Two months ago, as we returned home for winter break, my high school best friend asked me if I wanted to binge the final season of “Stranger Things” together. We had watched the show together when the fourth season came out in 2022. We also had not, before this plan, seen one other for close to a year.
To watch in this manner was perhaps a fitting environment for a show so built around high school nostalgia, even if our COVID-19-era high school felt a lot different from ’80s Hawkins, Indiana. Like my own high school experience, though, the “Stranger Things” finale was confused and frustrating, and the only thing that made it better was having someone to commiserate with. My friend and I spent a lot of time complaining, watching the ring-lit faces and CGI tentacles roll on past.
The world of “Stranger Things” has had something of a chokehold on the public consciousness ever since we saw Will Byers’ disappearance 10 years ago. The artful and mysterious horror of that first season has given way, gradually, to something grander—and perhaps more “Avengers”-y. In the first season, we had no idea what the monsters were or what they were capable of. By now, though, we get a whole taxonomy of the Upside Down—Demogorgons, Demo-dogs, flying demon bats, the Mind Flayer and Vecna. Season Five caps it off with a cosmology, introducing The Abyss as a parallel universe from which the Upside Down came. There is now a Broadway show, marketed as a prequel to the TV series, which, in exploring Vecna’s past, seems to contradict the TV show’s canon—though the Duffer Brothers insist it does not. But hey! This is entertainment.
Here is a sequence that happens at least eight times in the new season of “Stranger Things”: First, our beloved crew, quite inevitably, find themselves up against an impossible challenge. They do not know what to do. They wander around and argue. Eventually, one of them sees something—a vinyl record or popcorn in the microwave—that gives them an amazing and brilliant idea. They explain this to the rest of the group, using their object of inspiration as a prop, with the energy of a fifth-grade science teacher explaining the orbit of the planets. The rest of the group, after some amount of further argument, agrees to go along with the plan. The characters split up, and this lets them have their disagreements and emotional moments. Nancy and Jonathan will have an important conversation concerning their relationship as an energy orb of dubious physics threatens to drown them in goo. Steve and Dustin will have a physical fist fight in the epicenter of the Upside Down, distracting them from investigating said energy orb.
This season tells us everything and shows nothing. Somewhere along the way, these characters have become lovable action figures with backstories, here for the express purpose of fighting slime-monsters or electrocuting Demogorgons or pulling tentacles out of other people’s mouths. With their nervous nodding and penchant for dubious adventure at the slightest convenience of plot, they are perfect scaffolding for what has become a very different kind of story.
In Season One, Winona Ryder’s performance as the bereaved mother of a missing child, nearly driven insane by her search for him, gave the entire season its emotional stakes. We knew—through Joyce’s frantic movements, the look in her eye and what she did—how much Will meant to people. Now we are just told. That mother-son relationship is reduced to the constant repetition of lines like “I’ll never lose you again,” meant to signify affection instead of showing it. Add in all the plot-explaining dialogue and that rote structure, and the show begins to build up a kind of artificial sheen, like some Disney World animatronic unable to convince you it is real.
Season Five puts us neck-deep in the Upside-Down: giant tentacle walls, malevolent energy orbs, a Godzilla-sized spider monster being attacked by a lone gun and the picture of a world crashing down on another. Season Five has the visual appeal of a disaster movie or a comic book exhaustively come to life. There is something gratifying—and broadly appealing—about a definite cast of characters doing grand CGI battle together. Marvel milked that formula ultra-successfully through the 2010s. What is strange is that the strategy of a superhero movie has been so adopted by a show that once shared the aesthetics of an indie horror film.
And, hey—just like “Avengers: Endgame”—the strategy worked. “Stranger Things 5” is one of the most expensive seasons of TV ever made, and on track to be one of the most-watched, landing as Netflix’s biggest-ever English-language TV debut with over 100 million views in its first week. And, to be honest, no matter how predictable, frustrating or shallow the season might be at times, it is also really, really watchable. As I watched it with my friend, I felt frustrated, but in no world was I going to leave before finishing it.
The fifth season’s most annoying quality is its constant need to re-explain its own plot. Characters never seem to understand what is going on, and over and over again, they—along, conveniently, with us viewers at home—get reminded of the problem and the plan to fix it. This is not a unique problem to “Stranger Things.” Matt Damon, on a recent press tour for his own Netflix movie, has complained that company executives push for this kind of restatement in dialogue “because people are on their phones while they’re watching.”
The media landscape is changing, obviously. Social media and short-form video have changed our relationship with attention. Film professors are worried their students can no longer sit through a whole movie without pulling out their phones. And Netflix is changing its game accordingly.
“Stranger Things 5” is watchable and shallow. It does not want you to think about it too much. It gives the viewer no leeway, nor trust, nor food for thought. It is a beautifully-engineered and factory-processed entertainment product. If this is the model for cinema in post-brainrot America, I do not like where things are heading. Is this the content we deserve?