After a long wait, the first part of Stranger Things' fifth season finally premiered, and although I haven't been the biggest fan of what's been done with this project since it decided to stop being a one-season show in 2016, I admit that FOMO always ends up drawing me in, for better or for worse.
And no one can deny the level of cultural relevance that each new installment of the Duffer brothers' series generates worldwide, comparable only to phenomena like Game of Thrones or the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the last decade, to the point where I even decided to pay for a Netflix subscription, something I hadn't done in several years.
Although the decision to release the fifth season in three parts (one at the end of November for Thanksgiving, another on December 25th, and the final episode on January 1st, 2026) seemed a bit jarring considering that the fourth season came out more than three years ago, it's perfectly understandable given that this is a perfect mechanism to keep the conversation going longer and respect each viewer's binge-watching pace. However, it's rather amusing that the platform is doing everything possible to avoid a more traditional weekly release schedule, something that has worked excellently for series on other platforms like The Last of Us or Succession. Anyway, that's not the point right now.
Stranger Things Season 1 was conceived at the perfect moment, serving as a strong homage to 70s and 80s cinema, and being full of references to directors and authors like Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, and Robert Zemeckis, at a time when general audiences were obsessed with nostalgia. It boasted a talented cast of unrecognizable kids and a plot that borrowed elements from many diverse sources to create something that, despite being "similar" to many things, felt refreshing in its execution. It was raw, brutal, and passionate, and despite a couple of flaws in the script and pacing, it compensated with an indescribable charm.
What no one expected was that what began as a modest success on the platform would end up (thanks to word of mouth) becoming one of the pillars of Netflix, while its young protagonists would go on to become top-tier Hollywood stars.
What's the problem with this? Stranger Things was too successful to maintain its original format, and what began as an innocent miniseries with the potential to be an anthology would become a whole saga dedicated to the same characters, creating a couple of brilliant stories along the way, and others that were rather forgettable.
I admit that even in its moments of questionable quality, I've always been able to enjoy this series, but It's impossible not to long for those days when everything felt much more tangible, when the actions of the protagonists seemed to carry more weight, and questions were left open to the audience, because in fiction, as in life, not everything needs an explanation.
Now, instead, we have a teen series with characters who barely retain the essential traits they were conceived with a decade ago, and a constant attempt by the script to make us believe that all this crap was planned from the beginning.
The first batch of episodes of the fifth season is entertaining, but it fails to sustain the brilliant cliffhanger from the fourth season finale, and, far from using all the cards on the table to give us a satisfying and emotional resolution, it keeps introducing new elements and plot twists that directly contradict what we've seen in the past. It's exhausting, and it will forever pain me that at some point the bar was set higher.
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