is a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.
It has been a decade since the Stranger Things phenomenon began, and the Duffer brothers had had ample time to craft a strong finish to their breakout hit series. But the beginning of the show’s fifth and final season feels like a frantic race to the end.
While Stranger Things wasn’t Netflix’s first breakout hit, it catapulted the streamer to a new level of pop cultural prominence by telling a wildly captivating story that got everyone talking. Modern day nostalgia for the ‘80s never really went away, but Stranger Things kicked off a new wave of shows and movies that made it feel like other studios were doing everything in their power to re-create the Duffer Brothers’ success. Stranger Things was a momentous phenomenon that didn’t show many signs of losing steam over the course of its first few seasons.
By season 4, though, the show’s new episodes were releasing at a much slower rate thanks to production delays caused by the covid-19 pandemic. While the larger Stranger Things franchise was growing with a stage show and plans for an animated spinoff, after the 2023 writers strike led to even more delays, it felt like Netflix might have a tough time getting everyone excited to go back to Hawkins for the core series’ final season.
In the first four episodes of Stranger Things 5, you can feel the Duffer Brothers trying to address past production issues that were beyond their control while also exploring narrative ideas they had mapped out long before the series began airing. Though this season picks right back up where the last left off, it’s peppered with details that emphasize how much time has passed in the real world since we last saw these characters.
The younger cast looks and feels much older in ways that can’t exactly be attributed to sudden growth spurts. And characters have a tendency to speak to each other in quippy bits of exposition as if they know that people who need their memories jogged are watching. Those elements of Stranger Things 5 call for a suspension of disbelief that feels reasonable given all the external factors that kept this season from debuting more quickly.
Though a lot has changed about Hawkins in the months since it was almost entirely torn apart by the Upside Down, most people are still able to go about their everyday lives. Everyone remembers how earth-shaking interdimensional energy cracked the streets wide open. But they try not to think about what went down now that the damage has been mostly covered with massive sheets of metal.
Aside from the compulsory medical checkups and a military-enforced quarantine that keeps civilians from leaving town, things feel relatively normal to people unfamiliar with Vecna.
(Jamie Campbell Bower) and his many Demogorgons. But for Eleven / Jane (Millie Bobby Brown), Hopper (David Harbour), and the rest of their crew, the unnatural calm is a sign of how much more dangerous things are about to become.
In order to remind you how this winding story began and to emphasize what kinds of monsters Stranger Things‘ heroes are up against, the new season spends much more time with Will Byers (Noah Schnapp). Will insists on playing a larger role in the teens’ plans to take their fight to Vecna in the present, but the show also jumps back to the past to explore what happened to the boy when he was first dragged into the Upside Down in season one. As disturbing (in a good way) and impressive as many of this season’s otherworldly set pieces and VFX are, the Will-focused flashbacks featuring a new child actor superimposed with Schnapp’s de-aged face undercut some of the show’s fantasy. Similar to the show’s previous experiments in de-aging its quickly growing stars, the effect doesn’t quite work on a visual level. But it does give you a sense that the Duffers really want this season to feel like it’s bringing certain characters’ stories full circle.
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