30 Times “Stranger Things” Surprised Their Viewers With These Well-Hidden Easter Eggs

According to Jack Seale, a journalist who specializes in TV, 'Stranger Things' season four was bigger and better than anything the show had done before.

"It was clearly more expensively produced, with a larger cast and a surer sense of why all the monsters, heroes and hangers-on were there," Seale wrote in The Guardian.

"The double-bill denouement – held back for a month by Netflix to allow hype to build – is more expansive still. It's crazily, luxuriously sprawling, running to nearly four hours, and does everything fans could have expected plus several dollops more."

But if it hasn't quite overstretched itself yet, Seale does wonder where 'Stranger Things' can possibly go from here.

Consider where everything took place. In Hawkins, Indiana, in 1986, waiting for a gang of plucky teens to mount a final assault on Vecna, the demon who roams a dank dimension beneath the town.

Psychic superheroine Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) unlocked memories from a childhood spent in a secure facility for kids with strange powers, revealing that she opened up the interdimensional portal while confronting One, a murderous fellow inmate (thus turning him into the vengeful Vecna).

In the meantime, a group of sympathetic adults got stuck in a grimy Soviet Union prison, battling a creature left over from a previous season.

"A showdown looms – but hey, we’ve got four hours, there’s no rush. And so season four's last two episodes are surprisingly talky, giving almost every character a tender, watershed two-hander with a significant other," Seale explained.

"Lost love is lamented, halting young love gets closer to being properly expressed, and the show’s barely discernible – although fans who pore over every scene have certainly discerned it – hints about Will (Noah Schnapp) being gay become something more overt during his moving speech about learning to live with being 'different.'"

The TV critic thinks the creators of 'Stranger Things, the Duffer brothers, understand what underpins their reference points, and in particular, they get how the neighborhood apocalypse genre works.

"These stories say that it’s OK to be different – to be shy and angry, or a Dungeons and Dragons nerd, or secretly gay, or a heavy metal freak – because your small town might just be the most important place in the world, and maybe you’re not different, but special," Seale wrote.

"The Duffers appreciate that all this is a metaphor for coming of age, so they sprinkle their finale with universal life lessons about slaying your personal monsters and growing up."

Once the emotional framework, four seasons in the making, has been carefully put in place, the fireworks finally begin and they don't disappoint. As Seale pointed out, "with no big surprises (various characters find themselves on the edge of defeat in a fight to the death before visions of what truly matters to them give them the strength to rally at the last second) but a lot of impeccable judgments", the show delivers the goods.

The decisions over which character intervenes when, and how, are perfectly made – as are the ones over who dies and why, and the problem of splitting the action between Indiana, Nevada, and Kamchatka is reconciled smoothly enough.

The critic believes it could even be an ideal finale for the whole show.

But Netflix have commissioned a fifth and final season.

From what has been hinted, we might see a disaster on a global scale rather than a conspiracy only a select few geeks know about, and with the core cast no longer minors, there can also be some new adjustments.

But Seale thinks 'Stranger Things' "is at its best when it’s local, intimate, innocent, and homespun." And such an effect would be impossible without all the deliberate care that goes into production (often in a form of small details). Maybe it has already told this story?