‘Stranger Things’ Season 5, Vol. 1 review: Rough start to end of Netflix series

TV review

It’s a strange thing to be nostalgic for the early days of a series like “Stranger Things.” 

The initially engaging sci-fi fantasy that premiered in 2016 on Netflix (but now feels like it’s been dragging on for far longer than that) has always served up heapings of nostalgia, from Steven Spielberg’s classic films — whose imagery and ideas were riffed on to largely charming results — to Kate Bush’s enduring song “Running Up That Hill.” Yet as the supernatural series grew bigger and bigger, leaving behind the fictional setting of Hawkins, Ind., before always somehow returning to it, there’s been an unshakable sense that the charms it once had were getting lost. The show may be set in the 1980s, but its struggles are indicative of a modern entertainment landscape driven by empty spectacle at the expense of emotion. In the first part of this fifth and final season, this reaches a breaking point when whatever small remaining promise the show had very nearly shatters before your eyes.

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Picking back up in the fall of 1987, with Hawkins under strict military quarantine as the already tenuous barrier between our world and the alternate dimension that is The Upside Down grows even thinner, everything and nothing has changed. All of the surviving characters, such as Joyce (Winona Ryder), Jim (David Harbour), Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), have returned with one goal: to find and kill the villainous being Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower), whose menacing reveal in the last season was one of its few highlights.

This season, all roads once more lead back to Vecna, with the crew having to navigate their various interpersonal conflicts, hide out from the military that again has its own nefarious motivations and eventually do battle with the interdimensional being that seems behind almost everything. If this sounds like it’s a lot, just wait until you hear the characters repeatedly explain this all to you. 

In scene after scene, the cast struggles to get out dialogue that never feels like something an actual person would say. More than any other season before it, this one soon becomes painfully bogged down in spelling out character motivations, basic narrative developments and the rules of its world. Like an increasing number of recent streaming shows, it feels written for an audience that is only half paying attention and ultimately punishes those who are following each stilted sentence. For every more playful character moment we get, with Maya Hawke’s Robin remaining a scene-stealer, there are far too many that lean on Noah Schnapp’s Will to awkwardly explain to us what is going on. It’s a bold choice to have so much of the show hinge on him when he’s grown into being the least confident and stiffest of the cast.

Enough sporadically entertaining sequences make up for this in fits and starts, such as a “Home Alone”-esque battle with a Demogorgon that shines because of how relatively small-scale it is. Unfortunately, as each episode’s runtime begins to grow, the show starts to drive us headlong toward a dull mess of CGI spectacle that’s both bigger and more banal. Not only is there just no weight to the characters’ actions, but the emotional stakes are undercut by how unreal it all looks. It felt like the show used to have something approaching ideas. Now? All it has is noise. When it throws out twists, they land with a dull thud, even when they take us back into better seasons. No matter how often the characters desperately raise their arms to use telekinetic powers, they’re unable to prevent the earned emotion “Stranger Things” had from slipping away. 

There is still plenty of room for the series to pull off a big finale as four feature-length episodes remain, but the season’s reliance on empty spectacle in this first part doesn’t inspire confidence. As “Stranger Things” leans into that spectacle, the sincere emotional beats from Season 1, when Peter Gabriel’s cover of “Heroes” was first used, are harder to come by. When Gabriel’s cover was again used at the end of Season 3, it seemed to indicate that the show was attempting a reset, trying to bring the show back to a more grounded, engaging experience where it didn’t feel like everything was hurtling toward a mind-numbingly special effects mess. Now, instead of being a charming cover of the high highs of a Spielberg movie, “Stranger Things” plays more like a closed loop that merely refers back to its better days. All that’s left to be strangely nostalgic for is the show’s beginning nearly a decade ago.

“Stranger Things” Season 5, Vol. 1
The first four episodes of the final season are now available to stream on Netflix. Episodes 5-7 premiere Dec. 25, and the finale premieres Dec. 31.

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