Stranger Things: Season 5

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I will go out on a limb and say that this was a pretty bad season of an increasingly mediocre show. More so, it hasn’t been a good show in quite a while. I’m not exactly when and where The Duffer Brothers gave up, but that’s about what it felt like in season five. And perhaps that’s a matter of way too much time elapsing between seasons, or our care about the actual children playing children, versus our care about actual adults playing children. But the heart that existed at some juncture in this show was replaced with a bunch of lore and nonsense that was mostly careless and sloppy. And the writing. It’s almost criminal how bad the writing is this season. Perhaps it’s been pretty bad all along, but maybe we gave it some latitude coming out of the mouths of babes. But when, for instance, new mother and whole-ass adult, Millie Bobby Brown, delivers the same crappy dialogue she did when she was twelve, it seems less okay coming out of the mouth of a grown up we just expect more from. And all in furtherance of some absolutely opaque narrative that flattens all the characters into exposition mechanisms or incendiary devices.

Remember when this show was about some nerdy outcasts who played D&D and wanted to save their town from monsters? Yeah, me too. Remember when there were stakes in and amongst our group of characters? Some of whom even ended up dead? And we were like, man, poor Bob! Eddie, you left us too soon! Sure, the stakes were relatively limited, but at least the scripts rounded out these people to the point that we cared about them enough to mourn their passing. Well, forget about that! We will not only not kill anyone off, we will literally rip apart a third-stringer in Ted Wheeler, conspicuously vanish him for the entire season without a mention and then just kind of magically bring him back in the finale as if he’s been there all along. And then add in a bunch of completely useless characters who seemingly just serve to… Well, I actually have no clue why they’re there. Robin’s (Maya Hawke) new girlfriend, Vickie. Total waste other than to link up the LGBTQ storyline with Will (Noah Schnapp). Lucas’ sister, Erica. She seems to only exist to throw off vaguely cliched sass. And they bring back the science teacher, Scott, for no other reason than to remind you that he was the dude who originally told them about wormholes. There are other superfluous characters as well, but for some weird reason The Duffers decided they all needed to march into the Upside Down to create this kind of rogues army of nerds. The whole thing plays as completely jumbled and unnecessarily crowded. A bunch of cogs to get to a result that means not a whole lot. It’s hectic and cluttered.

There is a version of this season that is on the cutting room floor somewhere. I know a time-travel plot when I see one. Yet there is no time travel. There are flashbacks to Joyce (Winona Ryder) and Hopper (David Harbour) in high school. Ryder and Harbour are 54 and 50 years old respectively. Yet somehow Henry Creel / Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) is at their high school at the same time as them. Bower is 37. But Henry Creel (then known as One) was at the hospital as a young adult with Eleven (Brown) when she was a child in 1983. So, let’s be generous and say he’s 25 when he’s at the hospital (though I think he’s supposed to be younger). That would put his birth year at 1958. Problem is the flashback scene to their time in high school is 1959. Is he a one-year-old high schooler? Or… was there some time travel originally built into the script and later scrapped because it added too many layers of craziness? It’s the only thing that makes sense and why those scenes exist. There are some other items in the season that also nod to time travel, but they all cul-de-sac and are never resolved. It’s pretty egregious. Ignoring the messy age thing, if he was at high school with them, was in a play with Joyce and killed his parents in 1959, wouldn’t Joyce and Hopper remember him? It’s not every day that a kid in Jr. High (?) stars in a high school play or someone in a small town kills his family. But, nope, not even a mention of the connection between Joyce and Hopper. Weird. This isn’t the only plot that went nowhere due to either poor planning or some sort of editorial choice that couldn’t erase all of the original ideas. Linda Hamilton is in this season as what we’re led to believe is the human big bad (in the vein of Matthew Modine’s Martin Brenner character). She’s the head of a military unit dispatched to Hawkins to… be evil? Honestly, I have no clue what her character is supposed to be other than a woman in a really bad wig who stomps around menacingly and then is quietly erased as a threat in the finale with no mention of her. That’s poor plotting.

And if these were the only two or three giant plot holes, I could maybe live with it. I do hate when timelines don’t line up, though. Especially when it’s this unforgivably bad. But, let’s see. Eleven and Hopper murder tons of innocent soldiers. Like violently break their necks with telekinesis or just up and shoot them. Yet, Hopper rolls right into the arms of that same military and everyone just shrugs and they let him be a sheriff again with no repercussions. Dude’s a mass murderer. But that’s just fine, I guess? Also, the characters seem to come up with “theories” out of thin air. Most of which involve theoretical physics. Or seismology. Or advanced explosives. Or just hair-brained things that have no basis in either science or anything other than the writers trying to forward the plot by making some dumb kid — they are supposed to be sixteen, remember — come up with one-percent-chance-of-working scheme that no person would ever come up with. Over and over again. Including Steve (Joe Keery) — notoriously a beautiful dummy — who theorizes that these two worlds coming together through a wormhole can somehow be stopped by climbing a radio tower and just kinda climbing from one world to the other. Or something. It’s complete gibberish. But, surprise, it kinda works! Go Steve. Let’s see, they put Natalia Dyer in a terrible Rambo III wig and she is suddenly Rambo. She literally practices shooting a rifle in the woods a couple times and then, in season five, all 90 pounds of her is fighting the Mind Flayer with a couple M60s like a Green Beret superhero. It’s absurd. They dress Eleven in Josh Brolin’s dumb sweatsuit outfit from Goonies — the poor girl — and also give her some insane superpowers that were like 25x anything we’d seen from her previously. And… Holly Wheeler (Nell Fisher). She’s supposed to be nine. Despite being six in season four. So, she aged three year in 18 months. Which we could forgive (though I won’t) if the actress playing her wasn’t fourteen. I’ve had a nine-year-old daughter, who was eventually fourteen. There is no comparison in those two ages. We are not idiots. Not only does the character not look nine, she doesn’t act even remotely nine. She takes on Vecna with a firepoker and wins, for god’s sake. It’s crazy. And all her classmates — who are presumably also supposed to be nine — are also at least five years older than that. Shit is bonkers that they take so little care with the casting, writing or logic in this show. Bonkers!

And this is what disappointed me the most: they seemed to take advantage of the fans’ loyalty and desire to complete the series. They half-assed not only the lore and the writing, but just waved away what I imagine had to be concerns in the process. Why is Karen Wheeler (Cara Buono) now able to do like Ethan-Hunt-level MacGyver shit? Is all this stuff only affecting Hawkins, Indiana somehow? The military cordons off the town after those giant fissures form in season four, but one would think if another world crashed into ours, it would maybe destroy not only Hawkins, but the whole Earth? Who knows, because they never tell us. Can of worms, I guess. But, again, I think they just expect us to accept it. And then there’s a bunch of nonsense with the Mind Flayer and Vecna and a bunch of kids that are needed to like… Well, after all that I have no idea what was going on. Also, apparently the Upside Down is like not dangerous anymore! No demogorgons or anything! Nah, you can just like hike around the Upside Down, make your way up the Mind Flayer with no problem… And the Mind Flayer is hollow? Or is basically just a cave on legs?

And then comes the last half of the finale. It’s the epilogue, but it’s the only part of the entire season that has some humanity. Which makes you wonder if they just fudged everything so badly because they spent the entirety of their energy on that denouement. Where the characters finally almost talk like humans. Despite some of them making some seriously questionable life choices — which I feel like The Duffers think are cool but are actually super-foolish. In other words, this wanna-be Six Feet Under ending is better than the rest of the season, but is still clumsily written and unbalanced. Honestly, I think the reaction to this season will be even worse when folks have a chance to binge the series from season one through the very end. The quality is diminishing and the glaring laziness in the plotting and continuity will be even more evident. That said, I do see a future for Sadie Sink and Joe Kerry, the two most charismatic actors in the series. And lots of funny-best-friend options for Maya Hawke as well. None of the actors honestly had a whole lot to do this season. In fact, fake nine-year-old Holly Wheeler — a non-player small child in previous seasons — got the most screen time of anyone. But, hey, there’s always that secret episode that will [definitely not] come out some day. Maybe it’ll just be a two-hour retcon that explains away all the plot holes and disjointed timelines. I’m not holding my breath.