Creators: Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer
Stars: Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Winona Ryder
Synopsis: In 1980s Indiana, a group of young friends witness supernatural forces and secret government exploits. As they search for answers, the children unravel a series of extraordinary mysteries.
The first four seasons of Netflix’s smash-hit streaming series Stranger Things were genuinely thrilling, funny, and frightening armrest-grabbing television that may have defined the era of binge-worthy TV. The Duffer Brothers’ creation set the gold standard for mainstream popcorn escapism, elevating the genre into genuine art or at least an art form defined by its audience. These freaks and geeks we have welcomed into our homes have taken us on a thrilling and terrifying ride.
However, Stranger Things’ final season has, unfortunately, been a massive disappointment. Not because the series won’t be satisfying for its fervent fanbase, but because it recycles the same thrills and chills on auto-repeat, lacking new ways to put these beloved characters on their toes and settling into an unmerited mythology that skips over proper setups. The characters now feel redundant, the world-building has grown tiresome, and the era’s unique themes that once made the show stand out are all but a distant memory.
Stranger Things’ final season hasn’t reinvented itself as much as it’s found itself stuck in predictability, still clinging to the nostalgia from better seasons past.
The fifth and final season picks up in the fall of 1987, a few months after the events of the fourth season, when the gates of Vecna’s (Horizon: An American Saga’s Jamie Campbell Bower) hellish realm have opened in Hawkins, Indiana. The group is trying to live their everyday lives, but behind the scenes, they’re hiding Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) from the American military while planning to kill One. Helping to hide and train Eleven are Hopper (Thunderbolts’ David Harbour) and Joyce (Beetlejuice’s Winona Ryder), her legally adoptive parents.
Of course, this is all happening around the time of Will’s (Noah Schnapp) disappearance, highlighting the Duffer Brothers’ penchant for circular storytelling. However, the team is still down one person, as Max (The Whale’s Sadie Sink) remains in a coma, with Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) always by her side. Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) is still mourning the loss of Eddie (Joseph Quinn). There is also the ongoing love triangle involving Nancy (Natalia Dyer), her boyfriend Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), and Steve (Joe Keery).
The group begins an operation to send Hopper into the Upside Down to kill their nemesis, who is hell-bent on ending the world. With Robin (Wildcat’s Maya Hawke) running the local radio station and sending coded messages, Hopper sneaks onto a military transport—only to find himself in immediate danger. Meanwhile, as Mike (It’s Finn Wolfhard) tries to figure out why his little sister Holly is talking to an imaginary friend, she is taken by Vecna, who uses her as bait to draw Eleven out to save her.
Stranger Things’ fifth and final season suffers from a phenomenon called the Mystery Box effect, which, frankly, was an issue in Volume Two of Season Four’s pendulum chapter. When Vecna was revealed at the end of Episode Seven, it was a jaw-dropping admission. We knew most of the characters would survive, and everyone knew Eddie was a knockoff character. Now, in the final season, making Holly (Nell Fisher) older and using a character who has hardly had a presence as a significant driving plot point is highly contrived.
The show suffers from Netflix endgame fatigue, which is very real, and the loss of complexity results in only two simple outcomes: either the villain or the hero wins. The other issue is that all the episodes are over sixty minutes long, so there is a lot of narrative fluff in between. It doesn’t help that most of these kids lack the skills to play three-dimensional adult characters, which is the real reason Wolfhard and Schnapp were kept hidden for most of last season. There’s improvement, but they need to be insulated by the large cast to make their scenes work.
This, of course, will happen with any thriller as popular as Stranger Things, especially a show with so much mystery, character development, and world-building. For example, another series with a fervent fanbase, Lost, collapsed under the pressure of creating endless mysteries. With the Duffer Brothers’ mystery, however, the story leads to a simple, unsatisfying endgame that lacks complexity.
Even with the addition of Linda Hamilton (The Terminator) as Dr. K, running a military base in the Upside Down feels out of place and out of character for a series that takes significant jumps without showing enough patience, taking narrative leaps past its audience without earning those choices. Of course, the series is exciting enough in spots, displaying some glorious special effects that lead to a few very scary scenes. But once you’ve seen one Demigod, you’ve seen them all.
However, the twist at the end of episode three, titled “The Turnbow rap,” had a fun moment that almost had me recommending the first batch of episodes. Of course, only the first four episodes of Stranger Things’ fifth and final season were screened for most critics. So it is impossible to know where the show is headed or how it will end satisfyingly. Frankly, that is Netflix’s fault for not screening all the episodes for critics and not trusting their product. Based on the limited number of people who were given screeners, I can now see why.
You can stream Stranger Things Season 5 Volume 1 on Netflix starting November 26th!
