Who Saves the World? Girls
The Stranger Things 4 Leading Ladies
The reading time for this newsletter is 11 minutes. At the end of the piece, there are two polls for you to vote in, and an invitation to leave a comment with your thoughts. Make a cup of coffee or grab a beer, and enjoy! I’d love to hear from you, nerds.
Unless you’re off the grid, live alone in the woods and never talk to anyone on the outside, you will have heard by now that Part 2 of Stranger Things 4 came out on July 1st. In fact, records show that attendance at Fourth of July events were down by 75% because everyone who is cool was at home in their basements watching Eleven save the world yet again.
Just kidding—I made that statistic up. But I wouldn’t be surprised if people between the ages of 15 and 40 stayed in on the holiday weekend to find out what madness the Duffer Brothers cooked up for us this time.
When I think back to that first season of Stranger Things, that miniseries with an E.T. feel that came out of nowhere with a bunch of nobodies (except for Wynona Ryder), I think of the gang of nerdy middle school boys who befriended a strange little girl lost in the woods and won all of our hearts. Will, Mike, Lucas, and Dustin were the friend quartet that took center stage. When Will went missing, the boys worked with El (and their science teacher!) to find him.
But Stranger Things has never skimped on its cast, always offering us too many developed characters to grow attached to and more reasons to cry when bad things happen to them. Along with the nerds, we fell in love with Nancy and Jonathan, older siblings to Mike and Will respectively. We were charmed by Steve, Nancy’s jock boyfriend. We cried for Barb, whom everyone wanted more of.
Then there were the adults: Hopper, the washed-up sheriff; Joyce, the mom of the missing boy who drives everyone crazy (understandably—her son is missing!); and several other teachers, cops, etc.
There’s someone for everyone in Stranger Things, but those first eight “chapters” were really about those adorable little boys. We loved Mike’s earnestness, Dustin’s wit, and Lucas’s generally astonished reactions to everything. We watched as they used Dungeons & Dragons to understand the bizarre chain of events happening to them, and as they rode their bikes around dark and abandoned streets late at night. Ah, the 80’s.
Not so in Stranger Things 4—the ladies take center stage in the most recent installment of the show, and that’s exactly why I’m excited to write about it here in Leading Ladies.
Before I go on, I have to address something: rumors abound that the fourth season is “demonic.” And it certainly feels that way in the first episode. There are allusions to the demonic: the Dungeons & Dragons club is called “Hellfire,” the monster appears in people’s minds, and, after the first death in the show, a townsperson says on the news, “Ever since that girl, Bard, died a few years ago, it has been one thing after another. I’ll tell ya, you start to believe all those things they say, that this town is cursed, that the devil lives here, in Hawkins.”
I was personally worried the season would play into this more, but thankfully I heard from friends who finished Part 1 that the show does not go in that direction.
Reassured, I spent the entirety of a Saturday watching the rest of the six episodes of Part 1 so that I could watch Part 2—yes, on July 3rd and 4th in lieu of watching fireworks or attending an Independence Day Parade. America, Founding Fathers, I still love you and I’m still glad I was born in the US of A.
I’m reassuring you now in the same way my friends reassured me: the show is not demonic. The Duffer Brothers have incorporated more traditional elements of the horror genre in this season, complete with a haunted house. But in the end, everything scary is related to the Upside Down, that horrifying alternate dimension to which Eleven somehow opened a portal in 1983.
That being said, if you have planned to finish watching Stranger Things 4, stop reading here. Go finish the season, and then come back here to relive with me how the girls saved the world this time. I will be including spoilers; you’ve been warned.
If you have either finished Stranger Things, or never plan to watch it, or don’t mind spoilers, read on!
When I was a teenager in the 2000’s, the shows that aired on television included:
Friends
Gilmore Girls
Sex and the City
Friday Night Lights
Gossip Girl
One Tree Hill
The OC
Degrassi
The Secret Life of the American Teenager
Was I allowed to watch any of these shows? Absolutely not. A list of shows I was allowed to watch includes, in no particular order of my preference:
Glee
Lizzie McGuire
That’s So Raven
Drake & Josh
Hannah Montana
The Wizards of Waverly Place
Zoey 101
Even Stevens
In any of these shows, are the teenage girls baddies? Absolutely not. Both in the shows I was and was not allowed to watch (and have since seen enough of to get the gist), these girls’ lives revolved mostly around which boys they liked and if those boys liked them back. They liked the boys, wondered if it was reciprocated, and then had to figure out what to do depending on the answer.
Some of these leading ladies also happened to be pop superstars or wizards or have psychic powers. But these unique characteristics just provided the back drop for their very teenage conflicts. They never had to save the world. They never got the chance.
I wish there had been a pop sensation show like Stranger Things for my generation when we were teenagers. We were comparing ourselves to Blaire, a rich girl with toxic relationships, and to Miley, a megastar singer famous through nepotism. Maybe it was okay to want to be Rory, the braniac from small-town Connecticut who has big dreams about being a foreign correspondent. At least until she has sex for the first time with her married ex-boyfriend. That was definitely a problematic element.
Where was the Nancy? The Joyce? The Robin? Max or even Erica? And last but not least—the Eleven, a hero with a moral compass and a heart of gold? These women are true independent leading ladies, otherwise now known by Gen Z as “baddies.” They are brave, smart, and loyal. They follow their instincts, stand up to the men in their lives when the men are wrong, and kill monsters. All in all, these ladies hold their own. I wish I’d had them as role models when I was 15.
In the early seasons of Stranger Things, each of these women were instrumental in the plot. However, in Season 4, it is the girls who save the world. Here’s how:
First, Joyce Byers. I love Joyce. She’s a believer. Since Season 1, I’ve loved how willing she is to look beyond the natural laws of the universe for abnormal explanations. So often in television, parents are portrayed as the skeptics, the nonbelievers, the disenchanted. Joyce is the opposite. She is as enchanted, in the Charles Taylor meaning of the word, as they come. Because Joyce experiences the world as enchanted, one in which cosmic and spiritual forces cross boundaries and shape our lives in real ways, she has helped save the kids, and Hawkins, time and again. In this instance, she rescues Hopper, whom she believed to be dead.
It’s just an added bonus that strong women like Joyce are not held in contempt in the Stranger Things universe. They aren’t bossy or pushy. In fact, strong, smart women are more likely to be referred to as attractive, precisely because of those traits. Enzo, our favorite Russian traitor, says to Hopper, “You’re worried about your woman, is that it? I can see why you like her, American. When I talked to her, I can tell by voice that she’s very pretty. Feisty, too. I like that.”
Next, we have Robin. The fast-talking and likable Maya Hawke plays Robin. She was introduced in Season 3 as Steve’s co-worker at the ice cream shop in the mall, and his new love interest. That is, until we find out that she doesn’t like boys. Their friendship is lovingly antagonistic: they root for each other’s romantic lives with endless teasing. It was fun to see Robin and Nancy become friends this season, after hardly interacting in the previous. It was especially fun to see Nancy dress Robin up in frilly 80’s garb.
Robin and Nancy do some majorly important sleuthing by sneaking into a psychiatric hospital and gaining information that saves Max’s life. They have followed the trail of clues to this hospital to meet Victor Creel and hear his side of the story. Nancy and Robin realize that it’s the power of music that frees someone from the death grip of Vecna.
Nancy and Max both play key roles in the discovery of the monster behind the killings, his true identity, and how they can stop him—at least for now. Max is one of Vecna’s targets and, because of that, she can put the pieces together. She realizes that his first two victims had things in common: trauma, headaches, nightmares, meeting with the school counselor, and, finally, visions.
When Vecna tries to kill Max the first time, she resists him first by her sheer will power. She wants to live, so she runs (in her mind). Then, she resists through song, the one you hear everywhere now, “Running Up That Hill” by Kate Bush. But it’s not just the music. She conjures up her happiest memories and runs to them for dear life. Song and memory—that’s how evil is defeated. After surviving his first attempt to kill her, Max bravely offers herself up as bait in the final plan to destroy Vecna.
Nancy acts as a pack-leader this season, and it feels as though she’s come into her own. The love triangle dynamics between her, Jonathan, and Steve are present, but feel secondary to their genuine bond of friendship that’s developed after all they’ve been through together. Steve and Jonathan love Nancy, but you can also sense the deep respect they have for her. We might have been waiting for a major kiss between Nancy and Steve, but that moment was reserved for Joyce and Hopper, a couple I’ve been here for since the beginning.
Nancy is the one to whom Vecna reveals himself. He shows her who he was, who he became, and how he plans to destroy Hawkins. Because of this psychological experience Nancy has at the end of Vol. 1 and beginning of Vol. 2, it feels right that Nancy is the one who fires the final shot that blasts Vecna out of his lair and into oblivion (for now). That scene, in slow motion, gave me chills and has elicited comparisons to Sigourney Weaver’s character in Alien.
At the same time that Nancy discovers the final piece of the puzzle, thousands of miles away, Eleven is participating in the Nina experiment. In order to recover her powers, she has to open herself up to memories so traumatic that she had buried them. El has been afraid that she’s the monster responsible for murdering the other children at the Hawkins lab. But Dr. Brenner (who somehow is still alive—Duffer Brothers, please explain) shows El the truth. She didn’t kill the children. She defeated the one who did. Yet by doing so, she opened a portal to another dimension and banished One to it, where he became a monster hellbent on revenge.
Like Nancy, Eleven comes into her power in this season. Literally, she gets her powers back. But she also stands up to Brenner when he tries to manipulate and control her. When she speaks to him during his final attempt to stop her going to Hawkins, she says to him,
I came here to try and understand who I was, to see if I was the monster. But now I know the truth. It is not me. It is you. You are the monster. I am going to open that door and I am going to leave with Dr. Owens. If you try to stop me, I will kill you.
And when she says this, I believe her. Moments later, still fuzzy from Brenner’s tranquilizer, El brings a chopper down in the Utah desert. Besides Hopper beheading a demogorgon with a sword, this is, in my opinion, the single most bad-ass scene of the season.
I love that, in Stranger Things 4, the Duffers brought the ladies to the forefront. They are the melody of the song. The boys are the background music, complementing their feminine sound. One of the final, heart-wrenching sequences is Eleven attempting to reverse the potent fatal damage Vecna did to Max.
Since Max can’t remember, Eleven remembers for her. We watch their friendship from Season 3 play out across the screen. In the montage, Max says to Eleven, “See? There’s more to life than stupid boys!” Then Eleven asks, “Against the rules?” And Max replies, “We make our own rules.”
Last but not least, one more lady can’t be forgotten! Erica, Lucas’s little sister, gets more screen time this season. She’s sassy and smart. She makes the winning move in a game of Dungeon & Dragons in the first chapter of this season. And she joins the crew in their final battle with Vecna. Do we ship Erica and Dustin?
The girls are still girls in Stranger Things, even though they’re strong. So the romance and the chemistry—it’s all still there. But the boys and the men take more a backseat. They cheer on the girls, support and respect them. They don’t compete with them. The ones who do are usually the bad guys. Thank you, Duffer Brothers, for giving us strong leading ladies for girls and women of all ages to admire.
Hey nerds, a few polls, just for fun!
What did you think of Season 4? What did you like, or not like? Highlights? Or missing pieces? Also, since Eddie Munson is a boy, I couldn’t write about him here but… what did you think of Eddie Munson?! Tell me in the comments below! Let’s nerd out a bit.
Erica was actually my favorite leading lady!! But I said Max given the options. And Eddie’s death broke my heart. It also seemed like an unnecessary sacrifice since the roots were already getting Nancy, Steve, and Robin. Dustin had already gotten away so why, Eddie, why?!
“Song and memory—that’s how evil is defeated.”
Words to live by!