‘Stranger Things’ Shows Its Age in a Final Season That’s Outgrown Its Core Appeal: TV Review
by Alison Herman · VarietyIt’s been three and a half years since the most recent season of “Stranger Things” kicked off in May 2022. The first episode of the hit series’ fifth and final installment — delayed by dual Hollywood strikes and the mounting production value of a show that’s ballooned from surprise breakout to blockbuster franchise — opens in the fall of 1987. That’s 18 months after the events of Season 4, which concluded with archvillain Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) rupturing the metaphysical border between our reality and the alternate dimension known as the Upside Down, and four years from Season 1, which kicked off in November 1983.
Which means that the real-life gap between two individual seasons of “Stranger Things” is dangerously close to that of the entire canonical span of “Stranger Things.”
That factoid is absurd enough on its face, illustrating the escalating tax on viewers’ patience from a medium once defined by consistent, predictable output. (“Stranger Things” is far from the sole culprit: “Severance,” another streaming-native genre sensation, is a prime example.) But it also sums up the challenge facing the brainchild of twins Matt and Ross Duffer as their show steers into its home stretch, an eight-episode season broken up into three chunks, with the first dropping on Thanksgiving eve. “Stranger Things” is a story about children — and, more than that, the innocence of childhood, pitting a scrappy gang of bike-riding Dungeons & Dragons nerds against misguided adults who mess around with forces they don’t understand — that’s gone on long enough to see its cast grow up, with all the tensions that come with that glaring contrast.
The list of data points is long. Millie Bobby Brown, who broke out as the telekinetic, “E.T.”-esque Eleven, is now the married mother of an adopted baby girl. Voices have dropped; IMDb pages have lengthened. For some of the series leads, the time between their casting and the finale’s premiere will encompass more than half their lives. But what matters to this reviewer is how these changes manifest in the show — or rather, don’t. The truth is that “Stranger Things” itself has not reflected its stars’ obvious maturation with an accompanying complexity. All of “Stranger Things” is an exercise in nostalgia. In Season 5, the show now seems to pine not just for the neon hues and synth-driven pop of the 1980s it conjures so evocatively, but for a simpler time in its own run that can’t be brought back, no matter how high the budget. Though if anything, “Stranger Things” has only gotten less rough-edged over time. Remember when Hopper (David Harbour) was an alcoholic who smoked?
The four episodes that comprise Volume 1 unsurprisingly walk back the Season 4 cliffhanger. Hawkins, Indiana, has not turned into a hellscape of Demogorgons and slimy vines. Instead, the town has been put under military quarantine, occupied by the same foolhardy industrial complex that started this whole mess in the first place. With Matthew Modine’s Dr. Brenner now dead, the deep state’s latest ambassador is Dr. Kay (Linda Hamilton), a scientist and officer who commands an entire base constructed within the Upside Down. Uncle Sam has stapled over most of Vecna’s rifts with crude metal plates, but left just enough open to use for his own ends.
This human-made bubble makes Season 5 more geographically focused than its predecessor, which put thousands of miles between groups of the protagonists. That pays off in more concise run times than the bloat of Season 4, yet the return to Hawkins underlines the familiarity of the setups. In lieu of a mall, this year’s throwback locale is a radio station staffed by lovable burnouts Robin (Maya Hawke) and Steve (Joe Keery), who use the airwaves to send coded messages to their compatriots. The team once again splits up in the name of completing a sequence of self-assigned side quests before inevitably reuniting later in the season. Steve, his ex-girlfriend Nancy (Natalia Dyer) and her current boyfriend Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) continue to litigate their series-long love triangle. The same pieces are on the board, in only slightly different configurations.
Season 5 shows us more of the Upside Down, and at a greater scale, than “Stranger Things” ever has before. Hopper embarks on his regular patrol of its terrain to search for Vecna, who’s disappeared since he was injured in the Season 4 finale, and his adopted daughter Eleven joins soon after; the pair remain there for the duration of Volume 1. These scenes showcase the production’s increasing technical abilities, realizing this other world more immersively than ever. But after last season’s revelation that Vecna governs the Upside Down and controls its inhabitants via hive mind, Season 5 hasn’t yet added to our understanding of the realm, either in mechanics or as metaphor. Only the scope changes, not the approach. The “Stranger Things” version of evolution is that our heroes now use radio waves, not D&D creatures, as their analogy of choice for sussing out how the Upside Down functions where science could not. Once, these frameworks were endearing instances of middle-schoolers making sense of the nonsensical. Coming from actors mostly old enough to be college graduates, the relative haziness of the world-building starts to peek through.
To the extent “Stranger Things” conveys its main characters’ expanding emotional lives as they plunge ever further into adolescence, it’s through Vecna’s original prey Will Byers (Noah Schnapp), who comes to terms with his homosexuality in tandem with his enduring connection to the Upside Down. Will bonds with Robin, the only other queer person he knows, over his fear and uncertainty. Robin’s advice mostly boils down to “be yourself” platitudes, yet Hawke — who quite literally has stardom in her blood — sells them.
But in lieu of giving a similar treatment to the rest of the Hellfire Club, “Stranger Things” shows its hand by effectively swapping them for a new generation of kids who have the cuteness factor they used to. Holly Wheeler (Nell Fisher), the baby sister of Nancy and Mike (Finn Wolfhard), gains new prominence as the latest Hawkins resident caught in the clutches of the paranormal. Her classmate Derek Turnbow (Jake Connelly), derided by his peers as “Dipshit Derek,” provides some of the comic relief Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) once did. It’s no coincidence Fisher and Connelly are basically the same age their older castmates were back in 2016, when “Stranger Things” first set the world on fire. Holly’s interpretive lens of choice is “A Wrinkle in Time,” not a fantasy role-playing game, but she’s another kid confronting the unknown using the tools at her disposal, with grown-ups more a hindrance than a help.
As it hurtles toward a final showdown with Vecna, “Stranger Things” is resetting the clock rather than riding its forward momentum. The Duffers have always worn their influences with pride, and the specters of Steven Spielberg and Stephen King helped jump-start the series into a phenomenon. But in its last hours, “Stranger Things” remains primarily pastiche, so indebted to inherited archetypes (mad scientist, reformed bully) and references (The Clash, Peanut Butter Boppers) that its main cultural impact comes from extratextual elements like casting and the ascendance of Netflix. By declining to enrich its characters as they age, “Stranger Things” traps itself in arrested development. When you get bigger without going deeper, you end up stretched thin.