Stranger Things: S5 [2025]
“This place, this world… it’s a prison…”
10-years in the making, Stranger Things has finally come to an end [barring the inevitable prequels, spinoffs, and weird, between-season movies of course…]. Eleven must face her ultimate test, Joyce and Hopper have to watch the children they’ve raised take on dangers larger than ever before, and together, everyone you’ve come to know, love, and applaud will suffer through a certain Byers telling their deepest, darkest secret in the goofiest way possible.
Does this long-running, nerds-made-cool series use its 10-hour final season for good, or does it only use it for views? I guess there’s only one way to find out… [or two if you’ve already looked at my score].
With the disappearance of Vecna and a cataclysm that’s nearly ripped Hawkins asunder, the gang now has to avoid military patrols while they search for their accursed adversary, hoping to stop him before he can recover and unleash his vicious, final plot.
Season 5 of Stranger Things continues the normal cadence of the series and comes three years after its predecessor [Plenty of time for development… Right? RIGHT??]. Following in the footsteps of Season 4, 5’s episodes are all at least an hour long, with the finale being over 2… And I’m really not sure why that is. Ever since Season 1’s launch in the prehistory days of 2016, Stranger Things has had a great story to tell, but has never really been sure how to tell it. While S1 suffers from this the least, even it has some wishy-washy storytelling that leans towards “this is convenient for the plot” more than “this is logical and meaningful” — something that gets worse and worse as the show goes on, and becomes an unshakeable issue here, in S5. I recently watched a supercut of Obi-Wan Kenobi that takes the 7ish-hour runtime of the show and condenses it all into just 2.5, without losing a single piece of context, narrative, or pacing. It’s a significant improvement over the aired version in many ways, and something that [though it certainly wouldn’t save S5] would help this experience immensely, because… to call every single one of these episodes mostly “barren”, “desolate”, or “vacuous” would be a disservice to the use of interesting vocabulary, and I cannot for the life of me figure out how the showrunners crammed so little narrative into so large a space. Here I am only a few hours after finishing the season, and — outside the last moments of the finale — I can’t recall nearly anything of import that happened during the 620-minutes it was on my screen. It would be impressive if it wasn’t so annoying, but I guess you have to spend daddy-Netflix’s money somehow 🤷🤷🤷
In many technical aspects, Stranger Things: S5 is very much like its former seasons as well… Which is to say that, while the physical sets themselves look excellent, the lighting and post-editing give the entire production a glossy, plastic sheen that makes it all seem so cheap and fake that it becomes difficult to criticize, because you almost feel like you’re watching something actually from the 80’s. It’s so cheap and fake, in fact, that I was reminded of some early 00’s music videos whom, upon trying to remember the songs, I found others had already compared to one particular landscape. This look is so ubiquitous throughout the season that, had I not watched the follow-up documentary, One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things 5 [which I do, entirely non-cynically, recommend you watch], this review would have very confidently said that nearly every set, backdrop, interior, and environment was entirely made inside a computer from 1998, and that almost nothing was done practically. I’m glad to be both wrong, and to have seen some of the truly amazing effort that went into creating some of these scenes… But I wish the post-production crew hadn’t made everything look so horrible.
Who cares about long runtimes and bad effects though, this is TV. All we care about are meaningful stories, moving characters, and tight action… Right? Well… I have both good and bad news in those departments as well.
I’ll start with the good news:
Despite all I’ve already mentioned [and all I’ll likely mention below] the final epilogue of the show made me cry when it happened, made me cry when I talked about the changes I would have made afterwards, and made me cry when they recap it by doing a dry-read of the script during the documentary. For anyone who’s ever experienced the magic of tabletop roleplaying games, who grew up with these kids through this adventure, or who’s simply found more of their family than they’ve been born with, the way that Stranger Things simultaneously closes and breaks its sacred circle within its final moments is… Crushing in all the right ways.
I believe.
Now the rest of the news:
Basically everything else about this season sucks-ass.
From military operatives leaving known associates of their target [Eleven] to simply roam freely without ANY sort of surveillance, to horrifically cornball dialogue, to characters whose attitudes, demeanors, and choices are either not justified at all, or justified so poorly that they become distracting, Stranger Things: S5’s cringe-timewasting is rivaled only by that of S3’s… But at least that season didn’t last as long [120-minutes shorter, for those interested]. I’m reviewing the Google recaps of each episode now because, as mentioned above, I [without hyperbole] cannot remember anything outside of specifically key events, despite having just spent the last few days watching one or two episodes a piece… And it’s barely helping. I know I already talked about that, it’s just difficult to get past how something can be so empty… But I also think it’s a great way to summarize almost every aspect of what the Duffer brothers and Netflix have brought to the table with this half-inspired, contract-fulfilling conclusion to a decade of television. Outside of a genuinely cool oner during EP4, the show is just… Empty. An entirely empty performance by Linda Hamilton due to her being thrust into an entirely empty character. An entirely empty epilogue for a certain mom because of an entirely empty decision made back in S3 surrounding everyone’s favorite chief of police. An entirely empty villain reveal because of an entirely empty nine-fucking-hours that it took to get there… Everything in S5 is just so e m p t y.
Not only are we forced to face all of this void, but the show can’t even decide what to call back from previous seasons, when to do it, or who/ what anyone cares about in terms of canon. Apparently the Upside Down isn’t toxic anymore — nor is [conveniently] the [spoilers] brand-new-environment-that-the-show-never-even-pretends-to-hint-at-until-the-second-it’s-revealed, the “Abyss”. A character the writers forgot about for two-and-a-half seasons [that we neither forgot about, nor liked] comes back and does… Absolutely nothing except make someone else’s ending entirely worse and entirely meaningless for absolutely no reason at all. And, in what I think is one of the best examples of the show’s piss-poor, shallow, “please don’t think about this at all” storytelling [this is going to be a little spoilery, but I’m going to be as vague <and concise> as possible]:
Joyce, at the near-end of all things, delivers the accidentally funny line,
“You fucked with the wrong family,” *cue laugh track cheers from the audience
Before proceeding to brutalize a character who we’ve literally just learned has been manipulated by a larger force for the entire show, while we get flashbacks of the the sad and scary things our heroes have gone through at said “villain’s” hand. Ignoring entirely the massive narrative miss by not allowing this character to break free of said manipulation in their final moments by facing their inner turmoil — something we experience not one, but two characters do this season —, it’s incredibly awkward for the show to celebrate the violent murder of a person who, since they were an actual child, has been cajoled by a cosmic force whose only goal has been the wholesale destruction of humankind.
But whatever, stranger things have happened.
People say I’m too negative. I just think I’m honest.
There’s a ton more to pick at with this show — like how El’s entire source of power is her anger [which feels like a weird message] and how giving her a boost through her love for Mike-and-Co. instead would have separated her from Vecna in an interesting [albeit corn] way, or how quickly everyone seems to forget that Hopper, Nancy, and the rest of the gang murder many-several HUMAN BEINGS during their various searches this season [and others]. Why are there [spoilers] no demo-anything in the Abyss despite Vecna mind-invading Will and seeing their plan? Why a hundred other irritating things that had me throwing my hands up at the TV this week? — but I don’t want to get any more ranty, and I do want to end this on a positive.
Despite all I said above, and despite all the changes I would have made [both big and small], the final epilogue of Season 5 presents such a powerful passing-of-the-torch moment that I can’t help but feel there was at least some value in the thousands of minutes I’ve put into this ragtag group of outcasts over the years. I don’t think any show has tackled tabletop roleplaying quite the way that Stranger Things has, and — as someone whose social life, hobbies, and interests have been massively shaped by his experiences around these games — I am, and will forever be, touched by all things kids on bikes, Dungeons and Dragons, or driven by the phrase “what do you do”.
At its most-often, this is a show no more offensive or stupid than anything else out there but, at its strongest… Stranger Things [even parts of the dog-water-drivel that is this final season], is nothing if not a great expression of the many forces that hold my own world together nearly every day.
“I asked if you wanted to be my friend. And you said yes. You said yes… It was the best thing I’ve ever done.”
Let’s also not fail to mention the most important thing that Season 5 has brought to the world, and that’s a new appreciation for all things Game of Thrones: Season 8.
