Every New Character In Stranger Things 4 Explained

"Stranger Things" has always had a large cast, even back when it was a relatively low-budget show in its first season. The series follows four friends — Mike, Will, Lucas, and Dustin — all of whom have families of their own, plus Eleven and the staff at Hawkins Laboratory as well as the local police force, led by Jim Hopper. Season 2 introduced us to Max, Billy, Bob, Murray, and Dr. Owens, while Season 3 added Robin, Alexei, Grigori, Bruce, and Mayor Kline into the mix. Some of these characters joined the roster only to become fodder for the monsters of the Upside Down, while others have stuck around and become fan favorites. 

Now in its fourth season, "Stranger Things" is one of Netflix's flagship shows with a budget of $30 million per episode. Everything about "Stranger Things 4" is more epic than ever before. The production design, the runtime, the action sequences, the special effects, and the sheer number of new characters are all a reflection of the Duffer brothers' heightened ambitions — and the extra cash and time they had to work with. There are nearly as many new faces around Hawkins (and elsewhere) as there are familiar ones. With such a ballooned cast list, it can be tricky to tell the jocks from the freaks, the guards from the smugglers, and the local detectives from the military personnel. This guide to the brand new "Stranger Things 4" characters is here to help.

We meet Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn) in the cafeteria of Hawkins High, where he initially comes off as kind of a jerk. Eddie runs the Hellfire Club, a roleplaying game group our protagonists have joined since their old Dungeon Master, Will, has moved west. Mike and Dustin are genuinely worried about breaking the news that Lucas won't be joining them for the culmination of Eddie's "Dungeons & Dragons" campaign, and when they do fess up, he doesn't take it well. Eddie appears to be a proud troublemaking loser who brags about having not graduated the year before, but this first impression is designed to throw us off balance. 

Eddie is certainly no angel, but he's also not the devil that most of Hawkins will soon believe him to be. Once we learn more about the DM of the Hellfire Club, he becomes a much more likable character. When troubled cheerleader Chrissy meets him in the woods to buy drugs, they bond over shared insecurities. Chrissy acts like she doesn't know him, then remembers he used to be a quiet kid with short hair who liked to play guitar. His hair's grown out, and he's not so quiet anymore, but we can see that, deep down, he's a sensitive soul.

When they go to his uncle's trailer, we can tell that life has been rough for Eddie Munson. He clearly doesn't have much family or many resources, and his edgy personality is probably a defense mechanism. However, his life's about to get a lot rougher, as most of Hawkins now suspects him of being a devil-possessed serial killer. 

Jason Carver (Mason Dye) is the exact opposite of Eddie Munson. A golden boy with perfectly coifed blonde locks and a letterman jacket, Jason is the captain of the Hawkins High basketball team. Like Eddie, we meet him while he delivers an impassioned speech to his classmates. However, while Eddie rages against conformity, Jason rallies the student body to his conformist point of view. His pre-championship tournament pep talk is full of the empty rhetoric that often follows real-world tragedies. He even insists that the people who died at the end of Season 3 would want them to win the basketball game. 

Jason also makes sure to publicly profess his love for Chrissy. The fact that she stands him up later that night might have nothing to do with their relationship, or it might be a red flag that things aren't so perfect between the cheerleader and the jock. We soon see that Jason's good-guy persona is as much of a façade as Eddie's bad boy act. He doesn't see himself as a lawbreaker, but he doesn't think twice about breaking into someone else's property to party or bragging about underage drinking in front of cops. He also has a violent temper. He tortures Eddie's bandmate to get information and seems poised to do worse if he ever catches up to Eddie. 

The end of Season 4, Volume 1, reinforces that Eddie and Jason are indeed diametrically opposed. Once Jason has witnessed Vecna in action, he goes all-in on the Satanic Panic and blames the Hellfire Club for the murders. The audience might see him for who he is, but Hawkins is still mostly on their golden boy's side.

Argyle (Eduardo Franco) is the only friend Jonathan has made since moving to California. He's a delivery driver for Surfer Boy Pizza and a gentle stoner whose product of choice is Purple Palm Tree Delight. Argyle is a supportive best bud who actively listens to Jonathan's concerns about Nancy and gives him sound advice, but he doesn't seem cut out for the kind of hijinks that Will and Jonathan always seem to get into.

Take, for example, when Jonathan, Will, and Mike scheme to order some Surfer Boy pies so that he can arrive at the Byers house and rescue them, as they're basically being held under house arrest by Dr. Owen and Dr. Brenner's goons. However, the military gets there first, and Argyle finds himself in the middle of a gunfight. He barely keeps it together when an injured guard dies in the back of his vehicle while fleeing and he loses his mind as they're burying the man in the desert. Though Jonathan tries to explain that the point of an unmarked grave is to hide the dead body, empathetic Argyle imagines he must have had a family and makes a makeshift tombstone out of a pizza box. 

When the group road trips to Suzie's house to trace El's location, Mike warns Argyle that they're very religious. He takes offense and says he's spiritual, too. More proof that Argyle's a lover and not a fighter? He instantly falls for Eden, Suzie's foul-mouthed older sister. When the rest of the crew is sneaking into Suzie's dad's office, Argyle and Eden are cozily enjoying some bud in the back of his ride. 

We should probably hate this season's otherworldly evil monster the most, but Angela (Elodie Grace Orkin) gives Vecna a run for his money. In her letters to Mike, El makes it seem like things are going swimmingly since she's moved to California. But Will (and we) know better. It's not just that El's an unpopular wallflower. She's the target of intense bullying at her high school, and Angela is the ringleader of the mean kid circus. 

Like Jason, Angela manages to get away with pretty vile behavior while, for the most part, staying on the good side of the authority figures around her. She gives an insufferable slide show presentation about why Helen Keller is her hero, then turns around and torments the differently-abled kid in her class. When she interrupts El as she explains her diorama of Hopper's house, it's obvious that the teacher is aware that Angela's a bit of a pill. However, she doesn't do anything to protect El, even as the kids are snickering about her dead father figure. 

In short order, Angela demonstrates the full extent of her cruelty, first by destroying El's project. El doesn't snitch, but the truth is so obvious that Angela gets reprimanded. As revenge, Angela orchestrates a humiliating skating rink attack, which is made even worse by the fact that El lied to Mike and told him she and Angela were friends. Listen, nobody deserves a roller skate to the face, but seeing Angela with a bloody nose is a little satisfying. We don't know if we'll check in with this meanest of mean girls again in Volume 2, but it's doubtful she learned her lesson. 

On the surface, Chrissy (Grace Van Dien) is an idealized girl-next-door type. With her bouncy ponytail, wide eyes, and white smile, she fits the part of head cheerleader and the basketball team captain's girlfriend. However, when Max crosses paths with Chrissy, first coming out of the guidance counselor's office looking upset, then in the bathroom, we know something is amiss. 

The way Chrissy holds her stomach as she's leaving Ms. Kelly's room suggests that maybe she's pregnant. Only moments later, we see what's really going on. Chrissy is bulimic. As she's purging, she begins to hallucinate monstrous feet. Then she hears her mother's voice. The sound bites seem like snippets from Chrissy's past. Her mom was apparently critical of her weight and put far too much emphasis on looks. The voice remarks that it's had to let a dress out a size. It also calls her fat. Chrissy soon snaps out of it and comes back to reality worse for the wear. Though Chrissy does smile at Jason during the pep rally in a way that implies she returns his affection, the fact that she stands him up could mean (at a minimum) that she felt the same kind of pressure from him. 

She visits Eddie shortly after, hoping he can sell her something to make the pain go away. Chrissy, who is extremely fragile at this point, confides in Eddie that she feels like she's losing her mind. She and Eddie have the kind of chemistry that, for a few minutes in Episode 1, makes the audience think they could be something. Unfortunately, the cheerleader with a dark secret doesn't have much time left. 

Fred Benson (Logan Riley Bruner) works with Nancy on the Hawkins High School newspaper. He's trying hard to fill the vacancy that Nancy's boyfriend and former reporting partner Jonathan left when he moved to California. Too bad for nerdy Fred, his flirtation comes off more like antagonization. Nancy doesn't respond well to his negative attitude (he prefers his alternate layout in which the team loses the basketball game) or his judgment of Jonathan. Even though Nancy's his senior and the superior journalist, he doesn't show her much respect. But whether or not Nancy likes him or his writing is the least of Fred's problems.

When a cop comes to the car window to see what Fred and Nancy are doing at a crime scene, Fred experiences the same hallucinations that plagued Chrissy just before her death. In Fred's case, he relives a car accident in which the other passenger was killed. Vecna, in the form of the officer, implies that Fred was responsible for the fiery crash. Around the same time, Max breaks into the guidance counselor's office to look for information in Chrissy's file. She discovers that Fred was seeing the counselor too and suffering from the same symptoms. Before he and Nancy finish interviewing the witnesses, Fred succumbs to his visions and goes missing. Vecna forces him to join the ranks of his guilt-ridden lost souls after he levitates and crushes him in the middle of the highway. 

Whether it's because they love him or fear him, Jason's teammates follow him as if he really is their leader. When he goes after Eddie, the prime suspect in his girlfriend's murder, all of them — including Lucas — join him. Lucas's loyalty may have been torn early on, but once he watches Jason turn violent, he sticks around to protect his friends. Another teammate, Patrick (Myles Truitt), also looks conflicted as Jason's behavior becomes increasingly problematic. However, Patrick has other things weighing on his mind. 

Once Max goes through Ms. Kelly's files, the Hawkins kids and the audience know that Vecna picks on teenagers who have trauma (specifically, guilt) in their pasts. We never see what happened to Patrick to make him vulnerable to Vecna's curse, but we do see Vecna take possession of Patrick's mind as Jason's posse rides in his car, which results in a nosebleed. Not long after, Patrick spots the tell-tale grandfather clock from the Creel house at Chrissy's funeral. 

When his teammates finally figure out where Eddie's been hiding, Jason swims after Eddie, who's trying to row away in a speedboat that won't start. Patrick still looks conflicted, and we can't tell if he's trying to help Jason catch Eddie or stop him from doing something he'll regret. But before Patrick can reach them, Vecna pulls him under the surface of Lovers Lake, then lifts him high into the air and kills him just as he did Chrissy, right in front of Jason's eyes. Rather than prove to Jason that Eddie is innocent, the basketball captain is now sure the freak killed his girlfriend and his teammate. 

When Joyce discovers a ransom note in the Russian doll that came in the mail, she enlists Murray to help her figure out her next move. The message is from someone who calls themselves Enzo, which happened to be the name of the restaurant where Hopper and Joyce were supposed to go on a date. Only she and Hopper would know that, convincing Joyce that Jim might still be alive. She and Murray contact Enzo, record the conversation, determine from the ambient talk that Enzo is a prison guard, and agree to an exchange in Alaska: $40,000 for Hopper's life. 

Enzo's real name is Dmitri (Tom Wlaschiha), and though he has to play the part of a sadistic guard, he's keeping his fingers crossed that his prisoner can beat the odds and make it outside of the prison walls. Unfortunately for Hopper and himself, Dmitri seems pretty green when it comes to covert operations. His go-between double-crosses him and secures a better deal with the Russian government for exposing his duplicitousness. That means Dmitri and Hopper end up in a cell together. They aren't exactly friends, but necessity makes them allies. They and a handful of their fellow prisoners are all but sentenced to death in a fight against a Demogorgon. Hopper knows Demogorgons hate fire, so with an assist from Joyce and Murray in the control room, he and Dmitri manage to slip away from the monster in the nick of time. 

Now that he's safe from the Demogorgon and free from his cell (but not the prison compound), we don't know if Dmitri will align himself with his old comrades or his new allies.

Enzo gives Joyce and Murray instructions to fly to Alaska where they're supposed to deliver the $40,000 to a pilot-for-hire and peanut butter smuggler named Yuri (Nikola Djuricko). Upon meeting him, Murray proclaims that he really doesn't care for the guy. Maybe that's because Yuri and Murray have a lot in common. They're both big personalities with odd senses of humor who get involved in some seriously dangerous shenanigans. 

At first, it seems like the outlandish plan to free Hopper from a Russian prison (without the help of any ambassadors or diplomats) might work. However, Yuri soon realizes that a turncoat and three American prisoners are worth more than one, and he switches sides. Murray tries to shame him, but the opportunistic Yuri says he can buy his daughter a pony and his mother a new house with the money, which would make them plenty proud. 

As Yuri transports Murray and Joyce to the prison, they cut their binding with glass from a broken peanut butter jar, and a comically absurd mid-air fight ensues. Murray comes out on top, and his new plan is to impersonate Yuri while infiltrating the prison. Since Yuri and Murray bear a strong resemblance to each other in appearance and personality, the plan works — at least, the first step is a success. Now Yuri, Joyce, and Murray are inside the facility, as is a probably pretty vengeful Hopper and Dmitri, not to mention a Demogorgon. Fickle, goofy Yuri will likely see how the wind blows and buddy up with whoever can help him — or pay him — the most. 

"Stranger Things 4" tells the story of the Creel family several times, and there are important discrepancies in each retelling. Nancy first hears about them from Eddie's uncle, who heard it through the once common urban legend that Victor Creel (Kevin L. Johnson) mercilessly murdered his wife and two kids by breaking their limbs and cutting out their eyes. When Nancy and Robin go to the local library to search through microfilm, they happen upon a tabloid from 1959 in which Victor Creel claims demons killed his loved ones. Wanting to hear the truth straight from the source, Nancy and Robin disguise themselves as psychology students and request an interview with the now elderly and imprisoned Victor Creel (Robert Englund). 

His account seems to confirm the kids' suspicions. His family — consisting of his wife Virginia, daughter Alice, and son Henry — bought the big blue house and were very happy there for about a month. Then, upsetting supernatural phenomena started to occur. Dead animals showed up on the lawn, lights flickered, music cut in and out, and the family members started fighting. Victor believes his home in Hawkins was haunted by a demon who tortured and killed Virginia and Alice while it kept him occupied with nightmarish visions. The boy, he says, was found in a coma and died days later. 

Victor was so destroyed by what the supposed demon had wrought that he gouged his own eyes out in hopes it would take him, too. He's a shell of a man when Nancy and Robin come to question him, and as of yet, he doesn't know the real story of what happened. 

One of the more confusing elements of "Stranger Things 4" is all the various uniformed agencies pursuing Eleven. After "Jane Hopper" concusses the bully Angela with a skate, the local police show up at the Byer house to take El into custody. Mike, Will, Jonathan, and Argyle try to stop them as Joyce isn't home (they think she's at an Encyclopedia Britannica conference), but to no avail.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Colonel Sullivan (Sherman Augustus) arrives at Dr. Owen's personal residence in Nevada. He plays nice at first, but then he lets Owens in on the real reason for his surprise middle-of-the-night helicopter visit. The U.S. military thinks the Hawkins Lab was training kids like Eleven to be remote assassins, and they suspect El, not Eddie, actually killed Chrissy and Fred. Owens swears she's dead, but Sullivan ransacks the house and intends to tail him if he goes looking for Eleven.

Dr. Owens gets to El first when his people intercept her on her way to juvie. But Sullivan's thugs aren't far behind. They open fire at the Byers house with little concern as to whether the kids are collateral damage. Sullivan himself later tortures a guard who survived the shootout to get the underground lab's location. When Episode 7 ends, he has the information he needs, but so do Mike, Will, Jonathan, and Argyle — who are all headed to the same place on the map. 

Jamie Campbell Bower is credited with playing Peter Ballard on "Stranger Things," but he's actually playing a kind of quadruple role that serves as the fourth season's big reveal. Eleven meets Ballard in the memories she revisits thanks to the Nina machine, where he's a lowly lab assistant who occasionally stands up for her. Ballard earns her trust and promises to help her escape, but really, he just needs El to remove the device preventing him from harnessing his powers.

That's because Ballard is the mythical 001 that Dr. Brenner claims doesn't exist. He — not El – committed the Hawkins Lab massacre. But that's not all. One is also the son of Victor Creel. The Creel boy, Henry, seems to have demonstrated a proclivity for evil since early in his childhood. Since the family moved to Hawkins to try and rid him of his demons, we know that Hawkins and the lab aren't specifically tied to his predicament or the Upside Down. 

The young Henry Creel (somewhat like Eddie Munson) resented his parents for trying to make him conform. When they seek the help of a doctor, he kills his mom and sister in the same way Vecna disposes of his victims and frames his dad for their incomprehensibly gruesome murders. In the aftermath, he ends up confined to the Hawkins Lab anyway, where El used her powers to send him into the Upside Down where he — wait for it — transforms into this season's big bad, Vecna. This development ties up a lot of loose ends from Seasons 1 through 3, but — whether we call him Peter Ballard, One, Creel, or Vecna — his story isn't over yet.