, giving them a charm that enriches the story.

New or not so new, the protagonists of this world are alive, and it is understood that they have a previous history that goes beyond what happens on the screen, as is the case with Dmitri (Tom Wlaschiha) or Argyle (Eduardo Franco), two secondary that has a definitive weight throughout the fourth season. Vecna (James Campbell Bower), is another one of those great additions.

With a modus operandi that strongly refers to Freddy Krueger(a symbol of ’80s horror that the Duffers are so fond of), Vecna was originally Dr. Brenner’s (Matthew Modine) first guinea pig. But beyond his story, this is a villain who condenses two key concepts of fiction, such as guilt and responsibility.

“With great power comes great responsibility,” Uncle Ben told Peter Parker, andVecna is the perverse flip side of that maxim, a villain who owns enormous power, who chooses to disassociate himself from all responsibility for his actions. And faced with that, Eleven is faced with the painful moral dilemma of accepting whether or not she could have been indirectly responsible for those murders committed by the monster.

From the very first episode, Eleven’s growth is one of the guiding lines of this series, and her fight against Vecna puts the heroine before a defining perspective of growth, in which she comes to terms with the cursed nature of her powers, and her heritage. What does Dr. Brennan’s education mean to him? For this reason, Vecna is a villain in Stranger Things, not only because it is an homage to that terrifying cinema of creatures that crossed the screen, but also because his presence fuels Eleven’s growth in her personal journey.

The ninth chapter, entitled “The Piggyback” (translated as “The guest”), would actually be something like “a cococho”, the action Eleven takes to fight Vecna, traveling through Max’s (Sadie Sink) memories. And beyond how colorful the final battle is, there is no doubt that this concept of going “up” for someone is essential in the identity of Stranger Things.

Starting from that phrase that here became the leitmotif (“friends don’t lie”), this story was based on friendship as its main driving force, and on the pain of a group that is irremediably fragmented in the course of their lives. many fights. And once again, the Duffers were able to translate that logic, to the climax of the battle, again proving the importance of friendship to all these boys and girls. Eleven goes to Max’s cococho and the memories of him, to defend that bond that completes her so much, of friends who share ice creams and pajama party confessions. And that spirit is the one that infects all the protagonists of the story, who make friends, and lose others, but find their reason for being in that bond.

The worst: Mike, a mere spectator

While some characters, such as Eleven, Steve (Joe Keery), Hopper (David Harbour) or Max face specific dangers, the group led by Mike seems to be adrift. Its plot revolves mainly around the search for Eleven and not much else, all to justify his fair appearance of him at the time of taking the heroine from the experimentation center.

For this reason, it is difficult not to feel that Mike was one of the least relevant characters in the fourth season. In fact, he never seems to finish dimensioning what happens around him, and the best scenes in which he participates have him in a minor role. The emotional moment in which Will (Noah Schnapp) confesses his feelings to her, or the battle in which Eleven is submerged in that makeshift bathtub, shows Mike as little more than a spectator, an undeserved place for whom he was always a key piece. Of the plot.

An open ending

None of the previous seasons of Stranger Things left as many loose ends as this latest one. In this way, the whereabouts of Vecna remain to be resolved, and the future consequences of the gigantic rift that opened in Hawkins, the gateway to a large-scale invasion from the Upside Down World.

Until now, the boys had been dealing with fragments of that dark reality, small pieces that they could win, but that represented a tiny part of a much larger whole. For that reason, to pose such an ambitious scenario, it may be too much for the teenagers of Hawkins. And that bombast, hopefully not, may end up betraying that slightly more modest spirit that the series had so far.

To a large extent, the charm of Stranger Things was that it never completely showed the World upside down, and showing some of its creatures was enough to generate that nightmarish atmosphere. But the temptation to delve into that universe can reduce the importance of the boys, to bring that colossal world to the fore. Of course, to confirm whether or not that will be the case, there are still at least two years to go.