Who dies in Stranger Things season 4? Every death, episode by episode

Who dies in Stranger Things season 4: six deaths and a coma

Six named characters die between March 21, 1986 and the night of the last chapter: Chrissy Cunningham, Fred Benson, Patrick McKinney, Eddie Munson, Jason Carver and Dr. Martin Brenner. Add Max Mayfield, who dies for a minute in Lucas's arms before Eleven brings her back, and who will not come out of her coma for a year and a half. No other season kills so many.

The tally of the other seasons gives the measure of the gap. The first buries Benny Hammond and then Barbara Holland, the second Bob Newby, the third Billy Hargrove and Alexei; the last has only one long-standing ally to lose. Here, six names fall in eight days, not counting the unnamed: the Nina project staff, a helicopter crew, the prisoners of a Russian arena and the children of the lab, whose massacre is finally shown in the seventh chapter.

This slaughter has a cause inside the story itself: the monster needs deaths. Its curse does not kill for the sake of killing, it opens gates, and it needs four of them to split the town. Added to that arithmetic are a manhunt led by high-school students and an army that decides to shoot a child. Nine chapters, close to thirteen hours, released in two volumes on May 27 and July 1, 2022: the longest season is also the deadliest.

Every death, in chapter order

The season kills in waves. One death in each of the first two chapters, one in the fifth, one in the eighth, then a last chapter that lines up three in a single night. Between Fred and Patrick, two chapters pass without a character falling: that is the time the party needs to understand what it is facing.

Here is the full timeline, chapter by chapter. The deaths in the Creel house, long before the story, are not on it: they are told by an old man at the asylum, not committed in March 1986.

1. Episode 1 Chrissy Cunningham in the trailer

   On March 21, 1986, the cheer captain comes to Eddie Munson's for something to help her sleep. She goes into a trance, rises to the ceiling, limbs broken and eyes sunken. Eddie runs, and the town believes he is guilty.

2. Episode 2 Fred Benson at the side of the road

   Nancy's classmate on the school paper goes with her to investigate at the trailer park. A police officer reminds him of the car accident he fled, and the clock starts striking in his head. He dies alone, on the road, near the trailer park.

3. Episode 5 Patrick McKinney above the lake

   The basketball player follows Jason on his hunt. On Lover's Lake he freezes, rises above the water in front of Jason and in front of Eddie, then falls back. His death opens a rift under the surface.

4. Episode 7 The lab massacre, finally shown

   The second-longest chapter of the season, 98 minutes, reveals what happened years earlier in the white corridors: the numbered children and the orderlies massacred by subject One. In Russia, the creature in the arena takes several victims among the prisoners before Hopper finishes it with a flaming spear.

5. Episode 8 Brenner dies in the desert

   Lieutenant Colonel Sullivan's army attacks the Nina project and shoots the site's staff. Brenner gets Eleven out of the building, takes the shots from a helicopter and dies outside; she destroys the aircraft and leaves without giving him what he asks.

6. Episode 9 Eddie Munson under the demobats

   After playing Metallica on the roof of his trailer to draw the swarm away from his friends, Eddie refuses to run a second time and climbs back down to fight. The bites get the better of him; he dies in Dustin's arms.

7. Episode 9 Jason Carver, cut in two

   He catches Lucas at the bedside of Max, who is in a trance, and demands that he stop the music. The two boys fight, and the rift that splits the town crosses the room at the moment it opens.

8. Episode 9 Max Mayfield, one minute

   Limbs broken and eyes sunken, Max dies against Lucas. Eleven brings her back from inside her mind: the heart starts again, and the fourth rift opens anyway.

The three victims of the curse, one by one

Chrissy Cunningham is the first, and the whole season comes out of her death. Cheer captain, girlfriend of the basketball captain, she hides an eating disorder and a mother who watches every bite. The migraines, the nosebleeds, a grandfather clock no one else hears: she thinks she is going mad, and she goes to the school outcast so she can sleep. She dies in Eddie's trailer, at the Forest Hills park, a few minutes after the only kind conversation of her day.

Fred Benson dies in the next chapter. He writes with Nancy on the school paper, goes with her to investigate Chrissy's death, and carries a guilt no one knows: a fatal car accident the year before, which he fled. His visions start in front of a police officer, the word “murderer” writes itself all around him, and he follows a voice to the road, where Nancy finds him too late.

Patrick McKinney is the third, in the fifth chapter. Teammate of Jason and of Lucas, he is also the one who doubts the hunt for Eddie the most. His headaches start during the chase; on Lover's Lake he rises above the water under Jason's eyes, then falls back. What was eating at him is only half said: bruises, a violent father, nothing spoken out loud.

The three deaths follow the same mechanics, and none is free. Each one opens a rift at the exact place the body fell: the trailer, the road, the bottom of the lake. Nancy understands the plan in the eighth chapter, after a vision forced on her: four deaths, four gates, a town opened in two. The fourth designated target is Max, chosen for the guilt she has carried since the death of Billy, her stepbrother by marriage.

The deaths that do not come from the curse

Eddie Munson is the most mourned death of the season, and he does not die of the curse. Accused of Chrissy's murder, hunted by his own town, he agrees to serve as bait: on the roof of his trailer, on the Upside Down side, he plays Master of Puppets to draw the demobats away from his friends. Then he refuses to run a second time, climbs down to fight, and dies under the bites, in Dustin's arms. His town will never know that he saved it.

Jason Carver dies the same night, having understood nothing. The basketball captain, Chrissy's boyfriend, has spent the season raising a militia against the Hellfire Club and turning the town against its outcasts. He catches Max in a trance in the Creel house, fights Lucas, and the rift cuts him in two at the second it opens. It is the most brutal death of the season, and the least mourned.

Martin Brenner dies in the previous chapter, thousands of miles away. The man his subjects called “Papa” had taken Eleven back in hand in the Nevada desert, on the pretext of giving her powers back. When the army attacks the site, he takes her outside, covers her with his body, and takes the shots from a helicopter. He asks her to say she understands; she leaves without saying it, and he dies on the sand.

What remains are the unnamed deaths, which weigh heavily in the tally: the Nina project staff, shot by Sullivan's men, the helicopter crew, destroyed by Eleven at the moment her powers come back, the numbered children and the lab orderlies, massacred by subject One in a memory shown in the seventh chapter, and the prisoners of the Russian arena, killed by the beast they are thrown in front of. That Demogorgon is not Vecna: it is a creature of the Upside Down, fed at the bottom of a prison, which Hopper finishes with a flaming spear.

Max's case: neither a death, nor a survival

Max Mayfield belongs neither to the list of the dead nor to that of the survivors. She agrees to serve as bait to keep the monster busy while its body is attacked elsewhere, and the trap closes on her: in the Creel house, the limbs break, the eyes sink in, the heart stops. She dies against Lucas, who has not let go of her hand.

Eleven, having entered her mind from a pizzeria freezer in Nevada, refuses to let her go and brings her back. The heart starts again, the rest does not: Max leaves the last chapter in a coma, blind, limbs broken. And the fourth rift has opened anyway. A few seconds were enough: the monster did not need a corpse, it needed a death.

The last season, a year and a half later, explains this half-return. Max's mind was not in her body all that time: it was wandering Henry Creel's memories, looking for a way out. She finally wakes up in the hospital, when Lucas puts her song back on her ears. “Running Up That Hill” had already saved her once, at the cemetery, in the fourth chapter of this season 4.

That is why no honest tally can put her on one side or the other. Technically, Max dies: the story counts her death, because the rift opens. Humanly, she survives. Both are true at once, and the season stops exactly there.

Who makes it through, and the monster that does not die of it

The party of 1983 makes it through whole: Mike, Will, Dustin, Lucas and Eleven, with Nancy, Jonathan, Robin, Erica and Argyle. Steve barely makes it, bitten in the stomach and the side by the demobats in the Upside Down, pulled clear by Nancy, Robin and Eddie, and goes back to fight while bleeding. Joyce and Murray come back from Russia with Hopper, alive, whom everyone had thought dead since the battle of Starcourt, in the summer of 1985.

On the adults' side, Dr. Owens is captured and not killed, Lieutenant Colonel Sullivan walks free, Victor Creel stays at Pennhurst asylum, and Yuri the smuggler ends up tied up in his own plane. Wayne Munson, Eddie's uncle, receives his nephew's guitar pick from Dustin's hands: it is all that remains of a boy his town holds to be a murderer.

And the monster? It does not die. Burned with a Molotov cocktail, riddled with bullets, pushed out a window by Nancy, Vecna is gone from the floor of the Creel house when the team comes back down to look for him. Two days later, on a hill, in front of a sky filling with ash, Will feels his presence on the back of his neck: wounded, not dead. It will take the last season to finish him.

Frequently asked questions

Read next