The length of TV episodes used to be dictated by the strictures of schedulers and advertisers. Netflix and its streaming stable-mates have made these curbs unnecessary, though budgets, production costs and the attention span of the average viewer has kept the length of most dramatic series sitting somewhere between 45 and 60 minutes. That’s probably the sweet-spot, the boundary beyond which you start to bore your audience or reveal your short-comings. Or both, as happened when Kurt Sutter was given free reign with Sons of Anarchy. Not that the show was exactly Shakespeare to begin with. Season four of Stranger Things, however, takes this rule and wipes its hive-minded bum with it. Even at an average length of 90 minutes the episodes still don’t feel long enough, simply because every aspect of the production, from the writing to the acting to the design to the creature effects, is par excellence.

Stranger Things is both a tribute to and a subversion of the sorts of slick, high-concept, high-spectacle, Spielbergian melodramas that wowed cinema-goers in the 1980s. It treads the line perfectly between verisimilitude of setting, and nostalgia safariing, choosing to warmly bathe rather than drown its audience in tropes and pop-culture references. The show’s characters are distinct, rich, well-drawn and entertaining, comprising a symbiotic ensemble that contains few dud pairings or groupings. The show is fast when it needs to be, slow when it needs to be. It seamlessly blends action, adventure, heart, horror, and comedy; tears with laughter. Not many series can run the tone gamut from ET to Nightmare on Elm Street and make it work, but Stranger Things doesn’t just make it work: it makes it look easy. And that’s before we even talk about the perfect pacing; the skilful use of tension; or the way an episode’s separate stories dovetail and interlock in the most satisfying of ways.

Upside down, show you send me…

With the concluding four hours of its fourth season just days from dropping on Netflix, Stranger Things is enjoying the sort of blanket coverage, critical acclaim and mass appeal that once propelled Game of Thrones to its unassailed status (give or take an eighth season) at the top of the pop-culture totem pole. Everyone is talking about the show, even if they’re just asking people to stop talking about the show so much. People are probably going to start calling their kids Nancy, Elle and Jane; Dustin, Lucas and Mike; and possibly even Vecna, and Demi-Gordon. ‘Who or what is Vecna?’, Season 4’s central mystery – more visceral and compelling than the unsolved shootings of any number of prominent Texan oil tycoons – has already been solved, and the relieving news is that Stranger Things avoided becoming another Lost with aplomb. The Massacre at Hawkins Lab not only neatly closes the season’s narrative circle – clearing the decks for the finale’s inevitable confrontation between One and Eleven – but answers questions about the origins of Hawkins’ inter-dimensional trouble we never even knew we wanted to ask. It all makes sense, at least in terms of the rules of its own fictional world. Mercifully, nobody in Stranger Things is doing the equivalent of causing plane crashes above hidden tropical islands to help protect a magic plug-hole from a smoke monster.

On the contrary, Stranger Things‘ writers know exactly what they’re doing, even if our current destination was never the original plan. They’re smart on a smaller scale, too. They know the building blocks they’re working with – the tropes and archetypes – and they’re deft at reassembling them on the hoof to keep things fresh and surprising. And they know that we, the audience, know the building blocks they’re working with, too. Consequently, and cleverly, then, they take great joy in subverting that awareness. Case in point is this season’s mile-high battle between Joyce, Murray and Yuri on a plane somewhere above eastern Russia. All signs point to the disappointing yet strangely comforting realisation that Murray’s martial-art prowess will ultimately only prove effective against child opponents. We fully expect Joyce to emerge from off-camera and incapacitate Yuri herself. However, at the last moment, Murray demonstrates his innate bad-assery, even if his bad-ass-ed-ness is more in spirit than in deed, and more through luck and enthusiasm than skill.

The episode Dear Billy, featuring Max’s near-death at the hands of Vecna, was executed particularly skilfully. Those familiar with the language of television would have been instantly pessimistic about Max’s survival chances on the basis alone that Sadie Sink – whose character Max was an important though hitherto peripheral main character – was getting a meaty chunk of the spotlight to herself, along with more challenging and emotional scenes than she’d ever been given before. That’s often a sign that the writers are giving a character a long goodbye; a last victory lap before forced retirement. It’s such an ingrained trope that I found myself genuinely unsure if Max was going to make it out of the episode alive, and almost rose from the couch and on to my feet in step with the climbing tension.

Kudos, also, for making the Demogorgon scary again. The story-line that follows Enzo and Hopper on monster death-row is part Alien 3, part Prison Break, and all thrilling.

Endgame and beyond

Now that Vecna’s identity and modus operandi have been revealed there’s no direction left for the narrative to travel except straight to the final confrontation between good and evil; it won’t follow a straight line, of course, because there are still dangling plot threads by the dozen, not least of which are the US Military’s El-shaped endgame; Nancy’s mental imprisonment by Vecna; Mike’s mission to find El; Hopper and Co’s escape from Russia; and the murderous intentions of Hawkins’ townsfolk, who have been whipped into satanic panic by jock-cum-avenging-angel Jason Carver.

Still, with no surprises of Vecna’s magnitude left to uncover (though I could be sorely wrong about that) the only truly surprising thing left is to kill off a main character. We’ve been teased with this many times before, through the hanging fates of Will, El, Hopper and, most recently, Max. However, the more times a show teases a major death without following through, the less effective that narrative trick becomes. Keep doing it and you risk alienating your audience, and, worse, making them feel cheated (accusations that were thrown at The Walking Dead during its Dumpster-Gate moment). I truly believe that someone big is about to go six-feet upside down. But which characters are Stranger Things most likely to sacrifice?

Let’s take the long way round. It seems almost certain – to this writer, in any case – that the fifth and final season will take place in Hawkins: the place where it all began, featuring all of the characters we’ve come to know and love, each with an axe to grind. There’s a neatness to that; a feeling of having come full circle. For that to be the case then Joyce, El, Will and Jonathan will have to leave California (possibly – nay, hopefully – with Argylle in tow). Now, sure, if Joyce and Hopper were to hook up – supposing they survive Russia – Joyce might consider returning to Hawkins with her clan to be with Hopper, but she might just as easily decide to convince Hopper to leave behind the Hawkins house of horrors and join them all in the sunshine. So something has to give. I doubt they’d kill Hopper at this point, not so soon after his first ‘death’ and ‘resurrection’. I do, however, think that Joyce is a possible candidate for erasure. Her death would not only force the California gang back home, but also transform Hopper into a molten copper with the safeties off; The Punisher with a supernatural twist. And that would be a sight to behold, grief and sadness notwithstanding.

But even as I write that, I talk myself out of it. Joyce has been through a hell of a time. She suffered the trauma of a missing child, had to help that same child rid himself of inter-dimensional possession, watched her romantic partner die, watched Hopper ‘die’. It would seem rather cruel to cap off her arc with a sad and tragic death. Doesn’t mean they won’t. But, as happened with Dear Billy, the show’s got me racked with doubt. The only certainty, to my mind, is that Hopper will live long enough to overcome his past trauma, and prove his love and parenting credentials through saving El – and I don’t foresee that happening this season.

Something terrible was always going to happen to El. She won’t die, but, by god, she’ll suffer. The particularities of this suffering are legion, but here’s a handful of potential scenarios: El defeats Vecna (possibly by drawing on the inside help of the ‘souls’ Vecna has already absorbed, like happened to Freddy Krueger on Elm Street, and Peter Kay on Doctor Who) but gets trapped in the upside down. El defeats Vecna but takes his place, and gets trapped in the upside down. El defeats Vecna but the force with which they do battle tears a hole in the interdimensional fabric between universes, and the upside down bleeds into and merges with the real world, possibly just affecting Hawkins, but potentially the entire world. I guarantee that whatever happens, Hopper will enter Hell for El in season 5, whether that hell is in another dimension, or here on earth. Which it just might be. Probably the most likely scenario is that the US military, who have been tracking El all season, leaving murder and torture in their wake, will snatch El at the finale, and spend season 5 trying to use her as a weapon. Maybe they’ll combine that with the bleeding of universes. Maybe we’ll see the return of the Mindflayer, but this time it’s the size of Wales.

Dead-pool 2

You can lay easy bets on which part of El’s wounded psyche Vecna is going to try to use to break her (literally and figuratively): her guilt both at releasing Vecna from his powers, and at opening the first portal to the upside down, and all the deaths that flowed from those two events. Maybe to counter this attack El will try to harness her powers from a memory that makes her sad and angry, like the death of Hopper, only to have her burgeoning powers slapped down to nothing once it’s revealed that Hopper is still alive. Maybe the memory that gives El the power to perform a killing strike will be the recent death of Mike? The gangly Ghostbuster is surely in the top tier running for early check-out. The continuation of Mike’s time in the show wouldn’t add a great deal to its overall worth, but his death certainly would. Then it would be El who turned avenging angel. Equally, though, it might make her do a Scarlet Witch and become next season’s big bad.

The smartest money in the great Stranger Things‘ dead-pool, however, is on Steve. He’s a great character, but he’s literally got nowhere left to grow (sic). Yes, there are hints at a rekindling of the romance between Steve and Nancy, and while that story-line certainly has potential, whether Jonathan lived to see it happen or not (because he’s got to be on the chopping block, too), I think the most likely – and possibly powerful and affecting – scenario is that Steve will somehow sacrifice himself to save Nancy. He’ll go out in a way that would have surprised his younger self, and everyone who knew him: a brave and selfless hero.

I hereby announce that Murray, Dustin, Eddie, Argylle and Erica have been awarded indestructible plot armour. They now occupy the same exalted status as Carol and Daryl in season 4 of The Walking Dead. Nobody better muss so much as a hair on their heads. We’re not playing here.

In summary, then, I don’t have a bloody clue what’s going to happen next. But it’s fun gazing into the portal the first volume left in its wake, and wondering just what the hell’s going in there, because the suspense is killing you.

The clock is ticking.