We’ve been theorizing for three years. We’ve analyzed every frame of the trailers. And now Parts 1 and 2 of Stranger Things 5 are finally here.
The Duffer brothers aren’t just playing the hits. They’re taking their best shot at changing the entire game. We’ve got Hopper and the gang running secret ops right under the military’s nose. We’ve got a new dimensional threat called the Abyss. And we’ve got the internet absolutely melting down over episode 7.
The question is whether this setup justifies the weight it’s carrying, and why I’d argue the finale now has a mountain to climb.
Full spoilers ahead for episodes 1 through 7. If you haven’t watched, go binge them, because we’re getting in the weeds.
A Show That Has Maxed Out Its Potential
One of my favorite people on this channel, Victor Divani, summed it up on my live stream better than I’ve managed to: he’s lost hope in a lot of these things, and specifically he thinks Stranger Things has maxed out its potential. Not as an exaggeration. As a statement of fact. This show pushed the boundaries of what a series could do, so hard and for so long, that we’re now at the end of what it has to give.
And I’m not sure that what we waited for has been justified by what we’ve gotten. That’s me as a critic and as a fan and as somebody who watches how these things get made.
The New Normal in Hawkins
The season opens on a new normal. Robin and the crew have taken over the radio station. Remember when the ground split open and we wondered what coming back to a “normal” Hawkins would even look like? The military has cordoned off the entire town, and along that rift they’ve laid down those heavy-duty road construction plates, the ones you drive over when the road’s going to dip. It’s a giant hill of them. You’re supposed to stay away. The kids play around them anyway.
And then we get a glimpse into everybody’s situation. Here’s the key word: quickly. Very quickly.
In past seasons, you didn’t know where Hopper was because he was in Russia. You didn’t know where Eleven was because she’d left town. You got eight episodes to digest events, to sit with why something was happening, to feel character motivations line up. That’s how you got to a place where you could say, I like this story.
This time they’ve crammed a whole lot in. The show used to have really good dialogue, and it’s fallen behind. Honestly, watching it feels like the best parts of every previous season put into overdrive to the point where it’s becoming a caricature of itself. It used to be that we looked at the 80s and saw life the way they lived it. School. Stuff on TV. Hopper being a cop. Life happening around the horror. That isn’t the case anymore.
There’s also a production choice I can’t quite figure out. They’re using some form of the Volume, that large LED wall stage with the projection that moves with the camera. It’s most noticeable in the Upside Down.
And there’s the crawl system: Hopper and the crew have their runs into the Upside Down down to a science, with a rig on top of a van and the whole nine yards. The way they explained how crawls work was genuinely interesting to me.
Too Much Time Has Passed, In the Story and In Real Life
A lot has clearly happened between the panels, off page. The problem is that all of this takes place across the same four or five year period. It feels like too much time has passed even though there’s no way it could have.
And that’s the in-story version of a real-life problem. There’s a reason Mrs. Know-It-All hasn’t watched this yet. With this much time between seasons, you stop caring. She’ll watch it eventually. Absolutely she will.
When season 3 came around, we got up at three in the morning to watch it. Baby Know-It-All, her best friend Issa, my wife, my cousin, all of us. We binged it and it was wonderful and I had a great time with it.
I didn’t feel the need to binge this. It took too long. This kind of distance between seasons has done way more harm than good, and I’d love to hear your read on that. How did the real-life time jump land for you? What did it do to your enthusiasm?
If you still love it, that’s awesome, genuinely. I enjoy this show and what they’re doing. But for the time and the money spent, where is it? We’re a much more savvy audience than we were years ago. When series carry the budgets of films or entire franchises, we understand fully what goes into these things and what a good one looks like. And I feel like this show has tapped out its resources. They’ve shown us and told us all the story they can.
The Character Ledger
I don’t care about the relationship dynamics at play. I just don’t. Holly being technically the wrong age for the story’s time frame? Don’t care.
Karen Wheeler being a certified badass fighting off a Demogorgon?
Stay away from my daughter.
All day long. Karen smashing a wine bottle and shanking the thing was exciting. Very cool. Right on.
Mr. Wheeler getting shuffled off to the side entirely, though? Really?
Linda Hamilton is grossly underutilized. She’s a face we know, and she’s got none of the Matthew Modine energy we got in the first couple of seasons. I’m not sure what they were going for, especially given her strangely myopic view that Eleven is the problem, that all evil stems from Eleven, and that capturing her solves everything. She’s one-dimensional. Her toadies and minions have more characterization than she does.
The Hopper and Eleven dynamic felt off to me too. I like seeing her be capable, and the training scenes have their moments. Dr. Mike on YouTube pointed out that she basically cauterizes her own nose, which is brilliant, because at this point the bleeding nose gimmick has me asking why she hasn’t hemorrhaged yet. And that’s the thing: those are the silly questions you start asking when the story isn’t gripping you. You start hunting for shortcomings.
One thing I did want to flag from Part 1: the de-aging on Will didn’t work for me. Every time they held on him, his eyes looked too big or something. It felt off.
Part 1 on its own merits, though? I was down. Okay. Fine. I’m in.
Then Part 2 happened.
Part 2 and the Meeting Problem
I’m not scoring Parts 1 and 2 separately, mostly because Part 2 was such a disappointment for me. I’m telling you that up front so you understand where I’m coming from. I’m not trying to be negative. I’m explaining it technically and as a fan.
Holly gets taken. They send Demodogs after her through the other side, they break through, and you get the sequence where Karen tries to shank the creature. Holly’s gone anyway, and they’re trying to figure out where she is. Turns out she’s been seeing an imaginary friend, Mr. Whatsit, whose name is also Henry. It’s Vecna in human form.
And here’s the structural thing I couldn’t unsee, which I read in another reviewer’s write-up and immediately recognized. The team constantly has meetings. The gang gets together, they sit around, they talk about the problem. Somebody inevitably stands up and says here’s the beauty of the solution, and delivers something abstract and a little crazy. Somebody else shows up and restates it simpler. Then the team goes off and does it. That’s the loop.
Variety and Deadline have both written up how the team is thinking now, showing them sussing things out and demonstrating how intelligent they’ve become. Normally I live in that camp. Normally I’d say what we’re watching is people evolving inside a situation, who have encountered all this before, who know the lay of the land well enough that these aren’t leaps for them. I can go with that.
This time I felt different about it. And to be fair, I think that’s the distance from season 4 talking. Our expectations built for so long. If you leave us percolating, if you leave us sitting there cooking, eventually the pot boils over. I came in with sky-high expectations for all the reasons above and I came out disappointed.
The Abyss, and What the Upside Down Actually Is
Part 2 raises the stakes on the lore. You learn more about Vecna’s plan: he’s gathering the kids for a vague thing because he needs them for a vague thing. You learn Max is still alive, or at least her brain is, and that she’s living inside Vecna’s mind.
And you learn the Upside Down isn’t what we thought it was. It’s a wormhole that leads back to Earth. Vecna’s plan is to bring the two together and destroy old Earth. The place he’s actually from, which looks very much like a desert, is where Eleven banished him at the end of season 4. That’s the Abyss. That’s where he’s been coming from this whole time.
Then they retcon everything else into it. The Demogorgons come from there. They haven’t said it outright, but the assumption is the Mind Flayer does too. Everything comes from the Abyss, which is where Henry exists, which is where his mind lives, which is where he’s taking the kids. They’re inside his head but also not inside his head.
A lot of fans are genuinely excited about the lore changes. My problem is the delivery. If it sounds like I’m confused explaining it, that’s because that’s how they lay it out. They don’t give you nice, neat, clean dots to follow. You have to suss it out, and it’s messy.
That’s compounded by Part 2 being a series of exposition dumps that would normally be tell, don’t show. And the acting is off across the board. Dustin and Steve are the exceptions for me. Their arc out of being at odds in Part 1, over everything that happened with Eddie, actually works, and you come to understand the bitterness and the anger Dustin carries this season. It’s layered.
Which brings me to the best scene in these seven episodes, the one that felt the most like Stranger Things to me. Steve says he has to go do the thing, and Dustin breaks.
You always try to get yourself killed and I can’t let it happen again. Stop being so selfish, please. If you go in there, you’re going to die and I can’t deal with it again.
That felt like a return to who these characters have always been.
The Will Scene
Let’s be real for a second, because this is the one the internet melted down over.
The scene is hamfisted, and I don’t think it belongs where they put it. This should have happened a season ago, back when we were dealing with the infatuation with Mike. That was the place. Instead we got the conversation with Robin where he starts asking questions, and the minute he started asking, I thought, okay, are they solidifying that he’s gay and that this is a journey the show is going to walk openly? Fine. Good.
Then the moment lands and it’s clumsy. Yes, there are characters in that room who matter. There are also a bunch of new people who don’t even know him.
The more interesting version, for me, is what coming out actually looked like in the 80s. That was a very different time. AIDS was on the rise. People were scared. Just Say No was the cultural wallpaper. There was a lot going on that would have made this scene mean something specific to its era. Having that many people in a room accept it carte blanche feels disingenuous. On a personal level I’m glad his friends aren’t horrible people. But parents in the 80s had a much harder time with this.
I think some pushback was needed, even if his mom comes around later. Picture it: Will comes out, his mom shuts him down. Not rejects him, because I want the reconciliation. Then Robin is the one who picks up the pieces and tells him it’s going to be okay, that his parents love him, that they’re confused and they don’t understand yet. And that sets up a real come-to-Jesus conversation between him and his mom later, where they land on I get you and I love you.
Without any pushback, from Hopper or from anybody, it felt like a story from today. I’m supposed to be in 1980-something, and it didn’t feel that way.
Where We Are Going
The kids are about to become something special. Max is back, which, yay. And the three of us, me, Baby Know-It-All and Boyfriend Know-It-All, spent the longest pause in television history screaming at the screen to just run, because Max and Holly are standing there having a whole conversation with time they could be spending running. Then they finally run and it’s in slow motion and it’s weird.
Seeing Karen save them all one more time was great, though.
A lot of great moments. Overall, kind of a mess.
Now you know. And as long as you have the battle, you’re halfway to being a know-it-all yourself.
No Score, Not Yet
What’s the Know-It-All Index for the first two parts of season 5?
I’m not telling you. I’m holding it back.
I’m already unhappy with Part 2, and I’m not sure the finale can fix that. So I’m doing another video after the finale and I’ll get into my real thoughts there, once I can see the greater picture. Because there’s every possibility that at the eleventh hour they hand us an ending so satisfying that it explains things, ties up the loose ends, and lets me go: oh, okay, I get it now.
I’m holding out hope. We’ll see.
So where are you on the first two parts? Are you enjoying them or not, and did that real-life gap between seasons change how you came into this one? Drop it in the comments on the video above, and please be good to each other over there. I want honest opinions, not a fight.
