Netflix Netflix Series - Stranger Things 4 (1 Viewer)

[harleyquinn]

So...unfortunately, but not surprisingly, Sadie Sink didn't get an Emmy nom.

She was excellent. I'm still making my way through the season, but the episode that focused on Max was easily my favorite Stranger Things episode in awhile.

 

[Mike2001]

Max was great this season.

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so does the fact that the cracks reopened at the end mean Max died again?

 

[Sean Bryan]

Max was great this season.

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so does the fact that the cracks reopened at the end mean Max died again?

No.

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She only died the one time. Henry/One/Vecna didn’t get to fully do whatever he was doing to his victims, but she still died from the trauma. When she died, that apparently was enough to open the fourth gate and create the massive rip through Hawkins. Eleven used her abilities to bring her back to life but that didn’t do anything to the super-gate. I think you have have a misperception of what happened at that point. She didn’t roll anything back (like Supermam). The only thing she “fixed” there was returning Max to some state of being alive. She didn’t close the gate. That stayed open. The Duffers described Max as broken, blind and brain dead, but that was the state she was in from when Eleven brought her back. So nothing changed from that point through the end.

 

[Sean Bryan]

And speaking of the end, that final shot was fantastic. This is only a crappy iPhone picture taken off my projector screen, but I love the look here.

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[Sean Bryan]

And about the above picture:

I didn’t notice it when watching, but I recently showed this to a friend and she pointed out that the clouds look like

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the Mind Flayer

. And my reaction was “holy crap, it does!” How did it miss that!?

 

[Mike2001]

I'll have to watch again. When the gates opened, they tore right through the city hall in the center of town. When they showed the survivors milling around outside that building later, I didn't see the active gates. When they showed the overview at the end, it looked like the gates were active again. So I took the sequence as: Max died, gates opened up; Max back to life (such as it was), gates closed back up. Then, gates opening back up implied to me Max dying again.

 

[Sean Bryan]

I'll have to watch again. When the gates opened, they tore right through the city hall in the center of town. When they showed the survivors milling around outside that building later, I didn't see the active gates. When they showed the overview at the end, it looked like the gates were active again. So I took the sequence as: Max died, gates opened up; Max back to life (such as it was), gates closed back up. Then, gates opening back up implied to me Max dying again.

I think there may be some confusion about the specific locations shown and relative distances from

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the actual open gate to other areas. It really goes right through Hawkins from four directions and the town wasn’t completely abandoned. So people would still be in areas throughout the town that weren’t destroyed by the “earthquake”. But I definitely don’t think there was anything shown to suggest the gates closed (because they never showed that) and then reopened, because that would have been another big massive devastating “earthquake” that happened “sometime”’off screen between the scenes in the shelter and the final scene of the view of Hawkins from the field.

I think we just didn’t see enough of a close arial view of the town get get a clear sense of where everything is in relation to the open rifts.

 

[Sean Bryan]

I'll have to watch again. When the gates opened, they tore right through the city hall in the center of town. When they showed the survivors milling around outside that building later, I didn't see the active gates. When they showed the overview at the end, it looked like the gates were active again. So I took the sequence as: Max died, gates opened up; Max back to life (such as it was), gates closed back up. Then, gates opening back up implied to me Max dying again.

The Duffers have stated that

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she is alive

I haven’t yet watched though the video, but here are some of their comments from it.

The Duffer Brothers Revealed That Max Mayfield's "Stranger Things" Season 4 Plotline Was Supposed To Go Much Differently

"For a while, that is what was going to happen."

www.buzzfeed.com

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“It was discussed as a possibility,” Ross said about killing off Max for good. “For a while, that is what was going to happen. We wanted to end it in a little bit more of a question mark at the end of the season, where it’s still really dark and we don’t know if Max is going to be OK.”

"The fact that she’s in a coma, I can’t really get into the details, but it is important that she is," he said. "That is going to have a major effect on [Season] 5. So, it’s not a cheat. It’s incredibly relevant.”

 

[Mike2001]

yup. That is pretty definitive.

 

[Joe Wong]

And speaking of the end, that final shot was fantastic. This is only a crappy iPhone picture taken off my projector screen, but I love the look here.

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View attachment 144979

Nice shot!

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The imagery is not quite the same, but that view of a town in flames reminded me of the final cut scene from the original Doom video game (FFwd to 0:50 if you want to skip the text message):

 

[Citizen87645]

My impression was the center of Hawkins where the cracks converged became a ground zero and that has been cordoned off by the government and with their patroling helicopters.

 

[Greg.K]

Binged season 4 over the past week or so and finished last night. Wow, what a great season. Definitely my second favorite after season 1. Expanding to the new locations out west and in the Soviet Union gave it all a more epic scope than just keeping things around Hawkins would have.

 

[SamT]

I finished 4x05. This thing is unwatchable. Will be my last season especially that now they make long episodes for no reason. One episode 2h20m? What is this?

 

[Joe Wong]

I finished 4x05. This thing is unwatchable. Will be my last season especially that now they make long episodes for no reason. One episode 2h20m? What is this?

I’m curious - is it unwatchable because the episodes are too long (and hence becomes a chore to watch)? In other words, would it have been better if a 2 hour episode had been split into 2 x 1 hour episodes?

Or is it the quality of the story and characters?

 

[SamT]

It's the quality of the story and characters. How many times do we have to see the same thing? Eleven with the same look in the same lab with the same guy who I have no idea who he is despite having seen the whole series. It's just not for me and I don't care. Also the new trend of padding things for the sake of having a longer episode with no added quality like they did in Orville 3x1 makes it worse.

So watching a long padded episode in 3 sittings doesn't make the story better.

 

[Clinton McClure]

For me, the show went downhill sharply after season 1. I never even finished season 2 and went straight to season 3 which was much better but still not as good.

I was hoping the show would have been an anthology series to keep it fresh and entertaining. Sadly, that didn’t happen. After struggling to watch the rest of season 4, I’m done and I really don’t care what they do next season.

 

[Citizen87645]

I guess I don't understand continuing with a series when it's clear you're not enjoying it. Why not spend your time on something you like? Life is too short...or at least time is finite and there's so much good stuff to watch out there.

 

[Clinton McClure]

Because I enjoyed season 1 so much that I kept hoping the rest would get better. I have a 15 minute rule for movies and tv shows that I usually stick to but I wanted to see if lightning could strike twice.

 

[Citizen87645]

I understand it can be hard to know when to cut bait. Especially when we feel like we have to finish what we start no matter how much we don't enjoy something, the culture tends to look down on people who don't follow through and finish (this seems more true for books but also seems true at times for other media). My thinking has changed on this a bit as I've had to prioritize my time.

I'm still marveling over another member who watched a season three times over in hopes it would get better. I guess I'm more jealous that he actually had the time to do that.

 

[jayembee]

Because I enjoyed season 1 so much that I kept hoping the rest would get better. I have a 15 minute rule for movies and tv shows that I usually stick to but I wanted to see if lightning could strike twice.

I'm generally the other way around. I've watched far too many things over the years on Netflix that I spent most of thinking that it wasn't really working for me, then finding that in the last 20 minutes or so, it all pulls together and I end up really liking it.

Movies are one thing, however. Generally speaking, it's a 2-hour investment of time. I can do that, and I have a good enough handle on my tastes that I tend to pick far more winners than losers. I've gotten to have less patience with TV shows. More often than not, if I decide to bail, it's after the first episode. There have been the occasional series where something about it intrigues me enough to keep going for a full season, but then I decide whether to bother with it after that. Even popular series. I gave up on The Walking Dead when the first season finished, I gave up on Mad Men a couple of episodes into Season 2, and I gave up on Breaking Bad after -- if memory serves -- three episodes. It wasn't that I thought they were bad. On the contrary, I thought they were all well done. But I found I had more admiration than affection for them.

I used to be one of those people who felt that you needed to give something enough time to appreciate its virtues. And maybe that's still true, but I think it's just that as I've gotten older, I'm less inclined to waste what time I have left in life on something I'm not enjoying very much just out of some existential dread of missing out on something popular. I remember being in an argument about Breaking Bad. Several people tried to tell me that I needed to give it more time. But no one agreed on how much time that would take. One person even said, "It doesn't get really good until the third season, and then it becomes excellent." And my response was, "So I'm supposed to sit through two full not-really-good seasons just so I can get to the point where I'm going to start liking it?"

Not everything is for everyone. I'll talk about things I like till the cows come home, especially if someone asks me for my opinion, but if someone tries something I like or love and decides it's not for them, I won't try to persuade them otherwise. Mostly because I've learned how much I hate it when people try to do that to me.