While Stranger Things season 4 tied up a lot of loose ends from earlier seasons, the Netflix hit’s latest outing makes one major season 3 plot hole an even more obvious oversight. It is easy for shows like Stranger Things to accidentally open up major plot holes. The sprawling ensemble cast of the Netflix series, along with the fact that the tone of Stranger Things bounces between comedy, drama, horror, sci-fi, and fantasy, makes occasional storytelling hiccups inevitable.
However, this doesn’t mean that plot holes can be ignored in perpetuity. It was fair for viewers to expect that Stranger Things 4 would fix mistakes from the show’s earlier seasons and, by and large, the long-awaited return of the series managed this feat. However, while Stranger Things season 4 may have explained where Dr. Brenner has been and how Hopper survived season 3, there is one major season 3 plot hole that the show kept wide open.
Nancy bonds with Eddie Munson’s taciturn uncle Wayne when she notes that she, too, hates a lot of reporters. She specifically calls out a former colleague of hers, “Chuck Bailey,” at The Hawkins Post, saying that he is ignorant and winning Wayne’s trust as a result. The problem with this is, midway through Stranger Things season 3, the lead staff of The Hawkins Post was assimilated into a gigantic blob monster, ending Stranger Things' worst subplot without ever explaining how their deaths were covered up. The death toll included both the editor-in-chief and his second in command, so it should be impossible for a reporter who worked alongside Nancy and apparently still works at the Hawkins Post to have not noticed his two most senior colleagues mysteriously disappearing overnight.
The answer offered by the season 3 finale (repeated early on in season 4) is that all of the casualties the Mind Flayer racked up in Stranger Things season 3 were covered up as victims of the Starcourt Mall fire. However, this doesn’t make much sense when most of the victims had been assimilated days before the fire, meaning their families would have noticed them going missing. Even assuming the victim’s families are extraordinarily un-observant (or, in the editor-in-chief's case, also assimilated), Nancy’s newspaper colleague would have gone to work one day to find all his colleagues fell victim to the Mind Flayer. While it could conceivably be possible that the town’s civilians accepted the official story that they died in a fire, an investigative journalist like Chuck Bailey would need to be incredibly incompetent to not investigate the story any further.
However, it is perhaps not surprising that Stranger Things season 4 couldn’t close this awkward plot hole for good. The Mind Flayer storyline also required the townspeople of Hawkins to never notice a multi-story monster rampaging through the town’s Independence Day celebrations, something that makes Chuck’s negligence comparatively excusable. Fortunately, Stranger Things introduces a smaller, more self-contained villain in season 4, meaning the series at least didn’t compound the lingering question of how Hawkins managed to never notice the Mind Flayer’s presence in their community, their families, and their places of employment.