Stranger Things: Season 5, Volume 1

2022 feels like a different universe: the pandemic was drawing to a tentative conclusion, Liz Truss was Prime Minister for less than a lettuce’s lifetime, and Chris Rock got slapped at the Oscars. It’s also when we last visited Hawkins: where Indiana’s pluckiest teens and most chaotic adults fought to stop the world from being enveloped by a Lovecraftian nightmare.

Three-and-a-half years on, one of the jewels in Netflix’s crown returns for a final chapter, and completes its own unlikely underdog rise. Despite its initially low-profile cast and nostalgia for an era that was over before much of its audience had been born, Stranger Things became a phenomenon, each season expanding and improving its scope while folding in star-making turns from Maya Hawke (Robin), Joseph Quinn (Eddie) and Sadie Sink (Max). Now, the remaining gang is not trying to survive a battle — they are attempting to win the entire war, on a scale that even the world’s biggest streamer has never attempted.

The show proves it has not lost its sense of fun.

All the trademark elements are intact: the dark humour, the whimsy, the poetry of trauma and hard-earned resilience. Most reassuring of all is how quickly the show proves it has not lost its sense of fun. It also cleverly sidesteps the cast ageing into adulthood with a seamless time-jump. The new season is set almost two years after the Season 4 catastrophe. Hawkins is now under full military quarantine, complete with “free mandatory medical check-ups that are very cool”, as one character sarcastically notes. Meanwhile, our motley crew has become more skilled and convincingly capable of taking on an apocalypse that proves far beyond the ability of the United States military.

As it has done in the past, the series occasionally over-relies on fan service and self-referential callbacks but stops short of smugness. The performances remain largely excellent, with Caleb McLaughlin’s Lucas emerging as MVP — now entirely convincing as a hench leading man — while mourning Max, whose fate lies outside the normal binary of life and death. New face Nell Fisher as Holly is a delightful addition, and her twisted, Alice In Wonderland-esque adventures mark a welcome and captivating new visual language for the series. By comparison, with their uniformity and uncanny CG sheen, Demogorgon-fatigue settles in fast, and even a full balls-to-the-wall mid-season finale cannot entirely cure it. But their blandness conversely does enhance the brilliance of grounding Vecna in Jamie Campbell Bower’s campy, spine-chilling turn.

In some respects, the show’s success seems to work against it. With a cast now in high demand off the back of this show’s popularity, the plot-threads and action sequences are so bisected as to scream movie-star scheduling issues. Yet despite the chaos, Stranger Things remains a show that knows exactly what it is, and one that reminds us that youth may be precious, but growing older can still be exhilarating.