‘Stranger Things’ Season 5 Vol 1 review: The nostalgia machine is running on fumes

I used to joke that Stranger Things arrived in my life with the sudden, strangely exhilarating clarity in the way some people discover religion. When the first season dropped in 2016, it felt like a secret broadcast meant for kids who grew up combing through their parents’ dusty DVD shelves and cassette collections. It matched my fixation with ‘80s pop culture so perfectly that I treated its cracked-open world of Dungeons & Dragons, walkie-talkies and suburban dread as a kind of initiation rite, and defended it with the zeal of a convert. The Duffers had tapped into that earnest, fragile something in me where childhood still held and the darkness (of adulthood) beyond felt half-imagined. A decade later, the show returns for its final run in a form that resembles its younger self only in outline, like a photocopy that’s been run through too many machines.

Volume 1 of the final season opens with that Game of Thrones-style confidence of a franchise expecting loyalty. Now a military containment zone, Hawkins is wrapped in metal plates and checkpoints — the logical extension of last season’s border rupture. The rushed bluntness with which these details are handled is pronounced, and the season barely considers the lived impact of such an environment. This is the first sign of a larger problem: the Duffers have constructed a world too large for the story’s emotional frame to bear.

The ensemble steps back into place with familiar rhythms. Mike, Will, Dustin, Lucas, and Eleven have aged into mid-teens within the story’s timeline, even as their actors wear the unmistakable signs of adulthood. It’s easy to catch how the show attempts to reconcile this with digital smoothing during a de-aged Will flashback, oversized costuming to soften proportions, and blocking that keeps faces in forgiving light, but the effect is still distracting. Stranger Things was once about kids encountering terrors beyond their comprehension, and now the kids look like they should be filing taxes.

The premiere replays the founding trauma of Will’s abduction before leaping ahead to 1987. Hawkins remains cordoned off, held under the authority of the new Linda Hamilton’s Dr. Kay. Eleven hides in the woods with Hopper and Joyce, training for the inevitable confrontation with Vecna. These developments track directly with where we last left off, but play out with a checklist-like rigidity, as though the writers were fulfilling obligations before unleashing another CG storm. The intimacy that once defined the show has been stretched thin across a canvas too big to paint with care.

A still from ‘Stranger Things’ Season 5 Vol 1
| Photo Credit:
Netflix

The particularly egregious dialogues collapse under their own weight. I found myself wincing at the stiffness of scenes designed solely to repeat information. Will shoulders most of the psychic explanations, straining to translate the Upside Down’s logic into lines that feel painfully unnatural. A charming montage sequence at the new radio station, where Robin and Steve now work, becomes a dispatch hub for sending coded messages that quickly turns into a monotonous exposition device to further the workings of the Upside Down.

The action is a heady rush of references meant to evoke Aliens, Good Morning, Vietnam, Home Alone, and The Great Escape, along with callbacks to the show’s earlier seasons, but none of these motions are able to translate into emotion anymore. The longer episodes lean on heavy spectacle — with flamethrowers, Demogorgon attacks and bursts of military gunfire — yet the imagery feels vapid. Soldiers unload bullets at creatures already shown to be bulletproof. A Demogorgon rampages through Holly’s room while Mrs. Wheeler lounges in a bathtub with ABBA at full volume, before dramatically lunging at it with a wine bottle. Government forces behave with such incompetence that suspense evaporates, and the tension of these set-pieces settles into a haze of theatrics.

A still from ‘Stranger Things’ Season 5 Vol 1
| Photo Credit:
Netflix

The world-building reaches a point of exhaustion. The once eerily sparse Upside Down has expanded into a sprawling terrain traversed by Hopper and Eleven for most of the volume. Although the show now renders the environment with far more visual ambition, it still offers no new understanding of how the place works or what it represents. The mechanics remain unchanged, the metaphors remain unexamined, only the surface grows larger.

That writing now also carries an awkward time-warp that never lets its own voice mature, and the script still speaks in childlike cadences with no semblance of an update. Even the once-charming barrage of ’80s references has hardened into compulsory presentations, delivered with the gracelessness of that early flashback where Vecna forces tendrils down young Will’s throat, shoveling nostalgia inward until we gag.

Some arcs still flicker with stubborn promise. Robin, for one, remains the only true delight on screen — a kinetic burst of Maya Hawke energy whose ADHD-tilted rambles kept pulling my attention back every time she appeared. I caught myself a little enraptured (maybe even nursing the faintest crush) as she spun through her scenes with that twitchy charisma that has always outpaced the show’s writing. Through her, Will’s long-delayed coming-out journey finally gains a tether, and watching him inch toward honesty under her unpretentious guidance felt like the rare emotional thread this season doesn’t fumble. Holly Wheeler’s moments with Max in Episode 4 offer similar glimmers, especially when Sadie Sink anchors the frame with her instinctive intensity. Yet even these standouts struggle against the clumsy structuring that kept tugging me out of their performances.

A still from ‘Stranger Things’ Season 5 Vol 1
| Photo Credit:
Netflix

As for Brett Gelman’s Murray, every season has pushed him closer to caricature, yet this one cements him as the most repellent presence in the ensemble, whose smug self-righteousness has begun to mirror the worst qualities of the actor’s publicly professed politics. And if Noah Schnapp manages a half-decent performance as Will, that doesn’t erase the dissonance of watching two actors with deeply troubling public stances occupy such central emotional space in a story that once prided itself on its sense of moral clarity.

Max has a moment this season where she mutters that “music has a way of finding you, even in the darkest of places,” and I found myself smirking at the line, partly because nothing else in Stranger Things 5 seems capable of locating its emotional core anymore, and partly because Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein remain the only artists involved who still understand what the series once meant. Their gorgeous synth landscapes cut through the clutter like a rescue beacon, glowing with the melancholy that first pulled me under in 2016. A decade in, the show has outgrown its children, its mythology, and maybe even its purpose, but the music still feels evergreen.

Volume 1 ends with the barest sensations of narrative motion. The supposed twists and reveals either wilt from overexposure or land with a randomness that drains them of impact. The pacing rarely drags, but the momentum feels automated rather than alive. In small pockets, I do still glimpse that earnest spirit I once defended like a zealot, but ten years on, the show feels stuck between worlds, trying to remember how it began.

Two volumes still stand between Hawkins and closure, the boulder grows heavier, and the hill gets steeper. Even so, one must imagine Kate Bush happy.

Stranger Things Season 5 Volume 1 is currently streaming on Netflix. Volume 2 arrives on Christmas Day, and the third and final volume drops on New Year’s eve

Published – November 27, 2025 04:17 pm IST