This article contains spoilers through the penultimate episode of Stranger Things Season 5.
In the third season of Stranger Things, Eleven (played by Millie Bobby Brown) learned a pivotal lesson as she stood inside Starcourt Mall, the then-new watering hole for the then-still-pubescent kids of Netflix’s supernatural drama. Eleven, the show’s telekinetic heroine, who grew up in a lab, became dazed by the number of clothing options at the Gap. “How do I know what I like?” she asked her friend Max (Sadie Sink). “You just try things on until you find something that feels like you,” Max replied. She was talking about fashion, but the advice applied just as well to the challenge of leaving adolescence behind: Coming of age is a process of trial and error, of working toward what seems true to you.
For years, Stranger Things was changing too. The first season of the ’80s-set series—about underdogs triumphing over the terrors of another dimension called the Upside Down—became, after its 2016 premiere, one of Netflix’s most successful original productions. Each subsequent installment ventured into the proverbial fitting room: The second season leaned further into gore and took tonally challenging swings, including an episode exploring Eleven’s past to give its most enigmatic female character a voice. Season 3 explored how Reagan-era consumerism permeated its tweenagers’ lifestyles just as they began dealing with romantic relationships. The fourth examined conspiracy theories through a particularly unnerving, mind-manipulating villain, Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower); he targeted a grieving Max, testing the friends’ bonds as they tried to protect her and understand her pain at the same time.
In the fifth and final season, however, Stranger Things has stalled. This time around, as the gang tries to stop Vecna from ending the world, the show seems uninterested in furthering anything other than its already complicated plot. The cast has expanded several times over, to the point that most scenes look like a crowd awkwardly playing human Tetris. The action sequences resemble previous set pieces, and much of the dialogue amounts to exposition. A new, faceless threat called “exotic matter” takes the crew’s resident nerd, Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), multiple scenes to explain. Across the three episodes of Volume 2, the last batch before the series finale, characters regularly express their confusion about what’s going on. I found myself nodding along with them.
For fans watching to see how Eleven and her friends save the day, much of this stagnation is probably bearable. The show remains compulsively watchable; each episode ends on a cliff-hanger. But Stranger Things initially had much more potential than mere bingeability. It pushed the boundaries of television as a medium, eschewing standard act breaks and run-time constraints while injecting cinematic visuals and frequent mood shifts. It also cemented Netflix as an early winner of the streaming wars by consistently breaking viewership records and generating cultural conversation. A litany of brands has capitalized on the show’s popularity; it has multiple spin-offs (including a Tony-winning stage play); and its massive fandom has spawned conventions worldwide. Stranger Things had the opportunity and the budget to probe more daring themes and storytelling techniques. Instead, in its final hours, what was once an epic about growing pains and the end of childhood becomes algorithmic—as if settling for “compulsively watchable” is more than enough.
Of course, the franchise was built on recycling. From the beginning, Stranger Things has relied on ’80s pop-culture touchstones, drawing heavily on the elements and aesthetics of Steven Spielberg’s blockbusters and Stephen King’s best sellers. In its earlier seasons, the pastiche tended to be poignant and the familiarity fresh: Characters drew on teen-movie tropes but weren’t one-note, and the story arcs found novel angles to archetypal dynamics. (Think of the pint-size Dustin becoming best pals with Joe Keery’s high schooler, Steve.)
Season 5, meanwhile, has noticeably flattened its ensemble, leaning on simplistic personality traits and pilfering from previous arcs. One of the show’s new supporting players, Derek (Jake Connelly), is defined entirely by the two nicknames he has: “Dipshit Derek” and “Delightful Derek.” A tired love triangle reemerges. Much of the plot otherwise hinges on recovering Holly (Nell Fisher), the younger sister of Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and Nancy (Natalia Dyer), from the Upside Down, a redux of the first season’s story. One episode features three—three!—separate sequences of characters reconciling after encountering life-or-death scenarios. I was moved by the first; by the third, I felt only indifference.
Glimmers of depth still show up amid this shallow approach. Will (Noah Schnapp) has long served as the show’s most sensitive character, in part because he’s secretly queer and crushing on Mike. Yet the scene where he comes out feels shoehorned in, arriving between Eleven learning of a harrowing plan and the crew storming a military base to enter the Upside Down. Will’s speech is also packed with distracting reminders of the period backdrop. He insists to his friends that his sexuality doesn’t affect their shared interests (among other things: malted milkshakes, renting videos, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and Steve Martin). The conversation even ends with a group hug, referencing a key moment from the first season; the callback comes across more like fan service than earned sentimentality. Unlike the show’s previous coming-out sequence—when Robin (Maya Hawke) gently coaxed Steve into understanding why she wasn’t interested in him—Will’s monologue clunkily interrupts the plot. What should have been an intimate reveal becomes another chance for Stranger Things to remix itself.
Sticking the landing is tough for any program, and harder still for a critically acclaimed, fandom-fueling genre saga. Game of Thrones certainly couldn’t withstand the weight of people’s expectations, let alone its overstuffed plot. Stranger Things hasn’t dropped the ball as dramatically in its final season. It has, however, sacrificed nuance by refusing to challenge itself—or to deviate from the brand it has built in the cultural imagination. The series once proved that it could mature alongside its cast, blending its fantastical swings with grounded themes of friendship, grief, and that classic, youthful challenge of discovering who you are as the world changes around you. “The impeccable trick Stranger Things pulled off in its first season was how seamlessly it wove together the opposing qualities of comfort and fear,” my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote in 2017. Eight years later, the show isn’t making viewers nostalgic or giving them nightmares. It’s just telling them what happens next.
