Stranger Things: Show Guide and Every Season Covered

Stranger Things follows a group of kids, teenagers, and parents in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana, after Will Byers disappears one night in 1983 and a strange, nearly silent girl the group calls Eleven turns up nearby with powers she barely understands. Created by the Duffer Brothers for Netflix, the show mixes small-town 1980s life with a creeping government-lab conspiracy and a parallel, decaying dimension the characters come to call the Upside Down.

Season 1 centers on finding Will and uncovering how Hawkins National Laboratory's experiments on Eleven tore the first hole into the Upside Down. Season 2 widens the mythology considerably, introducing the Mind Flayer as a hive-mind threat working through the Upside Down and bringing in Max and her stepbrother Billy as new arrivals in town. Season 3 moves the action to the summer of 1985 around the new Starcourt Mall, layers in a Soviet subplot beneath it, and ends with Hopper seemingly killed and the Byers family, along with Eleven, leaving Hawkins for good.

Season 4, which this archive currently covers, picks the story up about a year after Starcourt with the core group split apart: some still in Hawkins, others adjusting to a new life in California, and Hopper revealed to be alive but imprisoned in the Soviet Union. The season introduces Vecna as its central threat and finally explains where the Upside Down's monsters actually came from, tying the show's earlier seasons together into one origin story.

Season 4 also became one of the show's biggest cultural moments outside the story itself: its use of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" drove the decades-old song back onto global charts, and Eddie Munson, introduced this season, became one of the show's most talked-about characters almost immediately.

The archive here currently covers season 4's finale in full. Earlier seasons may be added later, following the same rule as the rest of Spoil Me: coverage is built out as readers ask about specific seasons rather than worked through top to bottom in one pass.

Season 4 was also released as two volumes rather than all at once, split across several weeks, and its finale ran well over two hours, longer than any other episode the show had produced up to that point.