Stranger Things 4 Took on Depression With Decidedly Mixed Results

These are tell-tale signs of someone readying to die by suicide: Max has a plan, she’s disconnecting from her social circles, and she feels an eerie sense of calm while accepting that death is the only solution to her current predicament. But when faced with certain demise, Max instead escapes Vecna’s noose-shaped tentacles in a cathartic sequence set to a symphonic rendition of “Running Up That Hill”—her favorite song. She’s not ready to die, and she chooses to save herself when faced with a life-threatening situation after remembering her reasons to live are her friends, the people that truly love her. She runs through the storm clouds and falling wreckage of Vecna’s lair toward their light, having overcome her darkest turmoil. She won.

Except she didn’t, because the storyline of Stranger Things is determined to make Max suffer. In the season finale, titled “The Piggyback,” Vecna’s plan to unleash hell on the rest of the world is revealed. He needs four sacrifices to open a permanent gate from Hawkins to the Upside Down, and since Max is still “marked” from her previous run in with Vecna, she nominates herself as the bait and potentially fourth and final kill. This initially reads like a powerful and heroic move, an attempt to save her friends (and the world) from a fiery doom riddled with monsters from another dimension. But this is where things go very wrong.

While trying to lure Vecna out of hiding, Max reveals that she actually did want Billy to die because she wasn’t sure he was a good enough person to be saved, and that she wants “something terrible” to happen to her when she lies in bed at night. “I just want you to take me away, and I want you to make me disappear,” she pleads to Vecna. It’s not completely clear if this is simply Max revisiting her painful feelings toward her brother and herself as a ploy to tantalize Vecna into entering his mind-traveling trance-like state, allowing Nancy (Natalia Dyer), Steve (Joe Keery), and Robin (Maya Hawke) to kill him, or if she is truly being honest about her feelings in this moment; notably, Max doesn’t deny that these could be her true feelings when Lucas (who is appearing to her as a Vecna-induced hallucination) asks if she’s telling the truth. People are allowed to have complicated emotions about complicated relationships, but Stranger Things convinced us in “Dear Billy” that Max never wanted her brother dead while showing us that she had developed a will to live so strong, that she would risk her life to save her friends. This short monologue has put Max right back where she was at the beginning of the season.

To argue that grief and depression aren’t cyclical would be irresponsible, but people that struggle with mental illness already know this fact. Regressing Max’s story, the climax of which is hopeful and optimistic, into misery porn is a disservice. “Lucas, I can’t feel or see anything,” Max chokes while sobbing, having her arms and legs broken by Vecna’s powers after he very nearly succeeded in killing her a second time. “Lucas, I’m scared, I’m so scared. I don’t want to die. I’m not ready. I don’t want to go. I’m not ready.” She does, in fact, die—writhing in pain and blind. Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) makes a feverish attempt to revive her telekinetically, but is only partially successful, and Max is sent into a coma, doomed to a hospital bed indefinitely. “They say she might not [wake up],” Lucas explains to the group.

Suicide is a tragedy, and conquering trauma and depression is not linear. Max’s story resonated with me so deeply because the triumph of parting the clouds and walking into the sunlight is one of the bravest battles anyone can fight since the enemy is themselves. But the moral of Max’s journey at the end of Stranger Things 4 is simple: no matter how hard you fight, you are bound to suffer more and more. This is a dangerous precedent not only to those who struggle with mental illness, but to anyone that has experienced a life-changing cataclysm. While hope is not a magic bullet, it’s role in overcoming depression cannot be ignored, and hope is a thing that Max Mayfield has been robbed of.

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