Stranger Things 4’s ”The Monster and the Superhero” has a lot to offer, so lets get things rolling. First, Dr. Brenner trains child assassins. Also, Eleven commits an assault and battery. Plus, Jonathan reads an actual newspaper to find a good movie to go to. Not only this, Eleven’s repressed memories begin to emerge due to childhood trauma. Finally, we look at how the producers of Stranger Things deal with the issue of race in the 80s. This is a good episode.

It’s this episode where we learn Dr. Brenner trained remote assassins. These assassins were the kids he had at his Hawkins laboratory. These kids were trained to use their minds to kill people over great distances.

Next, Eleven loses it in this airing. She commits a battery when she attacks a girl at the roller rink. However, the charges are swept under the rug when Dr. Sam Owens shows up to take Eleven to the laboratory and reassures her that he will make her criminal charges go away.

Marvel comic’s The Uncanny X-Men are mentioned in this episode. This mention comes when Dustin refers to his computer as Cerebral, the X-Men computer in the Marvel comics.

This airing shows us how things have changed from the 80s. For example, Jonathan is reading an actual newspaper. He is checking out movies at an actual theatre. However, today, people don’t read paper newspapers, because they read digital newspapers on line; moreover, people don’t go to movie theatres, because they download movies off the internet.

This episode, too, sees Eleven deal with emotional trauma. This emotional trauma takes the form of repressed memories. Eleven has memories when she killed people in the Hawkins lab. However, Eleven’s repressed  memories did not surface in previous episodes.

Here’s something to think about: it should be known that the producers of Stranger Things attempt to address  the issue of race. For instance, police Officer Powell (ironically named after a famous Supreme Court Justice who delivered a famous majority opinion on affirmative action), an African American, is on the Hawkins police force, which could only happen as a direct result of 1970s affirmative action policies to deal with historical racial inequality, though the Supreme Court never endorsed historical racial inequality as the rationale for affirmative action in the 1978 Bakke majority opinion.

Overall, I thought this broadcast of Stranger Things was a think piece. If you had some knowledge of psychology, you were up on what Eleven was going through in this episode. Also, I thought the producers dealt with race in this episode in a real way. I enjoyed this airing.