The stakes — and the action — have never been bigger in Stranger Things’ fifth and final season. While a single Demogorgon was a terrifying threat in season 1, there’s now a whole army of extradimensional monsters. The series premiere, “The Vanishing of Will Byers,” is rewritten in the season 5 premiere to turn the abduction from a bizarre, singular incident to a key part of a dark plot. Yet for all the escalation, the series, which premieres with a first batch of episodes on Nov. 26, remains at its best when the Duffer Brothers embrace the throwback kid-focused silliness that has always made the show so fun, pausing the battles to just let their weird characters riff off each other.
Nearly a decade after the series premiered, it’s impossible to ignore the degree to which the kids of Hawkins are now too old to play high schoolers. But appearances aside, they still have strong chemistry as a band of friends trying to figure out how to best protect each other and their town while still dealing with their own insecurities. Lucas Sinclair (Caleb McLaughlin), Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard), and Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) are endearingly awkward in the first episode when they talk about how Dustin Henderson (Gaten Matarazzo) is crazy for wanting to restart the school’s Dungeons & Dragons club, and then unconvincingly pretend to be on Dustin’s side when he joins them at lunch.
Instead of playing D&D, the kids are effectively living it, using Mike’s maps and miniatures to plot out “crawls” through the Upside Down to search for Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower). After season 4 divided the characters across states and even countries, having almost everyone back together doing things with real impact on the plot is refreshing. Their coordination demonstrates the way they have grown to match the escalating threats and the ways they’re still very much just kids.
The banter between Dustin, Robin Buckley (Maya Hawke), and Steve Harrington (Joe Keery) has been one of the highlights of the show since the Scoop Troop came together in season 3, and continues to light up season 5. The crew is risking their lives on the crawls, but Steve seems mostly concerned with Dustin putting a hole in his car. Robin and Steve offer an absurd sort of recap of where things stand in Hawkins in the season premiere in the form of a radio broadcast, complete with silly sound effects.
Hawke’s brand of awkward, anxious humor is particularly useful for bringing levity to serious situations. She always feels like she’s making things up as she goes along, whether she’s sneaking around a hospital or getting Will away from his overprotective mom, Joyce (Winona Ryder) by telling her they need to get a flux capacitor. Pairing Robin with Will makes him feel like a fully realized character for the first time as Robin becomes his queer mentor, helping a kid who’s been through so much accept himself and find the strength he needs to get through the trials to come.
Hopper’s conspiracy theorist buddy Murray Bauman (Brett Gelman) is always best in small doses, but he’s well-suited for his new role of smuggling key items into Hawkins, which is under military lockdown. The dramatic flair with which he announces what he’s brought is particularly hilarious in episode 3, “The Turnbow Trap,” where he expresses his bafflement as he unveils a particularly bizarre order, including a child-sized CPR dummy and grenade-shaped water balloons.
The elaborate scheme those items are used for makes “The Turnbow Trap” the most creative episode of the first half of season 5. It’s everything that Stranger Things does best: a plan so goofy it could only be hatched by a band of teenagers that involves a slew of complications, personal drama, and genuine horror.
Unfortunately, season 5 often gets too serious. David Harbour has shown off his comedic chops in the MCU, but he’s almost entirely dour as Jim Hopper, who is focused on protecting Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) from the government yet again. Big exposition dumps slow things to a crawl. The action sequences are tense and visuals are appropriately grotesque, but at times it feels like the Duffers are actively messing with viewers wondering who will survive the final season.
Stranger Things has become a far more mythology- and special effects-driven show since its first season, and there’s clearly more of both to come in the final four episodes. But it’s always been the characters that make the series truly great, and they deserve more time to really shine and resolve their arcs before the story ends. Hopefully there’s still room for silly fun amidst the spectacle of the final confrontation between the heroes of Hawkins and the monsters of the Upside Down.
The first four episodes of Stranger Things season 5 are available to stream on Netflix now, with three more episodes dropping on Christmas and the finale airing on New Year’s Eve.
