Stranger Things S04E04 Review: Running Up That Hill

Stranger Things, Season 4, Episode 4: Dear Billy

Oh, so this is the context of that song. Shall we just discuss Max first, then? Max has been a character that... hasn't been super essential throughout this season, though it's obvious that we're going somewhere with her. After seeing how terribly she's been dealing with the PTSD of the Mind-Flayer's flesh avatar killing Billy last season, Max's visions into seeing Vecna's clock while the creepy demon-bastard continues to torment her are all amazingly acted. Vecna taking the form of Max's mother (or did he?) and comforting her like a parent before going "you are the reason this family was torn apart" and trying to guilt-trip her for surviving when part of her is glad that Billy died? All amazingly emotionally-manipulative stuff from Vecna. 

A lot of spectacular scenes on Max's part as well even before the confrontation with Vecna, with her terrified-but-resolute attitude at looking at things. She's quickly written a lot of letters to leave to her friends and family in case she's gone, and when Vecna does end up managing to 'catch' her and transport her to the Upside-Down, there's a genuine sense of dread for what's going to happen to her. The Upside-Down itself is a fair bit more creepier this time around... a lot less just a 'wrong' version of Hawkins, but Vecna's realm actually has terrifying architecture to it -- a fair bit more terrifying since there is someone there that's changing things on purpose and constructing something. Oh, and Vecna's idea of decoration are the corpses of his former victims. Of course. Oh, hey, and we get a cameo from Ghost!Billy as Vecna takes his form! A lot of great stuff for Max this episode, huh? I also absolutely love the depression/trauma analogy where her friends opened up a path for her, but she still has to make that brave step to ignore the hellscape of self-loathing and run towards the light.

Again, the music stuff is a bit cheesy, but at least we did get the idea of using it from the payoff of a subquest. And it sure as hell ends up feeling a lot more dramatic compared to the eye-rolling cheesiness of that Never Ending Story song from last season. Max does survive Vecna's realm powers and ends up running towards her 'body' and her friends when they play the song and Max starts remembering about how she needs to patch things up with Lucas, and... and it's just kind of a shame from a narrative standpoint how I am kind of sure at this moment that none of the main characters are about to die -- I mean, shit, half of this show is showing Hopper after he survived an extradimensional machine exploding, so. But Max's acting -- especially when she figures out from the therapist notes how all the other victims start to have hallucinations to their huge regret moment and end up dying within seven days. 

Anyway, we learn a bit more about Vecna from Robin and Nancy's sidequest as the two girls try and infiltrate an asylum. Some fun moments of Robin hamming shit up as she pretends to be a frustrated student, while the story of Victor Creel and his recounts of how he was a happy family that moved into a 'haunted' house, with the evil inhabitant, Vecna, slowly tormenting him and his family, murdering everyone but him, and leaving him to take the fall. Oh, and just like Vecna's other victims, Victor is tormented by guilt -- i.e., shelling a civilian house during a war that he mistakes for a place where enemy soldiers were hiding. The creepy music (Dream a Little Dream of Me) that he hears as presumably-Vecna torments him does end up being relevant to providing Max a way out, so... yeah. 

In California... Eleven is of training. And Mike and Will basically patch things up, decide to be friends, and they plan to make a run for it with Jonathan. It's genuinely not particularly interesting after the Mike/Will drama -- the agents are one-note, Jonathan is forgettable and his stoner friend even moreso. But what seems to be a simple sidequest ends up being a shootout as... hey, turns out that the shady government agents are fighting against Owens' government agents, and the transition to what initially seemed to just be wacky hijinks into one of the pizza-loving agents getting shot in the head is actually pretty tense. 

The Alaska plot is... again, not that Hopper, Joyce and Murray aren't fun. They are! I'm sure someone really cares that we get this plot dragged on and on, but I really don't care about Hopper's action hero antics. Yuri the treacherous plane pilot who decides that shifty Americans who drink coffee too easily, prison traitors and escaped convicts are worth more than whatever Joyce is paying them. His monologue and his polar bear story are fun, sure, but all the Alaska scenes we've been having all feels like something we should've covered in a single episode. It wouldn't bother me so much if we didn't jump around so much, and the Alaska stuff are the ones that are the most obviously divorced from the reset of the cast. 

Yeah, this is easily the strongest episode of Stranger Things 4 so far. The Max stuff (particularly her reading the titular 'dear Billy' letter to her stepbrother's gravestone) brings us back to some of those classic character-centric parts of the show that made its first couple of seasons so powerful, and the investigation from all our different cast members in Hawkins seem to really finally bear fruit. Even the California stuff end up leading to a fair amount of excitement with the well-done 'jumpscare' into a shootout. It's just that, well, I think at this point I realized that I really didn't care all that much for the Alaska scenes.