by Devin McCue, Sumner Newscow — Happy Friday. I love Netflix’s best original show, Stranger Things.

If you’re a long-time CultureCow reader, you’ll know it’s one of the very first things I reported on. Other than Taylor Swift albums, it’s also one of the only subjects I’ve written on more than once. This is why I’m so excited for today: the premiere of Stranger Things season 4…part 2.

Part one dropped early last month and became the platform’s biggest release ever. The show didn’t dip in quality and the fans seemed extremely happy with it. So, before you watch part two, here’s everything you need to know about Stranger Things season four.

(Warning spoiler alerts ahead)

This season is an experiment in release schedules

Streaming companies are falling victim to their best feature, convenience, which seems like an odd problem. What made streaming services preferable to cable was their lack of commercials and your ability to binge shows quickly. The biggest downside of that format, however, is keeping a show that cost millions of dollars to make in the limelight for longer than a few weeks.

Think about another Netflix powerhouse program, Ozark. Ozark was commercially and critically successful, but their final season received practically zero buzz. That’s because fans of the show binged it in a few days and moved on to the next show without any fanfare.

That’s good news for fans of binging, but bad for companies who need to show stockholders that the public actually cares about their programming.

HBO Max has tried to fight this by releasing shows one week at a time like their cable counterpart, to limited success. Disney+ releases the first three episodes at once, then on a weekly basis as well. Netflix is trying something new, with Stranger Things as its guinea pig.

The episodes are movie length

Instead of releasing weekly or making a shorter season, the Duffer Brothers (the creators and writers) decided to make every episode its own contained story. That means each episode is around 60 – 100 minutes. Instead of binging through 15 shorter episodes, each one is meant to be enjoyed by itself and then given some air to breathe.

The effect works. After that long of an episode, most people (myself excluded) will wait for another night to continue the binge. Once we’ve all got to the same point (the end of episode 7), people can talk about the season as a whole online and build up anticipation for part two.

It’s an interesting strategy and we’ll see how it pans out in the long run.

The kids are 35 now

We started watching this show when the main characters were all children and since the seasons take years to make, they are all hilariously too old for their roles.

One of the funniest bits in this season is watching these grownups look into the camera and pretend to be freshmen in high school. In a program about sci-fi monsters and a telekinetic protagonist, this is the biggest suspension of disbelief you’ll have to make while watching.

This season has a new bad guy

Season one had a man-sized monster called the Demogorgon as the antagonist. Seasons two and three focused on the “big bad” of the series called the Mind Flayer. Season four has a craftier villain in Vecna.

It seems weird to me to introduce a new villain after the show’s established the Mind Flayer as the ultimate bad guy, but there are a few key reasons they made this change.

The first reason is practicality. The Mind Flayer is an immense being incapable of human speech and way too much of an eldritch horror to be relatable. Vecna, on the other hand, communicates directly with his victims and is humanoid enough that he seems like an intellectual threat as well as a physical one.

The second reason is that Vecna turned out to be an important key to Eleven’s backstory and hints at the creation of the Upside Down.

Eleven’s backstory is a little shady despite driving the plots of at least three seasons of the show, so introducing Vecna as the original telekinetic child turned into a psychic monster was an important clue to her power’s origins.

Vecna was the natural prototype of Eleven and she’s the one who sent him to the Upside Down after he killed everyone else in the super-powered child compound. I expect that this will mark the beginning of the Upside Down as a concept. And Eleven will be instrumental in erasing it as a whole next season.

Mike still sucks, so he isn’t the main character anymore

Mike was the main character for season one and spent every succeeding season destroying his likability.

All he ever does on the show is complain and screw over his friends, namely Will, the token gay. Lucky for us, his plot over the first part of the season was to get dumped by El and exit the season after episode four.

Which gave plenty of time to establish side-characters like Lucas and Max as major players. Lucas has spent the majority of the show as a sidekick with less importance than the other boys and Max wasn’t treated much better.

This season, both have starring roles and drive the plot of several episodes. Lucas has become the only character that wants to move on from his loser reputation in the last three seasons and Max is dealing with the death of her stepbrother and subsequent possession by Vecna.

You wouldn’t think those are on the same level, but in this show, that’s the case.

Hopper and Joyce were wasted

I have to believe that part two of this season will feature Winona Ryder and David Harbour more because the first half was a complete waste of their talents.

These two are the best actors on the show by a mile, yet they were reduced to a few minutes of screen time per episode to let us know Hopper was still stuck in Russia. Admittedly, when they were on screen, it was one of the highlights of the show, but I think the writers wasted a great opportunity to expand on a pretty cool plotline.

Kate Bush is BACK

The final thing you need to know about part one of this season is that Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill is the theme of the season and one of the best musical choices I’ve ever seen in a television show.

I wasn’t around in the ’80s so I wasn’t familiar with Kate Bush as an artist, but that’s a real shame because she’s incredible. Sure, that song didn’t come out until 1985 and the season takes place in 1983, but that’s a discrepancy worth making if you can include this song in your show.

It also made me aware that Running Up That Hill is actually about a couple who wants to switch genders so they can experience the world in each other’s shoes. That’s the deal she’d like to make with god. I doubt they chose this song because of the cool trans messaging, but I still think it’s a point worth making.

And that’s it! Stranger Things is one of the few shows to keep the same level of quality over this many seasons and I’m excited to continue our journey through season four.

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