Stranger Things

Netflix’s love letter to Eighties pop culture plays it safe in the finale’s first volume.

While some of the decisions and storytelling methods might be divisive, there's still time for Stranger Things to stick the landing.

The longer Season 5 goes, the less charming it becomes, and the two big closing twists don’t exactly inspire hope for the back-half: One is over-telegraphed and the other shocking… but only because it’s so ill-conceived.

I found the first four episodes largely joyless and grim, right up until a moment that seemed to reset the show, or at least to capture some of the connection and spirit that used to make it so compelling. .... If Stranger Things can locate more of that humanity in its last few episodes, it’ll be much easier to swallow everything else it’s trying to sell us.

For now, however, these children remain frozen in time and space, unable to move past our nostalgic memories of the people they once were. It’s just as well that Vecna’s curse is coming to an end sooner rather than later. It’s time to let these adolescents do as adolescents are meant to do: grow up and move on with the rest of their lives.

The truth is that “Stranger Things” itself has not reflected its stars’ obvious maturation with an accompanying complexity. All of “Stranger Things” is an exercise in nostalgia. In Season 5, the show now seems to pine not just for the neon hues and synth-driven pop of the 1980s it conjures so evocatively, but for a simpler time in its own run that can’t be brought back, no matter how high the budget. Though if anything, “Stranger Things” has only gotten less rough-edged over time.