5 Glaring Plot Holes in Stranger Things Season 4 Nobody Talks About
Season 4 sees Eleven return to the secret lab while the people of Hawkins are once again threatened by the Upside Down. All she needs to defeat the new monster is to reawaken her dormant powers, but she has no idea how to do it. Fortunately, fate gives her a second chance.
Despite some really good decisions and awesome plot twists, the fourth season of Stranger Things, unfortunately, has a number of inconsistencies and mistakes that went unnoticed by the Duffer brothers.
Here are the five most glaring ones.
1. Eleven speaks too well
When Eleven makes her first appearance on the show, her language skills are rudimentary at best. She can barely speak in full sentences and knows next to nothing about communication etiquette. In the opening scene of season four, she gives a talk about her father, showing off how much her language has improved in recent years: apparently she has learned a thing or two in school. We also get to see some flashbacks to Eleven's childhood.
And this is where consistency goes out the window: in her recollections, the nine-year-old Eleven speaks perfectly good English both when communicating with the orderlies and when talking to One, but as per season 1, at that time she should not have been able to speak at all.
2. The Demogorgon in Kamchatka
The Mothergate, also known as the Rift, is located in Hawkins National Laboratory. In season three, a Russian team travels halfway around the world to the local mall in Hawkins when they want to access the Upside Down because Hawkins is the only place where you can access it. In this context, the existence of another portal in Kamchatka makes very little sense. Hopper's entire trip there makes no sense. However, perhaps, the dumbest plot twist of the entire season is the Demogorgon in a Soviet prison.
In light of all that has happened in the series up to that point, it makes no sense at all that the Soviets would have been able to capture the monster and keep it locked up for so long.
3. Killing Patrick
In the new season, Lucas tries to enjoy his newly acquired popularity as a jock while also hanging out with his old friends, who remain the school geeks. When his basketball team starts hunting Eddie, it is an interesting plot twist but it has some flaws. Thus, Vecna attacking Patrick is a fairly contrived move seeing how, unlike Wormsman's other victims, Patric never had insomnia or headaches. He has never gone to see the guidance counselor Ms. Kelly and in general he doesn't seem to be suffering from any mental trauma. All we're given is a couple of flashbacks in which Patrick gets abused by his father, but that hardly seems enough to justify him being killed the way he is in the series.
4. Joyce's unexpected superpowers
They say that characters that authors need real bad to move the story forward get to have special treatment. A perfect example of that is when the plane with Joyce onboard crashes. Joyce and Murray are taken to Alaska on a private jet against their will. On their way there they attack their captors and take control of the cockpit.
Nothing good comes of that, naturally. The plane crashes but the passengers escape unscathed. The fact they have no injuries whatsoever raises eyebrows as it comes across as completely unreal.
5. Eleven's Timeline
One of the biggest inconsistencies in the new season is Eleven's timeline. It looks like in the past six years, the Duffer brothers have forgotten a great deal about what transpired in the first several episodes of the first season. In the first season, Eleven opens the gate to the Upside Down on November 6, 1983. However, in the new season, we learn that she also did that much earlier, during the attack on One, who got sucked into the parallel universe. It is our earnest hope that in the remaining two episodes the authors offer some explanation for this.