Stranger Things 4 Chapter One The Hellfire Club featured Television 

Five Thoughts on Stranger Things 4‘s “The Hellfire Club”

By | May 31st, 2022
Posted in Television | % Comments

Nearly three years after the third season, Stranger Things 4 has finally arrived, and it is a beast, with nine episodes that run an average of 75 minutes — it is so large, Netflix have divided it into two volumes, the first of which was released on May 27, while the second is due for July 1. Let’s get into it:

“Chapter One: The Hellfire Club”
Written and directed by the Duffer Bros.

It is March 21, 1986, and Eleven is now living with the Byers family in California. Despite what her letters to Mike say, she is an outcast at school. Joyce receives a package containing a china doll from the Soviet Union. Back in Hawkins, Lucas has joined the high school basketball team, leaving Mike and Dustin one party member short for the school’s D&D group, the Hellfire Club. Max has broken up with Lucas, and her parents have separated too, while cheerleader Chrissy Cunningham is being haunted by disturbing visions…

(And in case you’re new here, spoilers…)

1. A New Beginning

Before all that, we open with a flashback to September 8, 1979, when Dr. Brenner was still working at Hawkins National Laboratory. We follow what seems like a typical day in his life, reading the newspaper, doing the crossword and so on before heading to work, greatly humanizing the ruthless scientist. Then, while testing the boy subject Ten, an attack occurs, and Brenner emerges the only survivor of a massacre perpetrated by Eleven, leaving countless adults and every other test subject dead. El’s always been a killer, but her past is far darker than any of us imagined, and this reveal leaves us on the edge of our seat when we see her being bullied later, before we remember the Spider Monster deprived her of her powers — her bully, Angela (Elodie Grace Orkin), is very, very lucky she’s been depowered.

2. Growing Older, Part I

It may be spring, but Hawkins is still struggling to emerge from the darkness of the past year, when so many people died in “a mall fire” on the Fourth of July. There’s a mournful tone to this episode, with El and Max respectively struggling to move on from Hopper and Billy’s deaths: to quote “Running Up That Hill” (the Kate Bush song used here), both girls wish they could “swap places” with them. This elegiac tone extends to the pacing, which brings Stranger Things the closest it has ever felt to being a genuine horror movie: there’s a truly creepy — rather than just spooky — atmosphere that reflects the older-skewing films that inspired the show, as well as the current age of the main cast.

3. Growing Older, Part II

On that note, a lot’s been said about how the lead actors are visibly older, and in fairness while they’re clearly a bit big to be playing freshmen, they’re still teenagers: frankly, a lot of the online discourse has been warped by how often perfect looking 20-somethings play high schoolers in movies and TV (including this show, so we’re clear!), and borders on body-shaming — sorry they’re not “cute kids” anymore, but this isn’t a cartoon.

Admittedly, the Duffers had an easy way to smoothen the transition, namely by progressing the setting to 1987, but then we’d have lost out on how raw the aftermath of season three still feels, and the immediacy of seeing Lucas become distant from his middle school friends. So ultimately, I don’t care how the kids look: it remains a joy seeing them — especially Millie Bobby Brown and Sadie Sink — continue to develop their characters, and grow (no pun intended) as actors.

4. New Faces

The biggest addition to the cast here is the Hellfire Club’s dungeon master, Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn), a proud freak and weed dealer, who’s not afraid to get in jocks’ faces. He’s frankly a little obnoxious, a jock leader who happens to be a nerd, but I imagine that was the idea, so you would start to speculate he was actually the creature stalking Chrissy Cunningham (Grace Van Dien), or at least why people would believe he murdered her.

Then we have Argyle (Eduardo Franco), Jonathan’s long-haired, pot smoking new best friend, who — in tandem with Nancy’s prickly school paper colleague Fred Benson (Logan Riley Bruner) — gets a great moment where he gives the long-distance couple an opportunity to prove how in sync they still are. We also get to meet Vickie (Anne With an E‘s Amybeth McNulty), Robin’s marching bandmate, whom she has a crush on (and suffice to say, it’ll be harder to figure out if she feels the same way in the ’80s.)

Continued below

Last but not least, there’s the season’s big bad, the Vecna, who is unlike anything we’ve seen from the Upside Down before: the show’s answer to Freddy Krueger or Pennywise, he can conjure nightmarish illusions from the other side, which he uses to lull his victims into a vulnerable fugue state. His surreal powers unshackle him from the visual language previously established for the Upside Down, with his arrival being heralded by an ominous grandfather clock, and flies and spiders. Thanks to this and his rotting, yet recognizably humanoid appearance, there is something incredibly personal, and far more frightening about him than the Demogorgon or the Mind Flayer.

5. A Double-Edged Sword

We mentioned earlier season four has a slower pace, which feels natural after the summer rollercoaster ride of its predecessor: it makes the show feel more natural and grounded again, like its late ’70s influences instead of its mid-’80s ones, but with so many characters and settings now, it also makes it much, much more bloated. Thanks to the time it took to reestablish everyone, it felt like the main plot was Mike and Dustin’s search to replace Lucas in their D&D party, as well as Lucas’s basketball game, with Joyce finding out Hopper’s alive getting completely lost amidst everything else going on.

The Duffers are supremely talented directors, and the staging of so much in this episode — the Jonathan/Nancy scene, the D&D/basketball game, even Murray Bauman preparing an ice bath — was fantastic, so it’s an absolute shame towards the end I just felt exhausted, and wished they had cut this or that so they would get back to the main story sooner. (The decision to have scenes only featuring the new characters also adds to the irritation: it’s a bold decision that comes across arrogantly in the final cut.) They have so many good ideas, it’s a shame that they’re so preoccupied with Stranger Things that they’re not saving them for other projects.

Other Things:

– As the season premiered a few days after the Robb Elementary School shooting, Netflix added a content warning to the description of this episode — suffice to say, it’s terrible a moment of horror on a TV show has become such a common occurrence in the real world.

– The Hellfire Club is presumably another X-Men reference, although it should be noted the Marvel organization is named after similarly debauched historical groups.

– Test subject Six is mentioned in the cold open as being a boy; in the comics, Six was the number assigned to a girl named Francine, who escaped the year before in 1978.

– When I covered season three, I was under the impression Jonathan, Nancy et al. had graduated high school: my bad.

We’ll be back soon to discuss each episode of the new season every week. In the meantime, stay safe, and beware the Vecnas of the real world…


//TAGS | Stranger Things

Christopher Chiu-Tabet

Chris is the news manager of Multiversity Comics. A writer from London on the autistic spectrum, he enjoys tweeting and blogging on Medium about his favourite films, TV shows, books, music, and games, plus history and religion. He is Lebanese/Chinese, although he can't speak Cantonese or Arabic.

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  • STRANGER THINGS. Joseph Quinn as Eddie Munson in STRANGER THINGS. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2022 Television
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