Summary
Stranger Things Season 5 kicks off impressively in “Chapter One: The Crawl”, which can’t escape an overlong runtime, but settles into its usual rhythms with surprising ease, despite the long gap between seasons and the increased age of the cast.
It takes an effort to remember this now since it was roughly a lifetime ago, but the abduction of Will Byers in Season 1 of Stranger Things remains the most important component of the narrative. This is, one suspects, why the Season 4 premiere, “Chapter One: The Crawl”, opens with a reminder of it, albeit one given a bit more pizazz by a now-absurd VFX budget and a multi-year production cycle. But the cliff notes are the same. The Demogorgon – how quaint that that was once the worst thing these “kids” had to worry about – snatched Will while he was hiding out in the Upside-Down singing “Should I Stay or Should I Go” by The Clash, and delivered him to Vecna, who promises him they’ll do beautiful things together.
One suspects that Vecna probably wasn’t anticipating this type of timeline. In 1987, when the rest of the action takes place, four years have passed, but Will is roughly 37 years of age. You don’t need me to reiterate how much older everyone looks. The show doesn’t acknowledge it explicitly in any way, but there’s a tacit acknowledgement. Nobody really acts like a kid now, even in the scenes set in high school. It’s like Sam Raimi casting a mortgage-paying Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man. Just roll with it.
Anyway, following the events of the Season 4 finale, Hawkins, Indiana, remains under strict military quarantine. The fissures in the earth have been haphazardly patched up by metal plates that the locals now use as a sledging track; recent events are being explained away as heretofore unseen natural phenomena, regular health checks are mandatory, and compliance is implied. The residents – aside from the core group, obviously – seem to be doing okay in their less-than-ideal circumstances, but most of them don’t know that there’s a very active resistance movement operating in the town’s margins.
Robin, assisted by Steve, hosts a morning show on WSQK, the local network that Nancy is now the manager of, so the broadcast – it’s called The Morning Squawk – is used to pass around coded information that allows the usual gang to coordinate “Crawls”, as in “dungeon crawls”, as in, “you haven’t forgotten about Dungeons & Dragons, have you?”. The Crawls require a lot of precise information since they involve Hopper sneaking into the Upside Down via the portal contained in the Mac-Z (Military Access Control Zone), aka the Big Mac, which the military is burning their way through periodically in events called, somewhat uncreatively, “Burns”.
The idea is to comb each zone of the Upside-Down in order to confirm once and for all that Vecna is dead, but nobody really seems to believe this, least of all Dustin, who is entirely focused on revenge for Eddie’s death and repairing his reputation posthumously, since his name is still mud at school and Dustin is being viciously bullied for continuing to rep the Hellfire Club. The core kids standing up to the bullies – on account of all now being grown men – is one of the funny ways that Stranger Things hand-waves the age issue away.
Within this new normal, a lot of things are the same. Steve and Jonathan are still openly pining and competing for Nancy’s affections, and Hopper and Joyce are still preparing Eleven for an inevitable psychic confrontation that she needs to be ready for, but they both love her too much to let her engage in prematurely. Robin is now dating Vickie, and Murray is posing as a delivery driver to sneak supplies and intelligence through the military quarantine.
Thus far, Hopper has completed thirty Crawls, guided by the others from the Rightside-Up, but has found no sign of Vecna. Eleven can’t detect him. Will can’t feel him explicitly (but does have a couple of twinges). Nobody quite believes he’s really gone, though, and none of them can move on unless it’s confirmed. Plus, the military is conducting large-scale, secretive operations in the Upside-Down, and it must be for a reason. The obvious problem here is that if Hop encounters Vecna without Eleven, whom he won’t allow to accompany him on the Crawls, even though she has mastered his training circuit, he’s going to be bang in trouble.
Needless to say, Stranger Things Season 5, Episode 1 kicks into gear during the latest Crawl. With Dustin missing after being assaulted by Andy and the rest of his bullies at Eddie’s grave, Steve and Jonathan are monitoring Hopper’s progress from the surface. But this time, something goes wrong. Hopper is attacked and chased by a Demogorgon, causing the truck to crash and forcing him to flee into the woods. And Will collapses, sensing Vecna. The Demogorgon seems to be heading for Nancy’s house.
“Chapter One: The Crawl” ends back at the Wheeler house, with Holly, who now has an imaginary friend named Mr. Whatsit who only she can see and who warns her about monsters in Hawkins – uh-oh – noticing widening cracks in her ceiling as the Demogorgon breaks in.
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