Stranger Things Is Shrinking

For a story about a supernatural phenomenon that threatens to pull the entire world into a hellscape of bisexual lighting, omnipresent thunder, and endless tangles of oozing vines, Stranger Things returns for its final season feeling curiously small. After four seasons of an assembly-line approach to maximalism — attach loads of nostalgia here, plug in decadent CGI there, retcon the plot throughout — the show’s budget is huge and the final eight episodes are supersized. But in the first batch of four episodes that hit Netflix tonight, the series pushes the Party toward resolution by making it more myopic than ever.

Stranger Things has been part of watercooler culture for almost ten years, spanning a pandemic and two Trump presidencies. But in season five’s first volume, we’re still not done learning what’s up with Vecna, because the in-show narrative has only progressed from 1983 to 1987. Therein lies some of the issues: suspended disbelief over the fact that the actors meant to still be playing teenagers are now in their 20s and 30s, with star Millie Bobby Brown a wife and mother in real life. But it’s more than that. Stranger Things is no longer ’80s pastiche. It is pastiche of pastiche, a slimy growth that can’t keep slinking deliberately outward and has begun retracting inward instead, consuming its own originality in the process.

When season-premiere “The Crawl” properly begins (after a sequence that looks like it’s relying on some iffy de-aging technology), it’s November 3, 1987, three days before the fourth anniversary of Will Byers’s (Noah Schnapp) disappearance into the Upside Down. It’s also about a year into the U.S. military occupation of Hawkins: After Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) opened a series of dimensional rifts at the end of season four, troops moved in, quarantining Hawkins and blocking off areas of its downtown. Weirdly, most of Hawkins’s citizens accept this. Only the series’ protagonists seem bothered by their town becoming a zone of barbed wire, checkpoints, and secret operations. The narrative shrink-wraps around them, making an insulated setting feel even more claustrophobic.

In secret, the Party is trying to find Vecna and kill him, a mission to which members are variably applying themselves. With baddie Dr. Kay (Linda Hamilton) searching for her, Eleven (Brown) is back in hiding and training every day with her father figure, Hopper (David Harbour), to attack the base, frustrated that he won’t let her come along on his secret recon missions into the Upside Down. Robin (Maya Hawke) has gone full Pump Up the Volume with a radio show, assisted by Steve (Joe Keery), where she critiques the occupation and communicates secret information to Hopper. Robin, Steve, Joyce (Winona Ryder), Nancy (Natalia Dyer), and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) all help guide Hopper each night so he doesn’t get lost in the nether. Meanwhile, Mike (Finn Wolfhard) is trying to lead a splintering friend group; Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) is still spending hours visiting the comatose Max (Sadie Sink); Will is struggling with his romantic feelings for Mike and his newfound ability to see through the eyes of Vecna’s Demagorgons; and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) is pulling away as he mourns metalhead and fellow Dungeons and Dragons player Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn), who last season was framed for the killing of numerous high-schoolers.

As the Party and its allies have grown in numbers, the cast has never felt quite balanced in terms of their connection to the A-plot or their subsequent screen time. (Remember when Hopper was kept captive by the Soviets, or when Will went to California and made a bunch of new friends, like a backdoor pilot for a spinoff?) This time around, that means Ryder, often this ensemble’s most convincing member, is relegated again to the “worried mom” outskirts, while other characters regress to habits previous seasons had seemingly resolved. The Duffers have always been naggingly self-referential, but season five is egregious in its oversubscription to existing dynamics, like Jonathan and Steve bickering over Nancy, and its hammering of established character notes: Hopper is reliving the same few memories of his deceased daughter; Will is singing the Clash in the Upside Down to keep himself company; Eleven is sacrificing herself to save her friends; there’s a Vecna emergency. Stranger Things rolling out the greatest hits has started to feel like Strangers Things stuck on repeat.

Certain actors do manage to interrupt the recycled milieu with standout performances, particularly Ryder, Hawke, Cara Buono (as Wheeler matriarch Karen, whose aloof persona finally gets punctured), and Priah Ferguson (playing Lucas’s suddenly-a-teenager younger sister, Erica). Holly Wheeler has been aged up and recast with a new actress, Nell Fisher, and she and Buono have a wonderfully believable mother-daughter dynamic that sells the devastating impact of an action sequence that nods, in Stranger Things’s customary way, to an ’80s sci-fi classic. When Stranger Things does push itself, it still has emotional and visual juice: Eleven and Hopper teaming up to torture a soldier is a dark spin on daddy-daughter time, and a Home Alone–style outfitting of a suburban house against a Demogorgon intruder shows off how collaborative the Party can be when they’re united in process and procedure.

There’s a cliffhanger at the end of the fourth episode, “Sorcerer,” and it’s probably safe to assume the next batch of episodes will deploy the same device; Netflix will drop three more on December 25, followed by a series finale on December 31. The release strategy is targeting viewers during their holiday vacations, but it amounts to a frustratingly truncated pace. A few well-acted set pieces can’t offset the sense that Stranger Things is less scary and less singular at a point when it should be reaching its Mount Doom–like peak. Nancy using an overhead projector to mark up a map of Hawkins, noting all the territory Hopper has re-patrolled in search of Vecna, becomes a tidy little metaphor for all the backward gazing. Even a major revelation at the end of “Sorcerer” feels like narrative retread rather than a bold concept to push the show forward, as if the Duffers are selecting from a bunch of prerecorded tracks on a Casio keyboard rather than scoring new sounds. With only four episodes to go, Stranger Things feels trapped in a feedback loop, with little sense of the creative adventure that was once so intrinsic to a series about the imaginative potential of playing Dungeons & Dragons with your friends and building a wide-open world where anything is possible. That version of the series no longer exists. Instead, Stranger Things is traveling the same paths, and they’re no longer so strange.