“Stranger Things” Season 5, Volume 1: A Nostalgia for Nostalgia

It’s been three and a half years since the most recent season of “Stranger Things” kicked off in May 2022. The first episode of the hit series’ fifth and final installment – delayed by dual Hollywood strikes and the mounting production value of a show that’s ballooned from surprise breakout to blockbuster franchise – opens in the fall of 1987. That’s 18 months after the events of Season 4, which concluded with archvillain Vecna (Jamie campbell Bower) rupturing the metaphysical border between our reality and the alternate dimension known as the Upside Down, and four years from Season 1, which kicked off in November 1983.

which means that the real-life gap between two individual seasons of “stranger Things” is dangerously close to that of the entire canonical span of “Stranger Things.”

That factoid is absurd enough on its face, illustrating the escalating tax on viewers’ patience from a medium once defined by consistent, predictable output. (“Stranger Things” is far from the sole culprit: “Severance,” another streaming-native genre sensation,is a prime example.) But it also sums up the challenge facing the brainchild of twins matt and Ross Duffer as their show steers into its home stretch, an eight-episode season broken up into three chunks, with the first dropping on Thanksgiving eve.”Stranger Things” is a story about children – and, more than that, the innocence of childhood, pitting a scrappy gang of bike-riding dungeons & Dragons nerds against misguided adults who mess around with forces they don’t understand – that’s gone on long enough to see its cast grow up, with all the tensions that come with that glaring contrast.

The list of data points is long. Millie Bobby Brown, who broke out as the telekinetic, “E.T.”-esque Eleven, is now the married mother of an adopted baby girl. Voices have dropped; IMDb pages have lengthened. For some of the series leads, the time between their casting and the finale’s premiere will encompass more than half their lives. But what matters to this reviewer is how these changes manifest in the show – or rather, don’t. The truth is that “Stranger Things” itself has not reflected its stars’ obvious maturation with an accompanying complexity. All of “Stranger Things” is an exercise in nostalgia. In Season 5, the show now seems to pine not just for the neon hues and synth-driven pop of the 1980s it conjures so evocatively, but for a simpler time in its own run that can’t be brought back, no matter how high the budget. Though if anything, “Stranger things” has only gotten less rough-edged over time. Remember when Hopper (David Harbour) was an alcoholic who smoked?

The four episodes that comprise Volume 1 unsurprisingly walk back the season 4 cliffhanger. Hawkins, Indiana, has not turned into a hellscape of Demogorgons and slimy vines. Instead, the town has been put under military quarantine, occupied by the same foolhardy industrial complex that started this whole mess in the first place. With Matthew Modine’s Dr. Brenner now dead, the deep state’s latest ambassador is Dr. Kay (Linda Hamilton), a scientist and officer who commands an entire base constructed within the Upside Down. Uncle Sam has stapled over most of Vecna’s rifts with crude metal plates, but left just enough open to use for his own ends.