Review by C.J. Bunce

In the fourth season of Stranger Things showrunners the Duffer Brothers finally fulfilled the series’ mash-up pop culture promise–hidden inside a mix of a B-movie style homage to low-budget horror and Steven Spielberg movies of the E.T. and Goonies vintage, the story finally came full circle in nine big hours over seven episodes.  1980s pop culture, a haunted house, a superman lab, more Upside Down, more D&D, bipedal monsters, a big bad heavily influenced by Freddy Krueger, and a huge cast of characters you’ve grown to love (and watch grow up) finally came together.  So what next?  Four episodes into Season 5 and the Duffer Brothers seem to be struggling with the story’s focus, and the strangest thing going on is their choices.

First there’s Millie Bobby Brown’s sci-fi wonder child Eleven.  In five seasons she hasn’t grown, hasn’t changed, and this season she’s stuck again with her father figure, David Harbour’s former sheriff Hopper, bickering over four episodes while running in place in the Upside Down.  Top-billed series lead Winona Ryder has never been the star as show mom Joyce Byers, and this year–so far–she’s relegated to the status of nagging mom again.

As for the next four leads, Finn Wolfhard’s Mike Wheeler lies to his little sister, telling her to her face there are no such things as monsters despite him spending his days hunting for them.  Beyond that, he barely reacts when his parents are left near dead resulting from the petal-head men aka the Demogorgons, and his sister is spirited away.  Worse, Gaten Matarazzo’s Dustin Henderson is stuck as the bullied kid.  Why Dustin?  Who knows.  But he’s left out of the latest “crawl,” a coordinated investigation by the teens and older siblings trying to destroy all-powerful, all-vile Vecna once and for all.  Caleb McLaughlin’s Lucas Sinclair, now a much bigger kid than when the series started, is left to come to Dustin’s rescue and offer a voice of reason now and then.  Otherwise Lucas is left watching his girlfriend recover in the hospital.  That’s Sadie Sink’s Max–one of last year’s focal leads–stuck in a hospital bed unconscious.

That leaves Noah Schnapp’s Will Byers, always the fourth kid in the friend circle.  The plot revolves around Will this time, but viewers must wait four episodes until Will gets to do anything meaningful.

Stranger Things’s fifth season is a reminder that nothing really is like having the real thing.  And that’s Steven Spielberg’s coming of age stories, his handling of fantasy and magic and direction, of Stephen King’s brand of horror that stays just inside something teen audiences can watch, and those Wes Craven bits that is the stuff of full-on horror movies.  The season opens as a little, unknown kid is taken by Vecna and in Alien-style a fleshy tube is attached to his mouth and his lifeforce is sucked out.  That definitely looks like something Craven might have done around 1984.  Other choices don’t fit–is it because the Duffers are too young and were only born in the 1980s–they didn’t actually experience it to know how to get it right?  Nancy and Mike’s sister’s outfit was never worn by anyone in any timeline, and look at the rest of the clothing choices.  Was using a BMW the coolest choice for a car for them to drive?  What twenty-year-old had a BMW in the 1980s in the Midwest?

What happened to the fun?  You know, that kind of fun that seemed to track the events of Spielberg’s E.T. the Terrestrial in the show’s first season?  All the characters are frenetic, running in all directions, shouting at each other, with all of it drowning out and sweeping under the rug the clunky path the characters are taking to accomplish… something.  The military complex assemblage that created Vecna and Eleven is up to something and for the fifth season what that is is not explained.  It’s led this round by sci-fi icon Linda Hamilton, but her character is so similar to what she did on Resident Alien it’s difficult to distinguish them.

Despite so many characters to keep track of, the Duffers chose to focus on a relatively new character, young Holly Wheeler, played by Tinsley Price.  She’s being stalked and kidnapped by Jamie Campbell Bower’s Vecna in the persona of imaginary friend Henry.

But what about the best characters of the previous seasons?  Sure, best is subjective here but try to argue the most fun hasn’t come from Joe Keery’s Steve Harrington.  This round he is stuck in a tiff with Dustin and an even sillier battle with older Byers Jonathan, played by Charlie Heaton, showboating for the affections of Natalia Dyers’ Nancy Wheeler, one of last years heroines.  Jonathan is practically not in this season.  The Duffers have Nancy on the right path as the person in charge of the teens, and nobody flinches as she takes the rifle.

Brett Gelman’s Murray Bauman is back being appropriately strange.  As The Goonies bits are now swapped darker for The Nightmare on Elm Street, Maya Hawke’s Robin Buckley, upgraded to a disc jockey, emerges as a gopher trying to keep the plans moving ahead. And even Priah Ferguson is back as Lucas’s sister Erica, although her role is disconcerting, as her brother and Mike convince her to roofie her frenemy’s parents and little brother, then stab the former BFF with a hypodermic needle.  It’s all for good reason, of course, yet it seems like an outdated element for a modern audience.  To top it off, one more character is added to the mix in the fourth episode of the season.

So who comes to the rescue?  The final season finds its singular badass heroine in an unlikely place–via Cara Buono’s Karen Wheeler.  Yep the hot mom of the show gets to shine protecting her daughter from a Demogorgon with a broken wine bottle.

For the season break the Duffers seem to have saved the best for Part 2.

Unless something big happens when the show returns, it may be Stranger Things saw its zenith in Season 4.  Just as Sean Astin was a highlight of Season 2 and Maya Hawke the highlight of Season 3, as newcomers to the series Jamie Campbell Bower and Joseph Quinn lit up Season 4.  The jury is still out on who will seize the day for this final run.

All four seasons and the first four episodes of the fifth season of Stranger Things are streaming now on Netflix.  The next three episodes arrive on Christmas Day, and the finale arrives on New Year’s Eve.