Editor's note: The below article contains spoilers for Season 4 Volume 1 of Stranger Things.As each season of the Duffer Brothers’ massive hit Stranger Things has progressed, the characters have been spread further and further apart both physically and narratively. In Season 1, there were three main groups of characters: Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and the other kids; Nancy (Natalia Dyer) and the teenagers; and Joyce (Winona Ryder) and Hopper (David Harbour). They were each solving the mystery of Will’s (Noah Schnapp) disappearance on their own, but the stories often overlapped and influenced each other until they all coalesced in the finale.
The seasons since then have still utilized the different group setups, having each set of characters doing a specific task but all of them contributing to the larger picture. But as the cast has grown and the story became more convoluted, the characters have started to intersect less and less. This cordoning off of characters into their specific groups reached a peak in Season 4. With a larger cast and so many story threads up in the air, the cast of characters is more cut off from each other than ever and the consequence of this is most apparent in the way Joyce Byers is treated this season.
Keeping the characters all in their own mini-plots for the majority of the season cuts off a lot of the most important relationships in the show: Mike and Will from the rest of their friends, Jonathan from Nancy, and Joyce from her sons, to name a few. Unlike in the previous seasons, after the first few episodes, characters from these disparate storylines barely speak of each other let alone to each other. The storylines feel more isolated than ever, especially with the extreme distances physically separating each group from each other this season. As a result, Joyce’s character feels flat and oddly placed. The show has always been larger-than-life, but it’s getting downright fantastical, especially with the more grounded characters like Joyce being dragged into increasingly outlandish and death-defying scenarios.
Joyce Byers is a loving parent and quite possibly the only genuinely good adult Hawkins has ever seen. Her deep belief in her sons and caring personality made her a standout character in Season 1. She’s a woman who refuses to lose those close to her. So, it's not surprising that when Season 4 opens with her receiving a mysterious doll containing hidden instructions on how to get Hopper back, she jumps right on it. Joyce has never been one to reject something just because it’s outlandish. If Christmas lights helped her find her son in Season 1, maybe a porcelain doll is the key to getting back her almost-boyfriend. Unfortunately, as soon as this plot kicks off, it seems Joyce fully has the blinders on.
The doll instructs her to take a large sum of money to a remote location in Alaska, at which point she’ll exchange it for Hopper’s safety. She contacts Murray (Brett Gelman) who comes along to help her and the two plot to sneak away with the kids being none the wiser. This choice to completely isolate her from the rest of the cast, her sons in particular, for the rest of the season, feels uncomfortable. The kids on the west coast are completely cut off from her, and her own sons have no idea where she is. And while she’s on her own insane mission, she’s completely oblivious to her sons being hunted down by armed military operatives. Joyce Byers, the world’s healthiest helicopter parent, doesn’t even call to check in with her kids before going to what very well may have been a trap. Her lack of contact with the other cast seems forced by the narrative putting her in a remote location than something Joyce would actually do.
Not only is she done dirty by this ignorance of her boundless love for her kids but aside from being the messenger pigeon for the ransom money, she’s basically given nothing to do this season. When the pilot, Yuri (Nikola Đuričko), betrays her and Murray, he drags them along back to Russia and Joyce knocks him out in the plane so she and Murray can take command for themselves. And then they crash the plane. This makes perfectly logical sense but shows how deeply out of her depth Joyce is here. She’s not the kind of character who does spy work, treks through the Russian wilderness, and expertly manipulates her way into a Russian prison camp. It’s simply too outlandish. But it happens anyway, all with Joyce having very little agency in any events except for a few choice lines of improv to try and fool the Russian soldiers. It feels cartoony and all wrong for Joyce. Joyce isn’t a fighter, not the way Hopper is, and certainly not the way real soldiers are. So to thrust her into this bizarre plot and give her little if nothing to do other than wait until it’s the right time narratively for her and Hopper to reunite feels like a massive waste of potential for a character who has always been so integral to the emotional core of the show.
Joyce is incredible, but she’s not an action hero, she’s a mother. Her strength has almost always come more from her kindness and compassion and not the anti-Soviet espionage we see her committing now. She spends most of the season having things happen to her rather than playing an active role in her own storyline. But the plot she and Murray have been thrust into this season is so off the walls it’s hard to imagine how things could have turned out any other way for her character. She’s out of her depth so all she can do is swim. And as a result, we see very little of note from one of the strongest performers in the entire cast and one of the most beloved characters on the show.
It’s the kind of character assassination that’s less a violent death than a slow poisoning. The Joyce we see in Season 4 isn’t destroyed, just severely weakened. Stranger Things' greatest strength since Season 1 has been its incredibly believable relationships and to see a character so integral to many of those relationships be pushed to the side and given little to do is frustrating and disheartening. The massive cast and convoluted plots of the newer installments of Stranger Things have definitely increased the scope of the story, but it's caused many of the show’s strongest foundations to be pushed to the wayside. The mother whose love sat at the core of the first season spends eight episodes barely considering her kids, out of her depth, and unaware that the people she cares about most are in even graver danger than the person she’s attempting to rescue. It’s a disappointing treatment for such a strong character, and we can only hope to see her offered more to do in the second part of Season 4.