‘Stranger Things’ Season 5 Volume 2 Review: Running Up That Hill to the Finish Line
As the series heads toward its finale, it keeps running on momentum, repetition, and just enough emotion to make the climb worthwhile. Streaming on Netflix.
It’s kind of a miracle that a show like Stranger Things still works at all. Credit where credit’s due: to the directors, who manage to keep a lumbering freight train of exposition and plotting in motion—even with Dustin constantly stopping the action to deliver TED Talks in front of a makeshift whiteboard; to the actors, who sell heartfelt speeches about their hopes, fears, and personal frustrations; to the mythology of the ’80s, which remains endearing even if it’s barely used anymore; to the action and suspense scenes, which put the characters in vaguely serious peril against an unbeatable enemy; or maybe to the simple fact that the end is finally in sight, and like when you’re 50 pages away from finishing a 700-page novel, what matters most is just getting to the last page.
The tired old horse that is Stranger Things is limping toward the finish line in better shape than you’d expect at this point. You can see the narrative machinery clearly, and it’s honestly baffling that something so basic and mechanical can still be entertaining. The system works like this: in one scene, three or four of our heroes—sometimes two, sometimes almost all of them—have a problem to solve, and they come up with the most wildly arbitrary idea imaginable to fix it. This isn’t a matter of deciding whether to enter a house through the front door or the back. No. This is about entering a parallel universe, discovering it thanks to a lucky coincidence between the shape of a mountain and some kind of cosmic telescope, falling into the void and surviving mid-air, plus a long list of supposedly scientific schemes that, more often than not, sort of work.
After one of those scenes, the show jumps to another subgroup of characters (in Part 2 there are five or six groups moving in parallel, across different dimensions) doing something very similar. Some kind of cataclysm ripples through several of these worlds and everyone has to adjust. If things get really bad, cue the emotional scene to deal with it: relationships (“I thought you were my friend, but you’re never there when I need you”), personal trauma (“I’m like you in almost every way, but I need to confess something”), or romance (“It’s not the song that matters—it’s you”). Something shifts just enough, and then it all starts again: another plan, another reshuffling of the pieces, another half-confession, and off we go.
That all of this keeps moving forward is, frankly, miraculous. Across the three episodes that make up most of the second half of the fifth and final season—only one remains, the Grand Finale—nothing really happens in Stranger Things that hasn’t happened before. Sure, there are “big revelations” (what the Upside Down is, how it connects to everything, what its function is, all decoded by a kid who should be about 14 or 15), and our long-suffering Will Byers finally gets his moment of truth, one that the end of Part 1 had already pretty much spoiled. But deep down, it’s the same story: new levels unlocked in an endless race toward the same goal. The weird thing about the show is that it keeps insisting that everything is changing. And yet, what we’re watching always looks more or less the same.
Are there new things? Well, sort of. There are kids hanging from gooey bushes in something like a Lovecraftian version of The Matrix. There are more kids wandering through a “memory palace” that looks suspiciously like a Dune soundstage. There are even more kids in a house that feels ripped straight out of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. A Wrinkle in Time is more than ever—right down to the episode titles—the show’s shared language for making sense of what’s going on. There’s an episode where Running Up That Hill plays so many times you can practically hear the money landing in Kate Bush’s bank account. And then there’s a moment—among the show’s worst practical-digital effects—when one of the many worlds (I’ve lost track of which one) turns into a hideous wad of bubblegum, with the characters trudging through it as if they were walking on melting tubs of ice cream. It’s all pretty ugly.
«Eppur si muove«, as Galileo Galilei supposedly said—whom I can easily imagine explaining heliocentrism to the Inquisition the same way Dustin explains black holes and “exotic matter” to his friends. And yet, Stranger Things does move. It advances. It inches closer to an ending where, as we’re told before every season finale, the kids must defeat Vecna, rescue yet another group of children (actual children this time, not adults dressed like high schoolers), and—predictably—save Hawkins and the entire world while resolving their personal trauma along the way. Will they succeed? What do you think? See you next week.
