Summary
Stranger Things Season 5 remains emotionally and adrenally compelling in Volume 1, despite its general sense of bloat, the distracting ageing of the cast, and unprecedented levels of anticipation.
Stranger Things is synonymous with Netflix. It has been the crown jewel in the streamer’s offerings since it debuted in 2016, and has surely turned more curious TV fans into paying subscribers than any other single show. It has been airing for almost a decade, and in that time has fuelled outlandish fan theories, built several careers, and become a benchmark for what is feasible production-wise in a streaming series. There’s nothing quite like it, and with Season 5 being its swansong, it stands to reason that it is being treated with all the fanfare it deserves.
But don’t let this distract from the elephants in the room. A decade is an obnoxiously long time to wait for only five seasons to play out, and the three-and-a-half-year wait between the end of Season 4 and the premiere of Season 5 has dampened a lot of enthusiasm for the denouement. That the ending has been divided into three parts, with Volume 1 consisting of only four episodes, builds annoyance more than anticipation, even though three of those episodes are feature-length and the fourth is pretty close. Unavoidable, too, is the fact that the cast ageing out of their high-schooler parts has given the whole thing a completely different texture, and requires a suspension of disbelief that some won’t be able to overcome.
And yet it’s still pretty brilliant.
Matt and Ross Duffer are very good at this. They understand these characters, they get the setting, and they know how to put an audience through the wringer, both emotionally and adrenally. It does, of course, help that Netflix has given them – if reports are to be believed – $60 million an episode to make this swansong as big and bombastic as possible, but I think it’d be disingenuous to suggest that the lavish VFX are the only thing going on here.
Picking up 18 months after the end of Season 4 and four years after the start of Season 1 – the events of which are as important now as they were then, so brush up on your lore if you need to – Volume 1 of Season 5 finds Hawkins, Indiana, under a military quarantine after Vecna’s rampage. Nobody is allowed in or out, and certain parts of the town are stringently off-limits, meaning that the core characters are having to comb the Upside-Down for evidence of Vecna’s survival by sneaking Hopper (David Harbour) into their expeditions whenever he isn’t training Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) to eventually go toe to toe with Vecna once again.
All the returning cast – arguably too many of them – are back, many with their own attendant subplots. Wildly underused is fan-favourite Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), who is still reeling from the death of Eddie but spends most of his time here surly and sidelined, and Steve (Joe Keery) and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) feel underserved also. But this is to make room for more specific subplots involving Will (Noah Schnapp) and Robin (Maya Hawke), who form an unlikely pairing as their respective battles not just with cosmic evil but their own sexualities dovetail in unexpected and powerful ways.
I’ll say nothing else about the plot, since that’d be telling, but just know that it’s more of the same in a larger portion. This is no bad thing, though the portion is sometimes too large to comfortably consume. I’m not a huge fan of episodes of this length, especially in a show so eminently bingeable, and you can sometimes feel the runtimes more than you’d like. But the level of detail and polish is undeniably stellar, with everything from outfits and haircuts to of-the-era pop needledrops – Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” has some real rivals here – is just exquisite. If nothing else, Stranger Things has always been a labour of love, and while its scale might have become ungainly, it still has that same earnest, nostalgic heart.
It also does a pretty good job of acknowledging the increasing age of the actors without doing so explicitly. Attention is drawn to how much bigger and more confident they suddenly seem; they rarely act like children, or are treated like them, and when they are, they make a case for their own maturity. It might not make sense in terms of the show’s own internal timeline, but it helps to alleviate some of the weirdness of watching what are obviously grown men struggle to interact with anyone outside of the framework of Dungeons & Dragons.
Ultimately, Stranger Things Season 5, Volume 1 is setting the table for the three-part Volume 2 and the two-hour special that’ll conclude the saga. The premiere is almost all setup, but things really kick into a higher gear in Episode 2, and continue like that through to a rather brilliant all-action mid-season finale. Somehow, however improbably, it remains emotionally resonant, smart, and compelling, despite the hype and the bloat having seemingly exceeded manageable levels. And after waiting so long for this climactic outing, Volume 2 doesn’t seem so far away.
