Stranger Things premiered on Netflix on July 15, 2016, and quickly became popular and received high praise. The co-writers, brothers Ross and Matt Duffer, were quickly given the green light to write a second season. The show’s instant success can be explained by its influence from many classic 80’s movies, leading to a strong nostalgic feel, even for those who didn’t grow up during that decade. Stranger Things Season 1 focused on character relationships and how they were affected by the disappearance of middle schooler Will Byers. As a result, the season’s heart is in the character’s dynamics and how their relationships are affected by the craziness in their lives.
Going into the second season and beyond, the show struggled to keep up with the first season’s character dynamics and relationships as the main cast grew larger. Season 1 also focused on one key plot with different character groupings, while later seasons had multiple key storylines, making the later seasons much longer with film-length episodes. The change led to later seasons feeling bloated at times, with some side plots that many people found uninteresting.
The final season of Stranger Things was released in three parts, with the first part premiering on Thanksgiving, the second part on Christmas, and the final part on New Year’s Eve. The Duffer brothers warned of a dark Christmas and an emotional New Year’s but failed to follow through on both promises. This is a result of the season lacking any strong emotional scenes that are to be expected from the final season of the series, but very few major characters died, and no major emotional scenes occurred, and any attempts at an emotional scene fell flat.
Season five also left many plot holes that the Duffers tried to explain in interviews, but ultimately failed and left more questions unanswered for fans. The Duffer brothers later went on to say that people shouldn’t be mad at their answers because they were tired. But many of these unanswered questions and major plot holes should have been answered with the season’s absurdly long episode length. The average episode lasted over one hour, which caused nearly every episode of the season to drag due to the very unnecessary length.
The biggest problem with the season as a whole is the brothers’ need to give every character a eureka moment where they hear or see something and come up with an idea that is completely correct immediately every time. This happens every episode for seemingly every character and never feels deserved, and is always exposition-heavy. This problem is a result of Netflix wanting its writers to explain everything for dialogue, as they feel no one pays attention to television anymore and just stares at their phones the whole time. Instead of appealing to the people paying attention, they opted to have everything be explained through very on-the-nose dialogue, so you can watch the show while playing on your phone.
The season has a few good aspects, such as a very strong episode titled “Sorcerer.” This episode is the highest rated of the season for good reason, as it is the only episode where this season’s major problems are mostly non-existent. What makes the episode stand out is that it actually delivers the emotional scenes, is paced in a way that doesn’t drag, and it doesn’t feel like every character is invincible. Outside of this episode, there are very few items that the season does well. The season as a whole had mostly good effects, but a few scenes had lighting that lacked majorly compared to scenes in the same places in previous seasons. The season as a whole is mediocre at best but boring and disappointing at its worst.
Many students at HHS also had opinions on the season. Out of 118 respondents, 63 have said they watched the final season. The respondents strongly preferred volume one of season five, with 51 respondents saying they loved it. The respondents’ least favorite volume was the final one, with 51 saying that it was average and 28 saying they disliked it. Out of all of the responses, 25% of people said their favorite episode was the series finale, which was the most voted favorite; it was also the most common least favorite episode, with 35% of respondents saying it was their least favorite. Many respondents said their favorite season was the first, with 25.9% saying it was, and season three was a close second with 25% saying it was their favorite. In the free response, a commonly shared opinion was that the final season was filled with plot holes and that episode four was the clear highlight.
Season five of Stranger Things is the clear result of a show that wasn’t originally intended to go for five seasons, with its major plot holes and overly large main cast. I would give the season a 4/10 overall.
