The Only ‘Stranger Things’ Recap You Need Before You Watch Season 4

The big day is finally here! After a three-year hiatus—and one global pandemic—the Hawkins, Indiana gang is getting back together at last. Stranger Things 4 lands on Netflix today, with the first seven episodes of the season.

The final two episodes of the show come to Netflix in July. This is the penultimate season of Stranger Things, and sets the stage for the final showdown in Season 5.

Since it’s been a whopping three years since we last hung out with Eleven, Mike, Hopper and the rest of the Stranger gang, it’s helpful to recap what came before so that you don’t have to go back and watch the entire first three seasons again if you don’t want to.

I’ll recap below, but here’s a video version if you’d prefer to just watch an eleven minute video (a fitting length, I’d say).

Season 1

In the first season we meet the gang: Eleven, an escaped child patient with psychic powers who has fled the U.S. government lab and the secret brainwashing Project MKUltra program.

She teams up with 12-year-olds Mike Wheeler, Dustin Henderson and Lucas Sinclair. The trio is searching for their missing friend, Will Byers, who was taken by the Demogorgon to the Upside Down, though nobody knows this yet.

Also searching for Will is his mother, Joyce, and police chief Jim Hopper. Later, Mike’s big sister Nancy and Will’s big brother Jonathan will join the hunt as they search for Nancy’s missing friend Barbara, also taken by the creature, who was freed from another dimension when Dr. Martin Brenner experimented on Eleven in the lab by sending her into a sensory deprivation chamber where she was able to use her powers to come into contact with the Upside Down.

The group of kids, teens and adults—along with Nancy’s boyfriend, Steve—slowly unravel the mysteries surrounding the lab and the alternate dimension, discovering that Will has been trying to contact Joyce through the phone line and the lights of their own house.

They hatch a plan to distract the monster and sneak into the lab to enter the gate into the Upside Down, ultimately freeing Will and defeating the Demogorgon. Barb isn’t so lucky. Neither are a whole bunch of government agents who Eleven takes out with her powers.

In the end, Eleven destroys the Demogorgon and disappears, though later we discover that she’s been hiding out near Hopper’s cabin, where he’s been leaving her Eggs waffles. Will, finally free, isn’t out of the weeds just yet. He has a strange vision and then throws up a slug-like creature, but hides these things from everyone.

Season 2

The second season of Stranger Things introduces new characters to the cast. Joyce has a boyfriend, Bob Newby, and there’s a new fiery-haired girl at school—Max—who Lucas falls for instantly. Unfortunately, Max’s older brother Billy Hargrove is a lot bigger and more frightening, and promises to be nothing but trouble.

Dustin finds a strange little creature in his trash can and names it D’artagnan, or Dart for short. When he shows the boys, they’re all immediately convinced it’s from the Upside Down—especially after Will has another strange vision. Will’s visions worsen, and he starts seeing a giant creature that we eventually come to know as the Mind Flayer.

When Bob encourages Will to confront the Mind Flayer, things go sideways. Will is possessed and starts behaving strangely.

Another new addition to the cast is Murray Bauman, a conspiracy theorist and private eye who Barb’s parents hire to track down Barb, who they don’t believe is dead.

This season takes place around Halloween and a new mystery has Hopper on the prowl: Pumpkin fields are inexplicably rotting. The investigation leads him down a dark path, as signs that the same strange ooze he encountered from the Upside Down is in the soil.

Dart continues to grow and eventually becomes a dog-like Upside Down creature, and just one of many that begin to terrorize our heroes. Will’s condition worsens and he becomes little more than a puppet for the Mind Flayer. Eventually they figure out that they can communicate with the real Will via Morse Code and he instructs them to CLOSE GATE (all of which feels a tiny bit like retreading Season 1 plot points, but whatever).

There is a great deal of action from here on out with the creatures pursuing various groups of characters through the tunnels beneath the pumpkin patches, through the lab and so forth. Bob is tragically killed right in front of Joyce.

Eventually, they’re able to purge the Mind Flayer from Will by overheating him in Hopper’s cabin while some of the kids lure the pack of creatures away. Billy continues to be a bad dude, getting into a fight with Steve (who is now a good dude) though they manage to stop him and carry on with their plan to close the gate and prevent the Mind Flayer from entering their world.

They succeed at this and Nancy is able to use her investigative work to expose the lab and have it shut down, but the Mind Flayer is still alive and we know that this kind of thing isn’t the end. The gate will be opened once again—by someone. The kids are already growing up at this point, and Lucas and Max kiss at the school dance. So do Mike and Eleven. Portents of things to come.

P.S. There’s a whole episode devoted to Eleven tracking down other kids like her who have formed some kind of quasi-super-hero-vagabond-group that’s a weird bottle episode in an otherwise pretty good season (though not as good as the other two seasons). This could have been cut entirely, quite frankly.

Season 3

Enter the Russians—a development that has a lot more significance today than in 2019. The Soviets have built a massive, ridiculously implausible underground base beneath Hawkins that the kids discover through their investigative powers. It turns out the USSR wants to use the Upside Down to create weapons of mass destruction. Much of this lab lays beneath the fancy Starcourt Mall, the other big set piece of Season 3.

This time around, Will isn’t possessed but Billy is—and Billy is a much more dangerous vessel for the Upside Down. He begins bringing people from around the town to the creature where they are later absorbed into a giant, grafted monstrosity—the Mind Flayer again, but this time made flesh by the corpses of rats and then later humans.

A great deal of Season 3 focuses on Mike and Eleven sucking face and Hopper getting increasingly angry about it. Hopper is angry throughout much of this season, which is useful at times—when he’s fighting Russian operatives, for instance—and less useful at times, like when he’s doing a bad job parenting.

I’ll admit, I found myself siding with Will for much of this season. All the other kids are obsessed with kissing and spying on each other and it gets old fast. Will wants to play D&D. He’s been through hell and back twice already but all his friends want to do is ditch him and snog.

In any case, we once again break up the group into smaller groups, with the usual teams teaming up in most cases, but some new alliances forming in others. Hopper and Joyce do their digging and end up escaping from a Russian bad guy named Grigori. (Hopper also has to frequently contend with the town’s awful mayor Larry Kline).

They capture a hostage named Alexi from a secret laboratory and take him to Murray, because Murray is the only guy around who speaks Russian. Alexi turns out to be a sweet guy and all these interactions are pretty funny until Alexi is killed by the Russians. (Alexi is the Bob of Season 3, basically).

Meanwhile, the kids have been learning more about the Mind Flayer’s plans and discovering that more and more people from the town have been “flayed” — aka taken over and are now essentially mindless zombie puppets.

Dustin is the only one not with the group. He’s hanging out with Steve and new addition to the gang, Robin, as well as Lucas’s younger sister, Erica. These four have infiltrated the Russian underground base and are learning—often the hard way—about its secrets, which they’re able to later pass on to Joyce, Hopper and Murray when they infiltrate the base to destroy the machine that’s keeping the gate open. During this mission, Hopper “dies” but is actually just transported, somehow, through the gate and into a Russian prison.

The Mind Flayer attacks the kids during the big county fair and Eleven is wounded. They fall back to the mall where an epic showdown involving many fireworks occurs, and in which Billy—despite his possession—is able to sacrifice himself to save the others, an act of redemption that he badly needed. While Eleven and her crew are able to defeat the Mind Flayer, Eleven ultimately loses her powers, rendering the one secret weapon they can use against the Upside Down inert.

There’s a flash-forward and we see the Byers packing up to move, taking Eleven with them. We get a very sad moment while Eleven reads a letter Hopper wrote to her earlier that year about their relationship and parenting and uncertainty, all voiced over by Hopper. Then tearful goodbyes, and if you’re the type who cries at movies you’ll need a box of tissues for sure. I thought it would make a great series finale, actually.

But Hopper isn’t really dead, and the show still has two seasons left. Hopefully for better and not for worse.

I know I skipped over some big beats here, but I had to go back and really winnow down my recaps because they got very long and much too detailed for a single post. And it’s time to watch Season 4 now!

I’ll be reviewing Stranger Things 4 here at this blog so be sure to follow for updates. You can also follow me on Twitter or Facebook.