Alright! Today I'm reviewing the fifth and final season of Stranger Things, which sees our main characters Eleven, Will, Robin, Nancy, Jonathan, Mike, Lucas, Dustin, Steve Harrington, Hopper, Joyce, Max, Murray, Mike's mom, Erica, Holly, Vickie, Eight, and Derek go up against Vecna and the U.S. military to save 12 children from being used to open a wormhole to another dimension. Coming three years after season four's amazing cliffhanger, Stranger Things 5 is an epic battle for peace in the Upside Down.
Right off the bat, we can tell one of the most immediate problems with Stranger Things 5: The astounding surplus of characters. Even without getting into how the characters are used, 19 protagonists is hard to balance well, if at all. You also have to consider the fact that there are two primary villains and ten children to rescue, and... well, let's just say that the intro is a bit crowded with text boxes. On one hand, the surplus comes from a natural roster expansion after five seasons, but on the other hand, it took 25 Avengers to take down Thanos. 19 is a lot.
The season is also incapable of giving all of them meaningful roles or meaningful payoffs; of the 19 protagonists, there are 4 actual protagonists: Will, Robin, Holly, and Max. Everyone else is there to a) cause fleeting parental drama (Hopper, Eleven, Joyce, and Karen), b) shout exposition (Lucas, Dustin, Steve, Eight, Robin), or c) be there (Nancy, Jonathan, Mike, Erica, Vickie). Murray gets his own special category, d), because his role is to tell jokes that don't land, and Derek, e), is there to be delightful.
This is all to say I wasn't entirely satisfied with how the characters were written this season: Mike and Eleven's relationship barely factors into the story, Mike and Nancy's sibling relationship has zero weight despite their dad dying (?), the Dustin and Steve drama was forced, Hopper is reduced to "overprotective dad" for the 4th consecutive season, Suzie and Enzo are forgotten, Joyce has little to do other than look shaken and her relationship with Jonathan is nonexistent, Eleven is massively depowered, Linda Hamilton is there mostly because Dr. Brenner died, and the Steve/Nancy/Jonathan love triangle was brought back despite being resolved in season three. Meanwhile, Max is stuck in Vecna's mind to give a John Falstaff amount of dialogue, and Vecna is given a human form because his monster design is still stupid.
At the end of the day, it feels like only two people really progressed this season: The first is Will Byers, who, after being sidelined for four seasons, is given the center spotlight and is revealed to have mind powers similar to Eleven's in one of the coolest moments of the season; he proceeds to never use these amazing powers. You might think that his mental link to Vecna could prove interesting, a fun little version of Harry and Voldemort's dynamic in The Deathly Hallows; this is true for an episode, then the story is dropped entirely. At the end of the day, Will Byers is once again a plot device instead of a character.
So, who is Stranger Things 5 about? If the entire main cast is sidelined/stuck in the same rut, what are these overly long episodes even about? Enter Holly Wheeler. With more screentime than any other character this season, Mike and Nancy's canonically 7-year-old sister is suddenly aged up to 14. She's the new object of Vecna's attention and instrumental in his plans to open a wormhole to a dark dimsenion, and, once kidnapped, she meets up with Max and serves as the audience substitute so we can be explained every single thing about Vecna's mindscape and how it works.
Sidebar, but it's a lot more fun to discover these things with the characters than to have a preestablished exposition mouthpiece, but I digress (Imagine if the mystery aspect of S1 was completely undone because half of the show was Dr. Brenner explaining the Upside Down to his staff. That's kinda what it's like).
Even worse is that, when the characters do not know what is happening, their first guess is always spot-on. Even when it requires leaps of logic, unproven interdimensional wormhole science, and massive stipulations that fill in more blanks than the Epstein Files has, the characters always guess exactly what Vecna's next move is and how to stop it. Even Steve Harrington, ex-Scoops Ahoy employee and radio jockey, is able to break the case of the wormhole using a slinky. These banal and uninteresting scenes of dialogue go on for far too long, with episode seven being entirely dedicated to drafting a plan to defeat Vecna - and that episode's over an hour long, mind you.
An interesting comparison I point is to The Penguin, which I watched between the release of Vol. 2 and Vol. 3. In The Penguin, I was amazed at just how much ground every individual episode covered. Things I thought would take the entire episode dramatically explode halfway through, and the intense gang war takes an entirely new direction afterwards. I was consistently amazed by how much episodes could do with just 20 minutes left, as compared to Stranger Things 5, where I was just consistently amazed that episodes still had 20 minutes left.
Some of this is due to the inane plotting. After Stranger Things 4's excellent cliffhanger ending, in which the Upside Down is actively leaking into the real world, Stranger Things 5 covers up the patches, takes away Eleven's increasing power levels, and more or less throws away everything ST4 sets up. They finally dropped the Russia sideplot after it derailed the last two seasons, but the U.S. military subplot kicks into full gear as Hopkins is in a full government lockdown. For whatever reason, they didn't evacuate the town (Which would have been much easier, simpler, and more realistic), but they instead place metal shingling on the literal rifts in reality, which works somehow, and force everyone to live under constant supervision. But not so much supervision that a group of 19 teenagers is impossible to find. Even worse is that all of this has zero resolution in the finale - the military just lets the group go, even after they kill several armed servicemen. Should it have ended like Seinfeld? Probably not, but they could have gone that direction.
This aforementioned cliffhanger is part of the problem here. As a disclaimer, before the disregard of "fan expectations" kicks in, I don't think it's terrible to be disappointed when something the show has set up isn't matched. "Fan expectations" for The Last Jedi is one thing - yeah, Rey Kenobi would have been a cool set up, but it's not like that was ever foreshadowed - but Stranger Things 4 directly setting up Weirdmaggeddon and season five placing shingles on it was deeply disappointing, especially when a full-scale underground war between the Upside Down and the main characters would have been infinitely more interesting than what we got.
Another major defect of Stranger Things 5 is the acting. Normally, I don't like to criticize the acting performances since a lot of things go into that - Poor writing can kill an otherwise superb actor, bad editing can neutralize a good performance, and bad direction can change the tone of a scene. That being said, there are some truly unimpressive line deliveries, emotional moments that fall completely flat, and genuinely awful acting going on from a cast that is clearly tired of the show. While our theatre kids pull through alright, Noah Schnapp, Millie Bobby Brown, and Finn Wolfhard give bad performances around the board this season. The entire cast looks "over it." The younger cast, however, are keenly aware that they are starring in the biggest Netflix show of all time and are consequently amazing, so Nell Fisher and Jake Connelly are the decided MVPs of this season. And it goes without saying that Jamie Campbell Bower and Maya Hawke were both superb, even when the writing wasn't great.
The bad dialogue, pacing, and acting comes to a boil in the penultimate episode, "The Bridge." While drafting the final plan, Will Byers is about to come out to his mother when his best friend (and former crush) Mike interrupts. He sees that they're busy, says he'll come back, and Will stands up and says "No. Everyone needs to hear this." Then the entire cast gathers and Will comes out of the closet in an unintentionally hilarious scene.
The issues with this - not with him being gay, cut through the noise, they've been hinting at this ever since the pilot - come because the whole thing is overly long and misplaced. The six-minute long scene comes just moments after they determine the entire world is about to end and the team drafts a plan to stop Vecna, meaning the episode feels like it hit a monumental snag. Moreover, the setup of the scene is ridiculous, given that the entire cast is there, including people with whom Will has never interacted with. If it was just his immediate family, his five best friends, his adopted sister Eleven, and Robin, it would have been much more intimate and personal. Instead, Eight, Murray, Hopper, Vickie, and his sixth grade science teacher are there for (?) reasons. Added onto this is the corny dialogue poorly delivered by Noah Schnapp and Will's character motivation being that Vecna might out him, a conversation we never see and a tactic Vecna doesn't ultimately end up using. It's overly corny, horribly lit, and is only saved by Charlie Heaton and Maya Hawke's reactions. Speaking of which, this is one of the only times this season that Jonathan and Will act like brothers, so that was nice to see.
The other grand emotional payoff of the series was supposed to be the final battle against Vecna in the ultimate episode, "Rightside Up." While I still don't like the season four retcon of having the Upside Down be under the control of 01, they admittedly spent a ton of time fitting Henry Creel in to the Stranger Things lore, so it's not too bad. The finale, however, had a lot of stuff I wasn't a fan of, the biggest being just how ugly it was.
And that brings us to how ugly Stranger Things 5 was. After four seasons of amazing cinematography, atmospheric set design, and physical props, Stranger Things takes an unprecedented nosedive in visual quality. Green screens, the inescapable orangescape of the 2020s, terrible lighting, and a complete dessacration of the slimy nature of the Upside Down all greatly hinder the season from making it scary. In the first few seasons, the Upside Down is a terrifying woodland full of living vines, disturbing bubbles, the only inhabitants are monstruous demogorgons, and the weather is always snowy, the peaceful phenomenon eerily at odds with the violent nature of the parallel world. In season five, Steve drives a truck into the Upside Down, demogorgons are never seen, and people loudly talk in the woods... it's possibly the least scary setting of the season.
And, after our main cast gets through the Upside Down, we get to the pocket dimension where Vecna is hiding, a yellow hellscape ripped out of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. The attached image is all I really need to say about it.
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| Like... how is this Stranger Things? |
It is ugly. It would be ugly in any series, but coming from Stranger Things, which had previously prided itself on unfamiliar and terrifying mystery, the open world RPG is a steep fall from grace. The main cast finds Vecna and the Mind Flayer (Which, after being sidelined for two seasons, makes it's Snyder-esque return), Lucas shoots it with a slingshot, Eleven jumps in, stretches her hand, gets a nosebleed, and the villain dies... meaning that Stranger Things 5 ends like Stranger Things always does. While the prior seasons had always upped the anti either in scale or emotion, S5 feels underbaked, with the final fight lasting less time than Will's coming out scene and covering the characters in no shortage of plot armor.
However, there were two saving graces for the finale - the first is the montage that plays as Vecna is beheaded by Joyce after an unbelievably corny F-bomb. The camera shows every character and then flashes back to a lost comrade from the earlier seasons. I wasn't expecting it, but the archival footage of Barb/Samwise/Billy/Eddie was an amazing way to tie the series together. Then there's over an hour of epilogue, the worst acted moment of the season between Finn Wolfhard and Millie Bobby Brown, and the series ends.
I have to give Stranger Things 5 credit where credit is due. Seeing the resolutions for every character was satisfying and very emotional, and seeing the party play one final game of D&D while reminiscing about the good ol' days was an emotional moment. The ending to the series (reminiscent of Cheers) has everyone place their D&D book on the shelf and walk upstairs like a curtain call, leaving Mike for last. He starts weeping as he sees all of the books together, goes upstairs, and is rushed past by Holly, Derick, and their friends as they sit down for their very own session. And thus the journey continues!
There's something to be said for sticking the landing. Maybe the final season wasn't great, maybe it was full of bad CGI, plot holes, and bad acting, but at the end of the day, the last five minutes are the perfect place to leave our memory of the characters. It's the sort of ending we always wanted from the show, and it's crazy to think about how Stranger Things, after nine years of cultural relativity, is now a relic of the past. It's worth the wait and the watch, although one can't help but think about what Stranger Things might have been if they had stuck with the vibes of season one or continued making yearly seasons.
Overall, I give Stranger Things 5 a 6/10. "Overlong, underbaked, rushed and yet with no momentum, Stranger Things 5 does the bare minimum to provide a satisfactory end to the most beloved Netflix original."
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