Josh Reviews Stranger Things Season Five

It’s always hard to end a TV show.  The audience has years of expectations and anticipation that they put onto a series finale, which is hard under any circumstances for the reality of one episode of TV to match.  But it can be done.  One of my earliest blogs for this website was a list of my favorite series finales.  And there have been some great ones since then, such as the finale of Parks and Rec, Mad Men, Treme, The Good Place, The Deuce, Veep, and more.

Stranger Things had the additional challenge of the extremely long wait for this final season.  (We had to wait three years between seasons three and four, and then another three years between seasons four and five.)  I must repeat once again that it’s crazy to me that it takes so long to make this show.  I grew up watching 24 episodes a year of elaborate, well-produced shows sci-fi or action/adventure shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, Babylon Five, Twenty-Four, and more.  Now, I know that system wasn’t perfect.  When making 24 episodes a year, there were always some clunkers in the mix, and episodes where they just didn’t have the budget needed to match the vision.  And I understand that we’re used to waiting two to four years between installments of big budget movie franchises, and I’m sure the Stranger Things team would say that they’re making four (or more) movies in each season.  But surely there must be a way to not have to wait three years for one eight-episode season of a TV show.  I’m not sure ANY show could be so spectacular that it could make the audience feel satisfied after such a long wait.  And with Stranger Things, I think that ever since the third season, the show has been damaged by how much older the actors got than the high school aged characters they’re supposed to be playing.

All of which is to say that expectations and anticipation for the return and conclusion of Stranger Things was very high for me, as I know was the case for so many of the show’s fans.

So, OK, enough preamble: what did I think of the fifth and final season of Stranger Things?

I quite enjoyed it!  I had fun watching each of these eight final episodes.  I’ve grown to love these characters, so I was happy to be back with them for one last adventure.  I thought the Duffer Brothers and their team did a nice job giving time to most all of the show’s ensemble, which has grown to be quite a large array of characters beyond the four boys (Mike, Will, Dustin & Lucas) and the two main adults (Hopper & Joyce Byers).  The show looked and felt suitably epic.  There’s a lot of terrific monster mayhem and everything looked terrific, with movie-quality visual effects.  And I was reasonably satisfied where most all of the characters wound up in the end, which is critical in a show’s sticking the landing.

Do I have complaints?  Absolutely.  I just didn’t buy large aspects of the set-up to this season (specifically, the military occupation of Hawkins).  There was a surprising amount of wheel-spinning in these final eight episodes, with repetitive scenes that rehashed what we already knew rather than moving the plot or the character arcs forward.  They totally dropped the ball with the new villain (Linda Hamilton’s Dr. Kay).  And the extended epilogue in the final 40-or-so minutes of the series finale flopped pretty hard for me.

I’ve never thought Stranger Things was brilliantly innovative — I’ve always been well-aware of the many influences that form the basis for the show’s story-telling — but I’ve always enjoyed the way the Duffer Brothers were able to pull together those influences into an enjoyable new concoction, and that continued to be the case here in the final season.  This continues to be a fun show with great characters and great monsters.  I’ve enjoyed all five seasons, and I’m delighted that the Duffer Brothers were able to end the show when they wanted, the way they wanted.  I’ve had a lot of fun on this ride.

Let’s dig in further!  SPOILERS ahead.  I mean it — stop here if you haven’t yet watched through to the series finale!

I have grown weary of the release pattern that Netflix originally innovated back in the day of dropping an entire season of a show all at once.  So I quite enjoyed the hybrid release pattern of season five of Stranger Things, in which we got four episodes, then three episodes, then the finale.  That gave me time to enjoy the season and to have fun thinking and talking about the episodes I’d seen and guessing about and anticipating the ones yet to come.  So that worked very well for me.

The show has always had a time jump between seasons, but the season four finale — in which Hawkins literally split open and the Upside Down invaded the real world — made me think that season five would have to pick up directly from there.  I was wrong, and the season five finale picked up a whopping 19 months after season four.  While this helps me accept the visual of how much older all the kids now look, very little in this set-up for the final season worked for me.  I just didn’t buy that the people of Hawkins could all basically ignore what had happened (their town exploded and an alien landscape emerged!!) and go back to life as usual.  I also didn’t buy that everyone just seemed to be totally cool with living under a military occupation (and apparently never being allowed to leave?).  I know it’s sort of a joke that the adults have been oblivious to the horrors the teenage kids on the show have been living through, but this set-up took that to an extreme that I just didn’t believe.  Not only don’t I buy that all the residents of Hawkins didn’t revolt, I also don’t understand why the military would want to keep everyone there; wouldn’t they want everyone OUT of Hawkins so they could have the freedom to do whatever they wanted??  This all felt like a huge cheat by the writers, because obviously the show depends on the characters still all being together in this small town.

While I was happy that all the main characters were reunited and back in Hawkins (after season four kept everyone separated for the entire season, which I think was a mistake), I was a little bummed that so many of the characters were at odds with one another as the season opened.  I understand the desire to give the characters arcs to go through during each new season, but I felt that by the end of season four we’d earned the characters all coming together to fight Vecna, so it felt like backpedaling to split them up again, even if just emotionally, at the start of the season.  I particularly did not love this new, angry version of Dustin.  I like the instinct of allowing the characters to feel the effects of the trauma they’d been through, but turning the jovial, silly, upbeat Dustin into a raging self-destructive mess wasn’t fun to see.  And that we had to live with this unpleasant version of Dustin for most of these final episodes was a drag.  (I didn’t love that they killed off Eddie — a fantastic new character introduced in season four — and this angry version of Dustin felt to me like one more reason why I didn’t like that choice.  As an aside, I also thought it was a major bummer that one of the other great new characters introduced in season four, Argyle, was totally absent from season five!!  Why didn’t they bring back Argyle??  I thought he was 100% one of the gang by the end of season four.  This was a big disappointment to me!)

I liked that Will Byers got a lot of focus this season.  I liked that we got to learn a lot more about his experiences in the Upside Down in season one.  That gave this season a satisfying “full circle” feeling.  (I was happy that many of the lingering questions I had after watching season one about Will’s experiences in the Upside Down were answered here in this final season!)  I was pleased to get some hints at Will’s homosexuality in season four, and happy that his coming out to his friends and family was a huge part of the story here in season five.  (I think Noah Schnapp slightly overplayed the weepy emotion in some of those scenes, but I think the show’s heart was in the right place so I could go with it, and I do know many people who were quite moved by those scenes.)  I also loved seeing Will get some kick-ass super-powers!  I loved this “sorcerer” version of Will, and seeing him kick ass against the Demogorgons in the big action climax of episode four was hugely satisfying.  (Possibly the high point of the season for me!)

I wasn’t thrilled that Max was stuck in a coma for much of the first half of this season, but I loved how central she was to the back half.  I liked that she was important to getting to the heart of Vecna/Henry’s secret history, and I loved her role in befriending and helping to save Holly Wheeler.

I feel that the Jonathan-Nancy romance really floundered in the second half of the run of Stranger Things.  Was this intentional?  Or did the writers change course because those two actors just didn’t have chemistry together?  The Jonathan-Nancy-Steve love triangle was a drag for me for much of this season, unfortunately.  I didn’t enjoy any of those scenes.  These were a prime example of the wheel-spinning I mentioned above, in which we got scene after scene basically just giving us the same awkward interactions between the three of them over and over again.  And I thought it was a bit of a cop-out, after all the back and forth over whether Nancy would end up with Jonathan or Steve, that she wound up with neither of them.  This could have been presented as positive character development for Nancy, in that she was going her own way and not being defined by either of those two boys.  I suspect that was the intention.  But as it played out, it didn’t feel like that for me; it just felt like a let-down that the show didn’t choose either path to resolve this story.  I’ve always enjoyed Nancy on this show, ever since season one, but I think she was somewhat let down in this final season.  We got to explore Will’s trauma, but I’d have loved to have dug into Nancy’s, and the path that led her to become a gun-slinging Rambo-like figure here in this final season.

There was similar awkwardness, and some similar repetitive wheel-spinning, in all the Hopper-Eleven stuff this season, but that worked better for me.  The Hopper-El relationship has always been central to this show, and so I’m glad that was still the case here at the end.  And I think David Harbour and Millie Bobby Brown were able to elevate their scenes together, so I did buy into the drama of those moments.  (As well as the back and forth as to which of those two characters was going to heroically sacrifice themselves in the end.  I’d assumed Hop was a goner.  I’m happy I was wrong and that he and Joyce were able to get their happy ending — and that date at Enzo’s!! — in the end.)

The kids’ parents have never been a big part of this show (other than Joyce Byers), but I was happy that Karen Wheeler (Cara Buono) got a few moments in the spotlight, and especially some heroic beats (like when she crawled out of her hospital bed to blow up those Demogorgons!) — that was fun to see.

I liked that we got to see a lot of Murray (Brett Gelman) this season.  He was always funny.  I loved that he got a moment of heroism in the end, blowing up that helicopter!  I thought he was at high risk of getting killed in the finale (because he’s someone we liked so would be sad to see die, but he’s not one of the main characters), but I was happy he survived.

Adding characters to this already sprawling cast was a risky proposition, but I really enjoyed having Holly Wheeler step into the forefront and have such a major role this season.  They recast the character, and Nell Fisher did a great job in the role.  I also liked the whole new group of young kids who were involved in the plot this season, especially Derek Turnbow (Jake Connelly).  (Though how did our characters avoid any consequences for drugging and kidnapping Derek’s family???  Why didn’t we ever see any of the Turnbows again after that crazy and ill-advised mid-season kidnapping plot?)  I also liked Robin’s girlfriend Vickie; she was a nice addition to the group, and I liked seeing Robin in a relationship (albeit complicated by all the monsters and stuff)!

It was a fun surprise to see Eight again!  Her one-episode appearance in season two was much-criticized by many viewers, so I loved that she turned out to be important in the end.

We got a lot of great action in this final season!  That huge fight at the end of episode four was terrific, a real show-stopper.  And I loved the huge Mind Flayer creature in the finale.

I liked the new even more hideous look for Vecna this season.  The constantly-moving tentacles/vines/whatever all over his body was a great look.  I thought that season four had told us all of Vecna/Henry’s origins; I enjoyed getting a lot of additional information this season.  I was particularly intrigued to get a hint at where exactly Henry’s powers came from in the first place, when we saw that memory in the cave and his encounter with the man with the mysterious suitcase.  Jamie Campbell Bower makes a great villain.  I enjoyed all the Mr. Whatsit stuff.  Stranger Things has never been afraid to comment directly on its influences, so I enjoyed all the A Wrinkle in Time stuff this season, with references to Camazotz, etc.  I was sort of hoping maybe we’d get a little redemption for Henry at the end, but I don’t mind that he stayed a villain all the way through.  I’m not sure I ever quite understood his ultimate plan.  Why exactly did he need those twelve kids?  And once he had them, why all the messing around with the visions of them being happy in his beautiful house?  Why couldn’t he immediately use them to do whatever evil thing he wanted to do?  If the show explained that, I didn’t quite get it.

Speaking of villains, I was delighted that Linda Hamilton joined the cast this year as Dr. Kay.  But wow did the show drop the ball with her character!  We didn’t get to spend enough time with her to establish her as a threat.  There were a bunch of scenes of Ms. Hamilton looking tough and growling at her subordinates.  But we never really understood who she was or what she wanted.  She was just evil and awful.  But in the end, our heroes didn’t have much trouble defeating her.  That was a disappointment.

I liked learning more about the Upside Down in this final season.  Has the show’s mythology started to get a little too complex for its own good here in this final season?  Possibly!  But I liked recontextualizing our understanding of the Upside Down, presenting it as a wormhole or bridge to yet another alien realm, the Abyss.

Let’s talk about the series finale, the feature-length “The Rightside Up” (which is a great title).  I thought the first two-thirds of the episode were pretty great.  I liked the final adventure.  When Vecna’s tree-like lair transformed into that huge Mind-Flayer-like spider-creature, I thought that was great!  I loved the look of that creature, and that visual effects sequence was fantastic.  OK, it was a little unbelievable that none of the kids got squished by it, but I could go with that.  Then we got to Eleven’s self-sacrifice, and I was satisfied.  I wasn’t rooting for massive deaths here in the finale; I wanted all the kids (and adults) to get a happy ending, so I was sad at Eleven’s death, but that was the point.  And I think it made sense that, to end the story, she had to take herself off the board.  That felt right.

Then we got that long, long, looong 40-ish-minute epilogue.  I am all for a long epilogue.  I hate it when shows or movies wrap up too quickly.  I want to spend some final moments with our beloved characters and find out how everyone was doing and where everyone was heading now that the main adventure was over.  (I am a staunch defender of the lengthy epilogue in Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King.  I find that last 25-ish minutes to be very emotional and moving.  Those final two chapters of the book are some of my favorite pieces of Tolkien’s writings, and I love those scenes in the movie as well.)  But as I’d noted above, I felt this epilogue fell flat for me.  First off, we got another time jump, but it sort of felt like what we were seeing made more sense for a month later, not eighteen months later.  Example: Robin is only now back on the air?  What has she been doing for the past year and a half??

I liked seeing Dustin happy again, and his valedictorian speech was fun.  But the message felt totally un-earned.  Dustin gives a speech about how the whole town came together, and then he reveals his Hellfire Club t-shirt and everyone cheers.  But wait a minute, we never actually saw any evidence that anyone in the town outside of the show’s dozen-or-so main characters came together in any way!  When last we saw Dustin’s classmates, they were beating him half to death for wearing a Hellfire t-shirt!  So this joyous reaction by the assembled crowd doesn’t make sense to me.

Speaking of unearned — Hopper is magically the sheriff of Hawkins again?  Didn’t he murder a ton of U.S. military men this season???  Why isn’t he in jail??  It’s crazy to me that we didn’t get one scene of any sort of repercussions for Hopper or any of our heroes, after getting captured by the military when they return from the Upside Down earlier in the finale.  Nope, we never see Dr. Kay or any military personnel again, they’re gone from Hawkins, and everyone is continuing to live in the town like nothing ever happened??  This is crazy to me.  Why would anyone still live in this town???

Something felt very off to me with the final scene with the older kids: Steve, Jonathan, Nancy & Robin.  I wanted an emotional catharsis after all these kids had been through together, but the scene felt so awkward to me!  They’d already drifted apart??  I didn’t buy they’d actually get together once a month moving forward.  (I was unclear on whether we were supposed to believe it, or to feel the pain that the kids weren’t going to follow through on that and so would no longer be in on e another’s lives.  It feels like a mistake that I’m unsure of what I’m supposed to take away from this scene.)  And then, adding insult to injury, Robin makes a comment about an overbearing girlfriend, suggesting that she and Vickie didn’t get a happy ending together?  That was all a big bummer to me!  And I don’t think that’s really what the writers were going for.

On the other hand, getting one last D & D game with the main boys — and Max! — was a hoot.  (I loved that we still got a TON of D&D references this season, from their “crawls” to all the talk of the difference between a “sorcerer” and a “wizard”, etc…)  That was sweet and emotional.  I liked the idea that perhaps Eleven survived, but we don’t get confirmation.  I know the show is sort of trying to have its cake and eat it too with this, allowing viewers to be sad at Eleven’s sacrifice but then happy that maybe she’s alive after all, but it worked for me.  I laughed at the revelation that Mike went on to become a writer.  Stranger Things has always been hugely influenced by Stephen King, and many stories by Mr. King include a character who’s a surrogate for Mr. King himself, either a writer or someone who becomes a writer.  (Like Gordy in The Body/Stand By Me.)  So this final Stephen King connection made me happy.  I liked seeing Holly and Derek and their friends playing D & D together at the end.  I loved the D & D imagery over the closing credits.

This was a fun season of television!  It wasn’t perfect, but I respect the effort by the Duffer Brothers and all of the talented creative people involved with this show, in front of and behind the camera.  I enjoyed all eight of these episodes.  This was an enjoyable end to an enjoyable show.

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