4 days ago
13
Time’s up for Stranger Things. The fifth and last season arrives almost three-and-a-half years after a fourth run that felt like a finale, not least because it seemed the kids had grown up. Having originally aped beloved 1980s films where stubbornly brave children avert apocalypse, the franchise now starred young adults and had adjusted plotlines and dialogue accordingly. Life lessons had been learned. Selves had been found. Adolescent anxieties – as personified by Vecna, the narky telekinetic tree-man who rules a parallel dimension adjacent to the humdrum town of Hawkins, Indiana – had been put aside.
But Stranger Things now belatedly returns, with the cast all visibly in their 20s. This is a problem. The whole point is that it’s fun to watch kids outrun monsters by pedalling faster on their BMX bikes, or ignoring their mum calling them to dinner because they’re in the basement with their school pals, drawing up plans to bamboozle the US military using pencils, bubblegum and Dungeons & Dragons figurines. If everyone looks old enough to have a studio apartment and a stocks portfolio, none of the above really flies.
The four new episodes – three more are coming for Christmas, with a further, definitely final one at New Year – get around this by shrinking the Stranger Things world. We don’t leave Hawkins, unless it’s to visit nightmare mirror town the Upside Down, or the mind-palace realm made of memories that Vecna takes his victims to if he really wants to mess with them. Even Hawkins as a location hardly exists: parents, teachers and the general populace no longer appear unless entirely necessary. There’s just the sinister government research facility (now heavily guarded by soldiers) where all the trouble started, and the main group of characters, scheming to break into the Upside Down and defeat Vecna for good – a quest that has obliterated all other concerns.
Our friends have become ageless, their core characteristics trapped in amber. Gadgetty herbert Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), fast-talking free spirit Robin (Maya Hawke), intense psychic warrior Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and determined nerd Mike (Finn Wolfhard) all continue to do their thing. Pals such as Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), who have never really found their thing, are still welcomed along for the ride, as are the token adults in the group, Joyce and Hop (Winona Ryder and David Harbour).
With each of the four episodes running on from the previous one, we have a five-hour action-comedy-horror movie, where each part of the story is luxuriously stretched. Episode one is all set up; episode four is a solidly thrilling 90 minutes of flame-throwing, bullet-dodging spectacle that makes good use of what looks like a virtually limitless effects budget, and which culminates in a moment that will have fans standing on their chairs and hollering joyfully.
Along the way, the gang set traps, crawl through tunnels, recruit spies and fiddle with radios, encouraging and arguing with each other as they improvise their way out of every impossible situation just as they always have. This year’s reference points, in lighting, composition or plot, include The Exorcist, Home Alone, Back to the Future, Little Red Riding Hood, The Great Escape, Jurassic Park and the cult 1985 French-Canadian animated movie The Peanut Butter Solution – but the overriding influence is Stranger Things itself. It has successfully patchworked its own unique genre vibe, a formula that can be profitably re-run, at least once more.
And, crucially, character development is not totally absent. Much of the action is driven by budding investigative journalist Nancy (Natalia Dyer), who is prompted to find her inner fire when an older man pats her on the shoulder, calls her “sweetheart” and tells her not to worry about difficult adult things. Then there’s the long-awaited blossoming of Will (Noah Schnapp), who was Vecna’s first victim in season one, episode one. As it succumbs to the instinct to end by returning to the beginning, Stranger Things opens season five by revisiting that moment, then works to turn Will, who for ages has been a frustratingly pale, baleful presence defined by his trauma, into the most important member of the ensemble.
Will is secretly gay, which could be just another coming-of-age tribulation, but writers/directors the Duffer Brothers have always treated their creations with more thought and sensitivity than you might expect a billion-dollar retro fantasy thriller to allow. Now, in Will, they find not just one more journey of self-discovery to embark on, but the show’s most moving one of all. Stranger Things definitely needs to switch off its boombox, hang up its catapults and admit it’s too old for these capers, but it’s worth indulging it one last time.
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Stranger Things season five is on Netflix now.
