Photo: CNET
Stranger Things season 4 is a tad bit longer than your average drama series, meaning it contains a full-packed story for fans to divulge.
In a most recent installment of EW’s Around the Table series, the cast of Stranger Things revealed that it is like “five movies rolled into one.” Finn Wolfhard, who portrays Mike, reels off: “We have a stoner action-comedy, we have a Russian prison movie, we have a Scooby-Doo-meets-Zodiac-killer storyline… And it works!”
Season 4 is separated into three main settings – not including the Upside Down, obviously. One is California, where Joyce (Winona Ryder) displaced her family to escape from the terrors of Hawkins, Indiana.
There, a currently powerless Eleven is getting picked on by schoolmates. However, Millie Bobby Brown says her point-of-view also follows El “revisiting traumatizing experiences and really gaining this autonomy from the men in her life, finding what kind of woman she’s going to be moving forward on her own.”
Through delving into these memories, El looks forward to gaining back her powers to combat the newest perils that now surround Hawkins.
“We haven’t quite had the ability to move on from anything in Hawkins,” states Gaten Matarazzo, who plays Dustin Henderson.
“And after everything that happened at Starcourt Mall, the town knows that there’s something quite not right anymore. And there are a lot of secrets in town that seem to be bubbling up rapidly that all of us are trying our best to suppress, but of course, in Stranger Things fashion, it isn’t going to go as planned.”
A new Demogorgon named Vecna, who has ties to the haunted Creel House, is currently tyrannizing Hawkins and gathering victims. With no El around, the others are compelled to fight back on their own.
On the other hand, Joyce receives a peculiar package that indicates Hopper (David Harbour) is alive and is imprisoned in Russia. So, she recruits her favorite conspiracy theorist, Murray (Brett Gelman), to join her in her rescue mission.
According to Harbour, Hopper is in “a brutal environment” following his secret survival of the events in the previous season finale, but we get a peek at his backstory.
“He has these secrets that have kept him from being the father, the man that he wants to be, and he needs to purge these secrets on the inside to move forward and be the warrior that can be necessary in this fight against the Upside Down,” says Harbour. Stranger Things season 4 first volume will be out this Friday, while volume 2 will be released on July 1.
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