"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."
"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."
Stranger Things returns for a final season that paradoxically feels smaller and more myopic despite a huge budget and supersized episodes. The show continues an assembly-line maximalism of nostalgia, CGI and retcons, yet advances the in-show timeline only from 1983 to 1987, straining suspension of disbelief as aging actors still play teenagers. The series shifts from '80s pastiche to a pastiche of pastiche, appearing inward-looking and self-consuming. Season premiere events place the story in November 1987, with Hawkins under U.S. military occupation after Vecna opened dimensional rifts, and only the protagonists resisting the new status quo.
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