Stranger Things Season 4 Finally Gave Lucas His Due

Editor's Note: The following contains Stranger Things Season 4 spoilers.Stranger Things is known for having a large cast of core characters. Every season the cast only seems to grow further and in a lot of ways it’s a big part of what keeps the show charming. If we were still just following Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) every season I’m not sure if I would’ve even kept watching. The time the show invests into all of its side characters is part of what makes it so rewarding to watch – though it does come at a cost.

As a cast gets larger its only natural that from time to time some characters stories fall by the wayside while others take centre stage. Usually, the Stranger Things writers do a pretty good job of giving everyone their turn in the limelight – that is until it comes to Lucas. I don’t know that I’ve ever found Lucas compelling in the slightest. He’s almost always been annoying, inconsequential, or both.

In Season 1 Lucas spends a lot of time berating Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and not much else. In theory, Lucas was seemingly intended to be the more skeptical or down-to-earth character, the one that kept the gang grounded, but often it just didn’t have the intended impact. In Season 2 Lucas gains some degree of interest through his slowly developing relationship with Max (Sadie Sink). On the whole though, it still felt like he wasn’t really important besides creating a bridge for Max to join the gang through. Where Will was connected to the upside down, Mike was connected to El, and Dustin was connected to Dart (his demodog) Lucas didn’t really seem to contribute much to the actual plot. In Season 3 it felt like he slipped even further into the sidelines, where his highlights of the season were raving about “New Coke” and giving Mike bad relationship advice.

Natalia Dyer, Caleb McLaughlin, and Joe Keery in Stranger Things — Image via Netflix

In Season 4 though, we finally get a Lucas that’s compelling and meaningful to the plot and characters. Within the first episode the writers establish a compelling and understandable central conflict for Lucas: “Yeah but maybe we don’t have to be [nerds and freaks]… I’m tired of being bullied… I’m tired of feeling like a loser” he declares to Mike and Dustin. For three seasons straight Lucas was just sort of along for the ride, he never seemed to have his own reasons for doing anything besides the fact the he was doing what his friends were doing. Season 4 is the first time in the whole series, though, that we see Lucas really making decisions for himself, having real goals, and going for them.

As the plot develops further, we see Lucas struggle with the decisions he’s making. He misses his friends, he’s in with a new crowd now, and eventually that crowd (the basketball team) starts to try and hunt down the gang. It would’ve been easy for the writers to simply have Lucas ditch the basketball team as soon as Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) became an issue and have him join the gang again, but instead they put him in a precarious position where he has to defend the gang by pretending to hunt them down. The way we see Lucas give the basketball team red herrings in order to save his friends before eventually splitting off shows a resourcefulness that we’ve never seen in Lucas.

As we move into the finale, we see Lucas’ own struggle between the popular gang and his friends come to a climax. At its root, Stranger Things has always been a coming-of-age story using sci-fi elements and monsters to act as metaphors for the struggle of youth. Never has that statement been truer than for Lucas in this finale. Lucas spends his whole childhood prior to this being a reject, a nerd, and a freak. While the rest of the gang seems to have accepted the constant bullying, Lucas struggles with it and wants a way out. In joining the basketball team and assimilating into the jock crowd he finds himself with the same bullies that had calling him a freak his whole life. Except now, instead of wanting to beat up the freaks, Lucas's original friends, the jocks want to kill them. So, when in the final episode we see Lucas being beaten senseless by Jason (Mason Dye) after trying to reason with him and eventually fighting back and winning it means something to Lucas and to the audience. Lucas wasn’t just fighting back against Jason but against the people who always bullied him, who he had always wanted to be, but who he knows now aren’t worth trying to be.

That’s all without even talking about his journey all season to repair his relationship with Max. He spent Season 3 mostly giving Mike bad relationship advice, and that’s mostly because he himself seemed like a clueless boyfriend (to be fair he was fourteen an it's hard to expect much better). In Season 4 though we see a more emotionally mature Lucas, one who genuinely wants to be there for Max, and one who we can root for. In a lot of ways Season 4 Lucas actually retroactively makes Season 3 Lucas more important. Part of the reason why we want to see Lucas succeed now is because we can see that he’s grown from the kid he was back then. He’s ready to genuinely be there for Max, to actually be the kind of emotional support she deserves. In Episode 4 when Max is about to die, its Lucas who knows her favorite song. When she has to confront death as bait for Vecna, its Lucas who’s there for he. And when she ends up in the hospital, its Lucas who stays with her even though he himself should probably be getting treatment after his fight with Jason.

In Season 4 we got to see a different side of Lucas. A new side not necessarily out of character, but one that channeled all his internal conflicts and redeemable qualities that we only ever got glimpses into before. Lucas is a character that has truly grown season to season. Ultimately, that’s what Lucas always lacked in previous seasons: true conflict and growth – something the creators gave him in spades for this season. Lucas has always had the potential to be interesting but was never given the opportunity, until now when the show’s creators finally gave Lucas his due.