5 “Stranger Things” Season 4 Plot Holes That Are Turning Our Heads Upside Down

We quickly meet the villain our heroes have to face in “Stranger Things” season four when innocent teenagers Chrissy and Fred, played by Grace Van Dien and Logan Riley Bruner, are mysteriously murdered. Vecna, an evil spellcaster named after the Dungeons & Dragons character, is killing and feeding off the trauma of his victims in order to emerge from the Upside Down into the real world at full power. Before he kills them, Vecna manipulates their minds, showing them horrifying visions that give the audience insight into their trauma, including Chrissy’s difficult home life and Fred’s guilt born of a horrible childhood car accident. Even Max (Sadie Sink) experiences visions when she’s targeted by Vecna through her unresolved trauma from Billy’s death in season three. But basketball player Patrick, played by Myles Truitt, doesn’t get the same treatment before he’s killed by Vecna.

Patrick has minor visions (like seeing the grandfather clock), and one scene between Max and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) alludes to Patrick possibly being abused at home (he shows up to basketball practice with a black eye), but his trauma is never contextualized beyond that like Chrissy’s and Fred’s. Unless Patrick’s death is brought up again in volume two, we may never know exactly why Vecna killed him.

Before Chrissy is murdered, she rekindles her friendship with Hellfire Club president and dungeon master Eddie Munson, played by Joseph Quinn. Because of his extroverted personality, gothic appearance, and interest in D&D, everyone outside of Eddie’s circle sees him as a “freak,” and their fear of him represents the “satanic panic” of the ’80s.

Traumatized by Chrissy’s death and knowing he will be the prime suspect for her murder, Eddie goes into hiding. Despite the fact the whole city are on the hunt for him, Dustin, Max, Steve, and the rest of the Hawkins city gang still manage to find him before the police do. He remains hidden for the rest of the season with the help of his newfound allies. By the end of volume one, police and a small-town mob led by high-school basketball star Jason Carver (Mason Dye) are still looking for him, which seems a little far-fetched. If Dustin and friends could track Eddie down after some simple sleuthing through the video store’s rental history, it’s hard to imagine the Hawkins police couldn’t track him down, too.

At the end of season three, Chief Jim Hopper (David Harbour) sacrifices himself to save Hawkins when Starcourt Mall explodes – or does he? Luckily for fans, the first episode of volume one confirms that Hopper is still alive when Joyce Byers receives a mysterious package from Russia. We eventually learn that Hopper was transported through the Upside Down and somehow landed in the hands of the Russian army, where he has been tortured, held captive, and subjected to forced labor at a Russian prison.

Joyce and Murray (Brett Gelman) spend the majority of volume one trying to locate Hopper, even traveling to Alaska and paying ransom money in hopes of breaking him out of prison. Towards the end of Hopper’s captivity, during which he befriends his prison guard (played by “Game of Thrones” actor Tom Wlaschiha), it’s revealed that the Russians have been keeping a Demogorgon hostage and feeding it unruly prisoners. While this is a great way to incorporate the Demogorgon back into the show, the season doesn’t provide much context on how the Russians got the monster, beside the fact that Russian scientists could’ve accidentally let it loose when opening the Upside Down.

In order to save her friends (and the world) from the monsters of the Upside Down, Dr. Owens (Paul Reiser) tells El that her powers could be restored if she agrees to participate in more experiments in another underground lab in an undisclosed location in the Nevada desert. In this lab, Dr. Brenner, aka Papa (Matthew Modine), is revealed to be alive. He convinces El that the only way to bring back her powers is to relive the memories she lost from the Hawkins lab when she was young.

As El is witnessing her memories through old surveillance-camera footage and pre-virtual-reality probing technology, she has visions of what really happened in the Hawkins lab all those years ago. But time would’ve moved differently when El was under the experiments, and we only ever see what the scientists choose to play back from the camera footage they have. At one point, Brenner tells Owens to fast-forward to the last day, aka the massacre at Hawkins Lab, so it’s not clear how much time El spent living and training with the other numbers before their unfortunate end.

At one point, while she’s reliving her memories at Hawkins Lab, Eleven has a series of conversations with One in which her English-speaking skills seem to be far more advanced compared to the skills she had when she first met Mike and the gang in season one. At that point in 1983, she communicated in only one or two words at a time. Eleven’s level of communication seems to be the most consistent inconsistency throughout “Stranger Things.”