Stranger Things season 4 episode 9: "The Piggyback," the end of season 4

Stranger Things season 4 episode 9: the file on "The Piggyback"

The ninth chapter carries the French title « L'Infiltration » and the original title "Chapter Nine: The Piggyback." Matt and Ross Duffer wrote and directed it themselves, as they do for the opening and closing chapters of each season: for season 4, chapters 1, 2, 7, 8, and 9. It runs 139 minutes, that is 2 h 19.

It is the longest episode of the story, and by far: the final season's finale, second in that ranking, stops at 128 minutes. Its release took place on July 1, 2022, five weeks after the first seven chapters. Volume 2 held only two episodes, the eighth and this one.

This ninth chapter was not planned at the start. Halfway through the writing, the two creators understood they would need one more episode to tell everything, and the platform approved it quickly. The season's nine scripts total more than 800 pages, nearly double any previous season: that is what forced the release in two volumes.

The original title names the finale's plan. Piggyback means "carried on someone's back": Eleven climbs into Max's mind to reach Vecna from the inside. The French title keeps the other side of the same idea, breaking into the enemy's house.

The recap of "The Piggyback," in order

The heart of the episode sits on a single night, in four places in the world, before an epilogue set two days later, and it never drops a thread without coming back to it. The plan was decided in the previous chapter, from a rule learned the hard way: the monster is almost untouchable, except while he is hunting, when his body stays still in the Creel house of the Upside Down.

Three teams therefore leave at the same time, and a fourth acts thousands of miles away without knowing it weighs on the same battle. Here is the progression, step by step.

1. Nevada Eleven goes down into the sensory bath

   In an isolated pizzeria, Eleven, Mike, Will, Jonathan, and Argyle turn a cold room into a sensory bath. It is from there that she will reach Max's mind.

2. Hawkins Max, Lucas, and Erica at the Creel house

   Max agrees to serve as bait. She settles upstairs, Walkman ready, while Lucas and Erica watch over her.

3. The Upside Down Nancy, Steve, and Robin on the other side

   The three go up into the overturned version of the same house, Molotov cocktails and rifle in hand. They wait for the trance to start before striking the monster's body.

4. The trailer Eddie and Dustin draw the Demobats

   On the roof of his trailer, on the Upside Down side, Eddie plugs in his guitar and plays "Master of Puppets" at full volume. The swarm leaves the Creel house.

5. Kamchatka The Russian prison cleared

   Hopper, Joyce, and Murray go back down to finish the creatures kept in the basement. These Demogorgons are not Vecna, but destroying them weakens him at the worst moment for him.

6. The trance Eleven trapped in Max's memories

   The monster was waiting for her. He holds her still, shows her what he has built since his exile, and tightens his hold on Max.

7. The reversal Mike speaks, Nancy strikes

   Mike's words give Eleven back the strength to break the hold. At the same instant, in the Upside Down, the monster's body burns and then goes through the window.

8. The rift Jason comes in, Max dies, the ground opens

   Jason catches Lucas and pulls Max's headphones off. In the time of the fight, the curse goes all the way: Max dies, the fourth gate opens, and the ground splits.

9. Two days later Ashes on the town

   The group finds itself again, Max does not wake up, and Will senses that the monster survived. Ashes start to fall from the sky.

Each story thread, taken separately

In Hawkins, everything is played in a single house. Max and Lucas settle upstairs in the Creel house, where the 1959 murders took place, while Erica keeps watch and serves as a runner. Max lets herself be taken on purpose, to occupy the monster while the others attack him elsewhere. Jason Carver comes in at the worst moment: the basketball team captain still believes Eddie Munson killed Chrissy Cunningham, and he demands that Lucas cut the music. The fight that follows costs Max the seconds she had left.

The Upside Down forms the second ground, a few meters away and in another world. Nancy, Steve, and Robin go up into the overturned house, where the wizard's body stays still for as long as the trance lasts. Eddie and Dustin hold the diversion from the trailer, and the plan works: the Demobats move off. But Eddie refuses to run a second time, goes back out alone to hold them, and dies under the bites in Dustin's arms.

The third thread starts from Lenora Hills, in California, where Eleven and the Byers had moved, and stops in a Nevada pizzeria. Immersed in a cold room turned into a sensory bath, Eleven enters Max's mind; Mike, Will, Jonathan, and Argyle stand guard around the tank. It is Mike who, by finally saying what he could not say, gives her back the strength to push the monster away.

The fourth thread takes place in Kamchatka, and nobody in Hawkins knows it exists. Hopper, Joyce, and Murray go back down into the prison to burn the creatures locked in the basement. These Demogorgons are not Vecna: they are beasts of the Upside Down, fed at the bottom of a jail. Bringing them down still weakens the wizard, at the precise instant when he needs all his strength.

The key moment, and what it changes

The turn holds in one minute. Max dies, limbs broken and eyes pushed in, against Lucas who has not let go of her hand. Eleven, still in her mind, refuses to let her go and brings her back: the heart starts again. But the death took place, and that is all the monster was asking for.

The mechanism had been set in the previous chapter, after a vision imposed on Nancy. Each victim of the curse opens a gate at the exact place where she falls: the trailer for Chrissy Cunningham, the road for Fred Benson, Lovers' Lake for Patrick McKinney. It took four for the cracks to meet.

The fourth opens under the Creel house. The four gates meet and the ground splits in a cross in the middle of the town. The crack crosses the room where Jason Carver is fighting Lucas: it cuts him in two. Outside, people will talk about an earthquake.

That is what makes this finale unique in the story: the group wins each of its fights and loses the battle. The wizard is burned with a Molotov cocktail, riddled with bullets, pushed through a window by Nancy, and he still gets his door. When the three go back down to look for him, the floor is empty.

What chapter nine sets up for what follows

The epilogue takes place two days later. Part of the town evacuates; the others set up an aid camp at the high school, where Nancy, Robin, Steve, and Dustin hand out blankets. Dustin finds Wayne Munson there, Eddie's uncle, and gives him his nephew's guitar pick. For the town, Eddie will remain a murderer on the run.

Eleven, Mike, Will, Jonathan, and Argyle finally arrive, after three days on the road. Hopper, Joyce, and Murray come back from Russia, and Eleven finds a man she thought dead since the summer of 1985. Then the group goes up a hill: ashes fall, the flowers die, the Upside Down's clouds move forward. Will senses the monster on the back of his neck, wounded and alive.

Everything the final season tells comes out of this scene. A year and a half later, in the fall of 1987, the town lives under military quarantine. Max has not come out of the coma, and it will be learned that her mind was not in her body: it was wandering in Henry Creel's memories, looking for a way out.

Two elements of this ninth chapter then take on their full meaning. The link between Will and the monster becomes the compass of the final season. And Max's song, which had already pulled her out of the trance at the cemetery, will serve a second time: it is Lucas who will put it back on her ears, at the hospital.

The details and references to notice

The music does a large part of the work. "Master of Puppets" by Metallica, released on March 3, 1986, is the most recent track used in the season's action: by a few weeks, Eddie is playing a new release. Joseph Quinn performs a good part of it on screen, and a special mix was made for the scene, with parts recorded by Tye Trujillo.

"Running Up That Hill" comes back in an orchestral version at the moment of the mental confrontation. The end credits, for their part, turn on "When It's Cold I'd Like to Die" by Moby, the only title later than March 1986 in the whole season, and therefore placed outside the fiction.

The monster explains to Eleven that he has commanded the Upside Down since she threw him there, when she was a child, and that the Mind Flayer is not a rival but a shadow he shaped himself. The Demogorgon, for its part, is neither one nor the other: a beast, not a mind.

Two nods are worth noting. Vecna's name comes from a wizard in Dungeons and Dragons, and it is the high school club that named him that way; he himself takes no name. And the Creel house, filmed outdoors, is an 1882 house located in Rome, in Georgia.

Finally, the wizard's actor had been announced in the cast under a false character name, Peter Ballard, and credited "Friendly Orderly" at his first appearance, until the revelation of the seventh chapter. Here, Jamie Campbell Bower plays with his face uncovered, under a full prosthetic costume: only the vines and a few touch-ups were added after the shoot.

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