Netflix Sci-Fi Horror Stumbles On

Midway through the latest run of Stranger Things, a character explains what it’s like to be trapped in the Upside Down. From within this uncanny realm, it’s impossible to say how much time has passed. Old memories dot the landscape, but outside reality remains out of reach. Grotesque creatures abound, but not souls capable of forging real connection. It’s an empty, insular and utterly dispiriting existence.

The fifth and final season of the Netflix smash isn’t quite that dismal. As ever, there are sweet character beats and thrilling bits of action to be enjoyed, all dusted with a generous sprinkling of ’80s nostalgia. (The world may have forgotten about Peanut Butter Boppers, but Stranger Things has not.) But as Matt and Ross Duffer’s sci-fi horror series enters its home stretch, it’s hard not to notice that it, too, seems caught in a murky CG expanse that looks big but feels small, full of scenes that look sort of like life from a distance but don’t feel much like it up from up close.

What started in 2016 as an intriguingly spooky yet charmingly relatable story of coming-of-age and monsters in suburban America has ballooned over the years into a sprawling war with apocalyptic stakes — to the point that season four, released in 2022, ended with the ground beneath Hawkins, Indiana, cracking apart and sending clouds of otherworldly dust up into the air.

In the intervening 18 or so months of in-story time, both more and less has changed than you might expect. As helpfully exposition-dumped by Robin (Maya Hawke) and Steve (Joe Keery) — now working for the local radio station, in a briefly delightful upgrade from their stints at Family Video and Scoops Ahoy — the fissures have been patched with sheets of metal and the entire town placed under strict military-enforced quarantine.

With nowhere else to go, the Byers have taken up residence on the various couches and pullout beds of the Wheeler home. El (Millie Bobby Brown) is “missing,” which is actually to say she’s in hiding from the armed forces directed by the mysteriously sinister Dr. Kay (new addition Linda Hamilton) to capture the “freak” at any cost.  

Mostly though, the gang are as we left them. Joseph Quinn’s Eddie is still dead, and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) continues to mourn him. Max (Sadie Sink) is still in a coma, and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) continues to cry at her bedside. Joyce (Winona Ryder) and Hopper (David Harbour) remain an item — as do Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and El, despite Will’s (Noah Schnapp) unspoken crush on him, and Nancy (Natalia Dyer) and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), despite Steve’s possibly lingering feelings for her.

And Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower), our Big Bad, is nowhere to be found after the dozens of meticulously organized and very illegal “crawls” our heroes have conducted of the netherworld — at least, that is, until the premiere, when (it seems no spoiler to say) the evils start to make their presence known again.

From there, the season pivots into the breathless chase to find Vecna and save the town before it’s too late. (Too late for what, exactly? Unclear to me. But it’ll be bad!) You can’t accuse these characters of lacking urgency: Critics were sent the first four episodes, ranging from 54 to 83 minutes, of eight, and for large swathes of these chapters it’s easy to forget these people might have any other goals or responsibilities or lives at all, as everything else takes a (sometimes literal) backseat to the fight against Vecna.

Sometimes, this is a very fun thing. It’s amusing to watch the crew booby-trap a house, Home Alone-style, against a Demogorgon, or turn to a hilariously unlikely hero for a highly complicated rescue mission. If a certain development in Will’s relationship to the Upside Down comes off a bit cheesy, it’s still a satisfying payoff to years of watching poor fragile Will rub his neck and seize up in psychic pain.

But the enormous stakes come at the expense of the smaller details needed to make them land with appropriate emotional impact. There are plot snags that, while individually minor, cumulatively eat away at our suspension of disbelief. I can buy that Murray (Brett Gelman) could smuggle illicit supplies into a town described as “the most heavily secured location outside of the White House, Fort Knox, and Area 51” one time. Have him do it several times in a few days, and I start to wonder whether anyone’s manning the gates to begin with.

More frustrating, however, is the hit to the characters that have always given the show its heart. The fifth season is not without moments of tenderness or levity. Will’s evolving connection with Robin, whom he regards as a sort of queer mentor, is touching, as is Mike embracing his role as the protective big brother to his scared little sister, Holly (Nell Fisher) — though I question Mike’s instinct to assure Holly that monsters aren’t real when they reside in perhaps the most monster-infested TV village since Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s Sunnyvale.

Without the space to flesh them out into meatier storylines, however, these moments play as fleeting echoes of stories established in previous seasons, rather than a deepening or a progression of them.

Much has been made of how old the characters look this season, and it is true: Brown and Wolfhard and their cohorts look very much like the 20somethings they are, rather than the roughly 16-year-olds they’re meant to be playing, and every flashback to seasons past only emphasizes this discrepancy. But young adults playing teens isn’t unusual in Hollywood. What accounts for the near jump-scare-level jolt in this case, I think, is that Stranger Things keeps its youngest protagonists in a state of suspended growth.

The teen years are dramatically rich precisely because they’re a time of such rapid change, when a person’s beliefs or passions or social status can transform completely over the course of a semester. But the Stranger Things gang have remained oddly inert in the year-and-a-half jump between seasons. If anything, they’ve regressed: Lucas’ season-four experimentation with jock-dom and Dustin’s long-distance romance have fizzled into nothing, while Will clings to his bowl cut even as he acknowledges it no longer looks cool.

With the institution of the quarantine, the universe outside Hawkins has effectively ceased to exist for them; if anyone misses it or wonders what’s happening out there, they don’t dwell on it here. The only conversation any of them have about any future beyond Vecna hangs on a childish fantasy of a fairy tale ending.

Possibly (probably) Stranger Things will have to open itself up in the second half of its final season, as it prepares to send the characters off for good. For now, however, these children remain frozen in time and space, unable to move past our nostalgic memories of the people they once were. It’s just as well that Vecna’s curse is coming to an end sooner rather than later. It’s time to let these adolescents do as adolescents are meant to do: grow up and move on with the rest of their lives.