The fourth season of "Stranger Things" is here, and it's the most ambitious yet. The creators have called it their "'Game of Thrones' season" on account of how much it sprawls. We've got one group of characters in Hawkins, we're got Eleven diving into her past, we've got the Byers family adjusting to life in California and we've got Sheriff Hopper trying to escape a Soviet prison. Most of the time "Stranger Things" keeps itself confined to the sleepy, extremely haunted small town of Hawkins, Indiana, but now it's a proper globe-trotting adventure!
And that . . . mostly works out? The season feels slower than it has before, in part because there can be so many stories to juggle that none of them can progress much over the course of one episode. And the stories can vary so wildly in tone — from standard mystery-horror to light comedy to gritty action — that they can feel in conflict with each other.
