‘Stranger Things 4’ continues to break records on Netflix as it puts its second half, or rather its final act, in the fridge to finish in early July, and the conversation continues to rotate around its villain Vecna or its satanic panic theme in the 80s. However, there is an element of the season that stands out and has not been discussed too much until now, and is the similarity that the story begins to take with respect to the original trilogy of ‘Star Wars’.
Considering that this batch of films was released between 1977 and 1983, the children of ‘Stranger Things’ would have been at the perfect age to follow the creation of George Lucas, so it is normal that, Like the rest of the 80s references in the series, it has been incorporated as one more piece of the reflection of pop culture that it proposes.. Without going any further, ‘Return of the Jedi’ would have been released only a few months before November 1983, the moment in which season 1 begins.
The integration of ‘Star Wars’ in the cultural map of the 80s
The fantasy franchise was already a cultural phenomenon by then, so the Duffer brothers incorporated many movie references into the dialogue, often having the characters compare their circumstances to situations well known to the public, a bit in the manner of Kevin Smith. In this season 4, for example, when they role play Dustin quotes the “Never tell me the odds!” from ‘The Empire Strikes Back’, when Han Solo tells C3PO, Leia and the team on the run as he is about to lead them into an asteroid field.
Will and Mike are also seen watching the Ewoks animated series on television and Dustin has a remote-controlled R2-D2 doll in his room, but beyond these details, in the new season Many circumstances of structure, characters and themes are reinforced that recover traditional pulses of the sagataking them to a darker and more horror terrain, even from the superhero movies to the ‘X-Men’, but rescuing key elements that show that the Duffers are following the path of breadcrumbs of George Lucas.
In this season, for example, there are many Hooper parallels to Han Solo, with his fake death being the carbonite equivalent, as Joyce and Murray go to rescue him from the Soviets. In this case it could be like Leia and Lando rescuing Solo in Jabba the Hut’s empire, they also disguise themselves to infiltrate by posing as prisoner smugglers and even there is also a survival scene in an entertainment pit with a demogorgon instead of Rancor.
Beyond alliteration
But the idea of using ‘Star Wars’ as a model is not new to the series. In ‘Stranger Things 2’, to motivate the team, the Duffers looked to the success of ‘The Empire Strikes Back’, believing that its sequel could do just as well. The idea for the controversial episode ‘The Lost Sister’ stems from this idea, but now being seen as a very minor season, perhaps having assumed that the series will last longer than expected, the Duffers have rewound to recycle some elements of that one and turn season 4 into ‘Episode V’ of their story.
Thus, they not only reuse the idea of music to rescue the lost within the upside down world, as they did with Will and ‘Should i Stay or Should I Go’, but they have tried again separate Eleven from the group to give her the nuance of Luke Skywalker’s arc. After all, the gang compared Eleven to Yoda for her telekinetic abilities, so the idea of Eleven’s power as “the force” of this universe was already planted somehow, and her return to Doctor Brenner (Papa) it is its own journey to Dagobah, in many ways.
In one of the critical moments of ‘The Empire Strikes Back’, Yoda warns Luke to complete his training, even though his friends are in danger. This option is the same one presented to him by Doctor Sam Owens in the restaurant, where he comes to tell him that you can go save your friends in Hawkins now or finish the process not only to recover his powers, but to amplify them in an uncertain way.
The dark side of the force
Eleven’s training is basically to remember her training in the Hawkins laboratory, for which she must also face her greatest fear, that evil is within her, because until that moment she fears that the massacre in the laboratory was her doing. Her procedure is to dream, just like Luke must go into the nightmare of the swamp that shows him his greatest fearthat Darth Vader is his father, a bit also the same process that Rey follows in the grotto of ‘Episode VIII’.
All three characters are orphaned and adopted, Not by chance. But the most obvious idea in ‘Stranger Things 4’ is that we learn that Eleven’s powers have positive and negative poles, just as the ‘Star Wars’ mythology describes, the force has a very powerful dark side, and in the case of Jane believes that he is the only one that exists, however, in the end discovers that there is a good side to his power that does not come from anger and rage, but from pure love and good memoriesin this case, the heartbreaking moment in which he relives his mother’s first hug.
And if the light side of the force has its hero, the dark side has its villain, and in this case the assistant played by Jamie Campbell Bower is revealed not as Eleven’s father, in the manner of Darth Vader’s big twist, but Yes, almost like one of his “brothers”, just as children with special abilities with the same “Dad” are considered. Creel masks his intentions and cruelty to recruit Eleven as the Emperor does not only with Luke Skywalker in ‘Return of the Jedi’, but with his father in ‘Revenge of the Sith’, of course, when he transforms he is warped and corrupted by the world upside down, like Ian McDiarmid’s Palpatine.
A new hope
In addition, there are moments in his conversation that take us to key scenes of ‘Star Wars’, for example, “Number One” speaks in the third person of himself, as Obi Wan of Darth Vader as if he were someone other than Anakin, who for him has disappeared. He also tells the story as if he seems to want to forget, but in this case it’s because he doesn’t want to uncover his master card to fool Eleven. Also there are parallels in the slaughter of the laboratory by Henry Creel with that of the students of the Jedi academy by Anakin in ‘Episode III’.
‘Stranger Things’ was born as a puzzle of cultural references to the 80s, but after seeing volume 1 of season 4, staying in that starting point image is insist on ignoring how the series has known how to use nostalgia in a metatextual waymaking his colorful and idealized universe of the decade strong in its characters and enemies, and now he has taken it a step further by building an epic and ambitious story that stands on its own.
But no one says the Duffers haven’t learned from the best, and mimic the creation of George Lucas, looking at its entropic skeleton and its emotional pulses, instead of limiting itself to reproduction or the wink is the definitive tribute that they could do, from which the dire new creations for television under the official brand ‘Star Wars’ could really learn, which continue to play everything to the family casting, the recurring cameos and the cuqui versions of beloved characters ago 40 years.