Stranger Things season 4 is currently getting lots of press. Trailers and clips of the show are being released left and right. The season is releasing on Friday, May 23rd and fans of the series can’t contain  their excitement. Technically, the whole season won’t be released on that date, but it will split into two different parts. Part Two is set to release on July 1st, 2022. This isn’t anything we haven’t seen before. For a longer season, it’s rational for Netflix to split it up into two separate releases to increase the hype and press. Plus, people are more likely to want to watch a season if it’s shorter.

However, something along the lines of being abnormal is the length of each episode. Typically, Stranger Things episodes range from 40-50 minutes, with a few abnormalities in season finales. However, Season 4 contains Behemoth-sized episodes. 

Here is a list of the part one episodes and their length times:

• Episode 1 “The Hellfire Club”– 1 hour and 16 minutes
• Episode 2 “Venca’s Curse”– 1 hour and 15 minutes
• Episode 3 “The Monster and the Superhero”– 1 hour and 3 minutes
• Episode 4 “Dear Billy”– 1 hour and 17 minutes
• Episode 5 “The Nina Project”– 1 hour and 14 minutes
• Episode 6 “The Dive”– 1 hour and 13 minutes
• Episode 7 “The Massacre at Hawkins Lab”– 1 hour and 38 minutes

Part two will only be two episodes, but each is even longer than the ones in the previous part.  

• Episode 8 “Papa”- 1 hour and 25 minutes
• Episode 9 “The Piggyback”- 2 hours and 30 minutes 

People aren’t exactly happy about these episode sizes. Episodes that are shorter are preferred over longer ones because they include more breaks in between. It can be difficult to stop watching a show mid-episode without a natural break. Some of these episodes are the size of movies, with the final episode being a length most movies don’t go to because of an audience’s attention span. 

Previous seasons ranged between eight-14 episodes a season. This season in total has only nine, but nearly five hours more of length time. They definitely could have fleshed out more episodes by changing the runtime of these longer episodes, but the Duffer Brothers and Netflix made an interesting decision not to. Season 4: Part One has a 93% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes so far which is along the same lines as the previous seasons. Either way, fans are enthusiastic to get back into watching the show.