LogFAQs > #966492646

DespondentDeity posted...

This stuff was ruining the season for me.

I mean, especially when you realize that the entire point of the bully arc was a misdirect that didn't really succeed in fooling the audience - 'oh, El lost her temper and clocked the bully with a blunt object, clearly she was capable of murdering all her fellow Hawkins test subjects' - it makes that arc that much more annoying.

I liked S4, but it definitely suffered from bloat. The showrunners weren't constrained by budget or time allotment like a regular broadcast show; it was pretty clear that they knew it, and dragged certain things out to an unnecessary degree. They could have easily cut a half-hour's runtime out of the last two episodes apiece and told the exact same story with the exact same gravity.

One thing in particular that started to grate was the cut-to-black fakeout. It worked great at the end of Ep 4, when you were genuinely unsure if the ep was going to end on the cliffhanger of Max escaping or not. But then they reused it like half a dozen times over the remainder of the episodes, and it got pretty annoying.