Stranger Things Season 4 Episode 4 Recap: Running Up That Hill

When Stranger Things Season 4 Volume 1 dropped on Netflix on Friday, it wasn’t long before “Dear Billy” started trending. Amidst fears that the Season 4 episodes are too long, “Chapter Four: Dear Billy” does not waste a single second of its one hour and 19 minute-long run time, ending with Sadie Sink delivering one of her best performances to date.

But let’s start first with Team Lenora. In California, two agents are holding down the Byers residence while El (Millie Bobby Brown) is off with Dr. Owens (Paul Reiser) learning how to be a superhero again. Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Will (Noah Schnapp), and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) are skeptical of how much they can trust Owens this time around. As Will points out to Mike, Dr. Owens wasn’t the one to save him when he was possessed by the Mind Flayer – they were. And it looks like Hawkins is really going to need them again.

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Jonathan proposes they hail themselves a ride from – who else? – Argyle (Eduardo Franco) in his sweet Surfer Bro Pizza van. As they all race to pack, Mike and Will have a long-overdue heart-to-heart. Mike apologizes for how he’s been treating Will and admits that Hawkins just hasn’t been the same without him. Whatever comes next, he thinks that he and Will should work together — as best friends. (It looks like the boys are back! Thank god Mike finally got that attitude in check.) Will grabs his rolled-up painting at the last minute as they are leaving. The doorbell rings and unfortunately, it is not Argyle with his 30-minutes-or-less pizza delivery, but surprise! It’s the military. There is a massive shootout at the Byers residence that leaves one agent down while Will, Mike, and Jonathan manage to get the second agent, seriously wounded, out of the house where Argyle shows up just in time with his van.

Back in Russia, Hop makes a miraculous escape from the prison camp. When no one is looking, he purposely breaks his sledgehammer and approaches a guard for a new one. Just as the guard walks into the shed to retrieve him a new one, Hop follows him in and knocks him out, and quickly sits down to do the agonizing work of pulling the chains past his ankles. Of course, his success is short-lived because Mr. Nosy Russian Guard Who Is Always in Hop’s Business bursts into the shed. The guard fires his gun as they are fighting, which alerts the whole camp. Hopper manages to escape through the roof and run barefoot to a snowmobile nearby. The guards open fire, but Hop miraculously makes it over the hill unscathed. He stops at a nearby town and makes it to the designated church where he is supposed to meet Yuri, and for one brief beautiful moment, it looks like Jim Hopper is finally going to make it back to Hawkins.

Moving over to our action-comedy duo, Joyce (Winona Ryder) and Murray (Brett Gelman), Operation Save Hop from Evil Russians is underway – or so they think. They arrive in Alaska and meet the infamous Yuri (Nikola Djuricko), the Russian smuggler who is supposed to take them to Hopper for the ransom exchange. Yuri – a fan of bad jokes and crunchy peanut butter – has a couple of screws loose, but he seems harmless enough. Joyce and Murray hand over the money, and Yuri encourages them to hunker down and enjoy some hot coffee while he proceeds to count every dollar. Once he finally finishes, he says he should give Enzo (Tom Wlaschiha) a quick phone call just to make sure Hopper is still alive because he’d hate to waste a trip.

Back at the prison camp, Enzo takes the call. Yuri informs him there has been a “slight change of plans.” (Come on, Yuri. Don’t do us like this.) Yuri has decided that he will not only hold on to that 40K, but he will also capitalize on the great opportunity that has fallen into his lap: it turns out that escaped convicts, especially an American, along with a corrupt Russian guard, and two Americans wanted by the KGB, are worth quite a bit of money. He is going to make out like a bandit! Enzo is seized just as Joyce and Murray pass out, as it turns out that Yuri had drugged their coffee. And then, the last few crumbs of our hopes and dreams are dashed: the Russians break into the church, and Hop is captured – again.

Back in Hawkins, Max has about 24 hours give or take before Vecna pays her his next – and last – visit. Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Steve (Joe Keery), Robin (Maya Hawke), and Nancy (Natalia Dyer), catch Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) up as they all try to wrap their heads around how Victor Creel, the only known survivor of Vecna’s victims, managed to survive his attack 50 years ago. And why has Vecna just come back now? Nancy and Robin come up with a plan to pose as “Ruth” and “Rose,” two rock star psychology students with 3.9 GPAs, who are hoping to convince Dr. Hatch (Ed Amatrudo) at Pennhurst Asylum to let them talk to Victor Creel for “research purposes.” Steve, of course, much to his dismay, is left behind to “babysit” Max, Dustin, and Lucas.

Nancy and Robin arrive at Pennhurst and attempt to convince Dr. Hatch, an academic scholar at the top of his field, to let them have an audience with Victor Creel. Dr. Hatch, of course, a man in academia, brushes aside their request without even so much as a consideration. Much to Nancy’s surprise, it’s Robin – who hasn’t stopped complaining for even a moment about how the horrible ruffly clothes Nancy made her wear are suffocating her and giving her a rash – who convinces him. He gives them a brief tour where he stops first in a popular area known as “the listening room,” citing that research has found that music has a particularly calming effect on the broken mind. Afterward, Nancy and Robin finally find themselves in front of Victor Creel’s cell.

Victor’s back is turned to them as he scrapes his nails against the same spot in the solitary table in his cell. Nancy assures him that they aren’t reporters. They are there because they believe his side of the story, and most importantly, they need his help. Whatever killed his family, they think it’s back. Victor (played by Freddy Krueger himself, Robert Englund), turns around, and we get our first good look at Hawkins’ “bogeyman.” Like all of Vecna’s victims, Victor doesn’t have any eyes — but this time, it wasn’t Vecna who took them. It was Victor himself.

Victor recounts what happened the night of his family’s murder. He says that his wife’s uncle died and left them a small fortune, which allowed them to buy a new home. His daughter Alice (Livi Burch) described the house as something out of a “fairy tale.” His son Henry (Raphael Luce), was a very sensitive child and seemed to sense before the others that something was very wrong. Dead animals, mutilated and tortured, started to appear near their home. Victor says that he knew that whoever had killed those animals was not human nor animal: it was the spawn of Satan, and it had cursed their house. Soon, his family started having “encounters” conjured by the demon (just like Chrissy, Fred, and Max), as if they were in “waking living nightmares.” Victor could always sense that the demon was close, though he couldn’t explain it rationally.

On the night of the murders, the Creel family was sitting down for dinner when Ella Fitzgerald‘s “Dream a Little Dream of Me” started crooning over the radio. The lights started to flicker as Victor’s wife Virginia (Tyner Rushing) flew up to the ceiling and her limbs started to snap. Victor says that he tried desperately to get his children out but as soon as he got the front door open, he found he was no longer in his home. He was back in France during the war – a traumatic memory in which he thought German soldiers were inside a house, so he ordered its shelling. It turns out, he was wrong. Not only were there no soldiers, but there was also a baby screaming in a cradle, burnt alive.

Victor says he heard a voice, the “voice of an angel,” that pulled him back to reality. But by that time, it was too late. The demon had already gotten his children. His son Henry slipped into a coma shortly after Vecna’s attack but died a week later. Victor was then locked in the asylum, where he cut out his eyeballs and tried to join them in death, but Dr. Hatch stopped the bleeding. Nancy asks Victor who the “angel” was that he heard, but Victor doesn’t answer – he simply hums the song that was playing in their dining room: “Dream a Little Dream of Me.”

Before they can ask him anything else, Dr. Hatch enters the wing and tells Nancy and Robin they are going to have a little chat with the police. While he was gone, he discovered in an enlightening phone call that Nancy and Robin, or “Rose” and “Ruth,” are not in fact academic scholars (Yikes!). As they are being ushered out, Robin realizes something: Dr. Hatch said that music can reach parts of the brain that simple words cannot. What if Victor Creel’s “angel” was Ella Fitzgerald? What if music was his lifeline back to reality?

Max, meanwhile, is dealing with her impending demise with an extreme amount of maturity and grace for someone whose eyeballs are about to be sucked out of their skull. She writes her friends letters – “fail-safes,” she says, in case she doesn’t make it. She convinces Steve to drive her to the trailer park, so she can drop off goodbye letters to her family. She is surprised to see her mom outside, hanging laundry on the clothesline. She explains that she left letters for them, and her mom hugs her tightly and assures her that nothing is going to happen to her. Suddenly, the sky darkens as the arms around Max begin to tighten. Max slowly looks up and into the eyes of Vecna, who tells her that her time is almost at an end. Max bursts free and books it back to the car, where she tells Steve to take her to the cemetery where Billy was buried.

They arrive at the cemetery, and Lucas attempts one more time to get Max to talk to him. He begs her to stop pushing them away, to stop pushing him away. She brushes him off and tells him to wait in the car. She sits down at Billy’s grave and reads him her letter. In the letter, she admits that she plays back the moment he died over and over again in her head and imagines that instead of just watching, she pulled him away. Then maybe he would still be there with her, and they could start all over again, but this time, like a “real brother and sister.” She tells him the one thing she has to say before it’s too late: “I’m so, so sorry, Billy.”

Max folds the letter back up as the sky suddenly starts to blacken. “Billy” appears, dressed in his blood-soaked clothes he was wearing in his final moments. He slowly approaches her and tells her menacingly that he’s “been waiting to hear those words,” but it wasn’t the full truth. Part of her, he says, was relieved – happy even – when he died. That’s why she stood there that day instead of pulling him away. That’s why she hides from her friends, from the world, and why late at night, she wishes she could join him in death.

Max takes off running through the graveyard while “Billy,” now Vecna, follows her. Screaming for Lucas and Dustin, she wanders through an ominous crimson fog wherein the distance, she sees a strange, deconstructed house. Chrissy (Grace Van Dien) and Fred’s (Logan Riley Bruner) mangled corpses are tangled up in vines, hanging on pillars. Vecna, surprised that she is there, sends a slithering vine after Max that wraps around her ankle and yanks her backward. Max is thrown onto another pillar as vines wrap around her arms and legs and throat.

Back at the cemetery, Steve, Dustin, and Lucas are frantically trying to shake Max out of her trance. Dustin repeatedly tries to walkie Nancy and Robin, praying they found something that could help them. Robin and Nancy, meanwhile, are hightailing it to their car trying to outrun the Pennhurst guards. Thank god they do, because they hear the walkie just in time.

Dustin races back to Max and the others holding Max’s cassette player and tapes. He throws them down and frantically asks what Max’s favorite song is. Just as Vecna holds out his hand above Max’s head, Max suddenly hears the faint sound of Kate Bush‘s “Running Up That Hill” and sees a pocket of reality open up. She sees her real body hovering in the air in the cemetery, and flashes of memories of Lucas, El, and her friends race through her mind. She rips one of Vecna’s vine-like tentacles off and starts hurtling toward the pocket while “Running Up That Hill” grows louder and Vecna looks on, shocked and angry, hurling debris in her pathway. Finally, Max’s eyes fly open in the cemetery and her body comes crashing to the ground as she falls out of her trance. Lucas holds her as she cries, “I’m still here.” The episode ends, and finally, we can release the breath we’ve been holding. Thanks to the powers of Kate Bush, Max Mayfield is still here.

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