Stranger Things has been the king of cultural conversation for a full decade now… yes, a full decade. Since storming onto Netflix in the summer of 2016 and snatching Game of Thrones’ proverbial crown as the “watercooler” appointment television of the moment, it has unwaveringly remained so. A couple of Emmy wins, a staggering 1.2 billion views viewed, a host of iconic characters, and a fanbase ranging from young kids to nostalgic adults later…and it has never been shaken as THE show of the 2010’s. Not to mention the imprint that it left by re-introducing Kate Bush back into the public consciousness (I mean, you would be hard pressed to go on a date in 2022 and not be asked what your Vecna ‘Running Up That Hill’ song would be).
To cut a long story short, the Duffer Brothers had accrued just about every accolade and eyeball on the planet to affirm Stranger Things as a cultural phenomenon and vital piece of Television history.
Yet, with all that affirmation, Stranger Things could never quite be accoladed for its ingenuity… and the lack of such ended up being the very thing that dismantled that perfectly accrued legacy and cultural image.
Sure, nostalgia was baked into the Stranger Things pudding, it frankly couldn’t exist without it, but at first, they were able to mask their derivativeness through interesting characters and even more interesting actors embodying them. The first season is a very blatant mashup of Spielberg’s E.T. and Stephen King’s It, a very well-executed mashup, but a blatant one nonetheless. The second season is a loving homage to the Aliens franchise, with the hive-mind, queen xenomorph (Mind Flayer) and militarised storylines all coming straight from the genius mind of James Cameron.
Then season 3 is a direct homage to the massive blockbusters classics of that era, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dawn of the Dead, The Terminator and the big scale monster movies like Jurassic Park. Finally, season 4 was very clearly modelled off of Hellraiser and A Nightmare on Elm Street, with the big bad of the series, Vecna, finally coming into focus as an amalgam of those infamed monsters.
However, whilst these seasons were able to pass off these homages as… well, homages, it created a fundamental problem in that these writers were shoe-horned into a job of Frankenstein’ing classic homages into a season rather than developing their own storylines. With the release of Stranger Things 5, and with it the conclusion to the entire narrative, it is clear that the Duffer Brothers fundamentally did not know how to creatively wrap-up their own story without the crutch of nostalgia and homage.
But the ramifications of this under-developed and frankly disappointing final season began to show the cracks in its foundation (much like Hawkins itself) by the end of season 4, revealing that these writers were treading water rather than smooth sailing towards a compelling conclusion. These cracks came in the form of the Vecna/Henry Creel and Max Mayfield dynamic in season 4, representing the stereotypical psychic serial killer, Freddy Krueger archetype and the perfect final girl. It was a new and fresh angle to the show, a really interesting dynamic that managed to invigorate their formula and connect with audience’s on a deeper level due to the thematic undertones of the dynamic.
This is no better exemplified than through the ‘Running Up That Hill’ sequence which was a beautiful extension of the hand to those with depressive thoughts to keep fighting and an iconic piece of action cinema that defined the post-COVID era.
So what exactly was the cracks embedded in such an iconic storyline that unravelled season 5? Well, it’s the fact that both Max and Vecna naturally concluded their arcs by the end of season 4, and the fact that they were shoe-horned into the final season repeating their same storylines is ultimately what derailed it. Vecna completed his grand evil scheme of opening the gates to the Upside Down and kidnapped the four children, and Max Mayfield, as a tragic heroine, unfortunately lost her battle and was claimed by Vecna, as a tragic parallel to how so many depressive people ultimately lose their own battles. Sure, there were dangling threads in both storylines, but both seemed pretty conclusive in their finality to me.
This is where the Duffer Brothers’ reliance on nostalgia and homage, without developing any signature creative flair was a detriment to Stranger Things, as in season 5, both Vecna and Max return in cyclical storylines that remain in an ouroboric state. Vecna’s plan at the start of season 5 is simply to mentally kidnap more children, and Max is stuck in a trance being psychically hunted by the psychic serial killer. There has been no progression, no escalation of events as we hurtle towards what is supposed to be the epic climax of this genre defining show. Without any roadmap in a prior established piece of material to copy from they merely reverted to reheating the work completed in season 4 and hope that fans are too invested in the shows to notice the cyclical nature of their writing.
This is perhaps best evident through an egregious recreation of that aforementioned ‘Running Up That Hill’ scene in which Sadie Sink’s Max and Nell Fisher’s Holly do a redux of that famous scene from season 4. From the dilution of the emotion by now having two protagonists, one of which had never had more than four lines prior to the final season, evidencing the complete oversaturation of the cast list.Then there’s the lighting, which was once scary, moody and atmospheric, in the season 5 ‘Running Up That Hill’ scene is bright, saturated and completely ruinous of any emotion built up by the visual grandeur of the scene it is trying to mimic.
Just ultimately, it is a desperate attempt to recapture the magic of that original scene, without any of the thematic weight of ‘young girl with depression fights against her demons and wills herself to live’ tethering the audience to the emotion of the scene. It’s merely two girls running through a CGI environment trying to recapture the magic of something more potent and powerful. Ultimately, it is lazy.
That’s the word: Lazy. A perfectly succinct word to describe season 5 of Stranger Things. Lazy in that it never dares to think broader than the confines of the world it built upon and beyond the derivative parameters of the world it set up. Even in the wrap-ups for each of the characters, it didn’t dare to even answer any of the burning questions that kept viewers so intrigued in the overall story. Eleven ‘dies’, but not definitively, Nancy never chooses a side in the love triangle but rather focuses on herself, and several central side characters simply disappear from the epilogue without a conclusion.
Ultimately the Duffer Brothers crumpled under the mountain of homage, nostalgia and derivativeness that had propped up Stranger Things as appointment television for the past ten years. Without anything left to copy they had to resort to, as the kids say, ‘reheating their own nachos’ and in this instance, the leftovers went down pretty cold, slimy and unsatisfyingly. This has resulted in Stranger Things, which had been at the pinnacle of Television for a decade, ending its stellar run lumped in with Game of Thrones at the junkyard titled ‘disappointing conclusions’ (and that’s putting it gently). To clarify, I don’t think that Stranger Things is as egregious as Game of Thrones, in that it is a disservice to the legacy of its storytelling and its acting, but it is a severe step down from the quality that had once been synonymous with Stranger Things.
So, whilst Stranger Things is by all means an inoffensive and natural conclusion to the series, it flounders and ultimately drowns in never failing to soar to the heights of the material that it drew its inspirations from. Season 5 doesn’t quite finish out as the cultural phenomenon that it ultimately blossomed into, but lumbers out as yet another series that couldn’t quite deliver on the promise of its grand ambitions… or rather the co-opted ambitions of others.
— Darragh Evans