This crazily luxurious, firework-packed double-bill makes so many impeccable choices that it would be the ideal way to end the franchise. How will it follow it for season five?

Confronting her demons … Millie Bobby Brown as Eleven. Confronting her demons … Millie Bobby Brown as Eleven. Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix Jack Seale Fri 1 Jul 2022 11.03 BST 241 Stranger Things season four was already bigger and better than anything the show had done before. It was clearly more expensively produced, with a larger cast and a surer sense of why all the monsters, heroes and hangers-on were there. The double-bill denouement – held back for a month by Netflix to allow hype to build – is more expansive still. It’s crazily, luxuriously sprawling, running to nearly four hours, and does everything fans could have expected plus several dollops more. But if it hasn’t quite overstretched itself yet, you do wonder where Stranger Things can possibly go from here.

Where were we? In Hawkins, Indiana, in 1986, waiting for a gang of plucky teens to mount a final assault on Vecna, the demon who roams a dank dimension beneath the town. Psychic superheroine Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) has unlocked memories from a childhood spent in a secure facility for kids with strange powers, revealing that she opened up the interdimensional portal while confronting One, a murderous fellow inmate, thus turning him into the vengeful Vecna. A group of sympathetic adults, meanwhile, are stuck in a grimy Soviet Union prison, battling a creature left over from a previous season. พนันบอลฟรีเครดิต