Stranger Things review, season 5 volume 1: Marvelisation is rife in this juggernaut’s final series

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Netflix’s mega hit is still fun and immersive. But can it stick the landing?

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The small town of Hawkins, Indiana, has been through a lot. In the years since 1983, when a young boy disappeared, its citizens have faced down countless otherworldly ghouls, crazed scientists and government officials and, after all that, find themselves locked in military quarantine. This is, after all, the world of Stranger Things – a horror-tinged subversion of America’s Reaganite boom years – which returns, nine years after it began, for its final season.

And even though the show’s neon title card bears the branding “Stranger Things 5”, this is really a direct continuation of the show’s fourth outing. Its final boss villain, Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower), is still lurking in the Upside Down, the ashen underworld beneath Hawkins. On the surface, the gang plot his demise. Hopper (David Harbour) has built a dojo to give his telekinetic ward Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) the skills needed to take Vecna down.

Meanwhile, the remaining ragtag group of children and young adults who have been tasked with saving the world are working on an elaborate mission to access the Upside Down and finish what they started. “It’s looking like a pretty regular day in Hawkins,” Rockin’ Robin (Maya Hawke) broadcasts to the townsfolk, knowing full well how irregular things usually are. Soon enough, Vecna’s incursions into the material world unveil a new and disturbing plan, in which history will soon repeat itself…

Stranger Things has been a huge piece of Netflix’s original programming since it debuted in 2016. Its patented blend of comic coming-of-age story with complex supernatural thriller was an instant hit and, to its credit, the streaming giant has resisted the temptation to rush the show through a multi-season arc. Instead, we have arrived at this – the first half of the final clutch of episodes – with a well-constructed world, established characters and a recognisable threat. “We don’t stop until we’re goddam sure that wrinkled, noseless, rotting bastard is dead and gone,” Mike (Finn Wolfhard) tells his Dungeons and Dragons obsessed crew. And that tone prevails. Even while their friends and family are in mortal peril, the central kids crack wise, treating this existential threat with a quippy irreverence that stops the show from going up its own gaping wormhole. That familiar tone – brisk, upbeat, fun – is maintained throughout these concluding episodes.

So all that continues to work well, as does Stranger Things’s superb production design (a demonstration that not every Netflix show needs to look terrible) and its commitment to a fun needle drop by the likes of Diana Ross, The Chordettes and Tiffany. But this final series is also the victim of what I call Marvelisation: a feeling that the drama needs to be set against an interminable fight between humans and extraterrestrials. “There’s a fine line between bravery and stupidity,” Hopper warns his adoptive daughter.

There’s also a fine line between tension and protraction. The episodes in this first tranche range from 57 minutes to 86 minutes (the fourth season’s finale was an eye-drying 139 minutes), which necessitates an awful lot of almost killing the demogorgons, almost escaping the clutches of Vecna, almost saving humanity. Delayed gratification is how writers build a compulsive narrative, but Stranger Things could do with a little more gratification, a little less delay.

And then there’s the problem of the Upside Down. Stranger Things’s closest aesthetic antecedent is probably Stephen King’s IT, a bildungsroman set in another American town beset by subterranean evils. And, at its start, Stranger Things understood that the allure of the story was watching these children having formative adventures and only occasionally dipping into outright fantasy. Yet now the show overwhelmingly plays out in or around the Upside Down and the stakes are never lower than critical. It is like IT, if 90 per cent of the novel involved Pennywise baring his teeth and chasing the children. It lacks the contrast – the light and shade – which in earlier seasons really brought out the emotional heart of the show.

That heart is still those kids – now gangly almost-adults ­– who have grown up on the sets built by the show’s fraternal creators, the Duffer Brothers. One or two have developed into slightly awkward screen presences but for the most part that early casting was good. Winona Ryder and David Harbour, too, give committed, full-throated performances – “Sometimes people need someone to believe in them,” Ryder’s Joyce croaks, with doe-eyed sincerity, “and then they can do amazing things” – while Joe Keery and Maya Hawke (as Steve and Robin, respectively) steal most of their scenes. It’s a good assembly, and even when the plot starts to drag or becomes hard to follow, there’s enough charisma that it can, like Kate Bush warbling through a cassette player, drag you back into the room.

We will have to wait until the New Year to see how Stranger Things concludes, and whether it can stick that particular landing. But the Duffer Brothers have created something, in the beleaguered town of Hawkins and its luckless citizenry, that is admirably immersive. The danger now is that the desire to give it a spectacular send-off will undermine those charming, emotional moments where Stranger Things delved into one of the great cinematic subjects: finding your place in the world as you exit childhood.

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