Stranger Things Season 5 Turns the Series’ Craziest Cliffhanger Into a Huge Disappointment

This article contains spoilers for “Stranger Things” season 5, episode 1 – “Chapter One: The Crawl”.

Remember that wild cliffhanger ending from “Stranger Things” Season 4, Part 2? You’d be forgiven for being fuzzy on the details – after all, it was over three years ago. In the climactic moments of the season finale (titled “Chapter 9: The Piggyback”), a chasm opens in Hawkins, allowing the Upside Down to enter our world. Additionally, Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) realizes that Vecna ​​(Jamie Campbell Bower) isn’t done yet, despite the villain’s seemingly fiery death.

With a setup like that, surely the show’s final season would be a “Jurassic World: Dominion” type situation where creatures from the Upside Down stalk the normal world? Or perhaps a smaller scale invasion that would provide a fitting backdrop for the show’s grand finale? It turns out not. The “Stranger Things” Season 5 premiere (“Chapter One: The Crawl”) achieves the impossible by standing up and restore the status quo.

Certainly, there is a few changes from what came before. Pieces of Hawkins are still in ruins and the entire area is under closed military quarantine. Yet daily life continues, with people going to school and work as usual. There are even people in the city who don’t seem at all aware of the horrors of the Upside Down. If I’m honest, this all smells like a ploy to keep the series’ “normal small town with terrible things lurking in the background” motif intact for one last go-round. Even the show’s own characters don’t really seem to buy the way the show restores the status quo after a massive dimensional invasion, given that Robin (Maya Hawke) specifically refers to the metal strip covering the chasm like a band-aid.

I understand that “Stranger Things” wants to take the premise that made it famous for one last spin. It’s just that in order to remain a supernatural mystery in a small town, it has to jump through so many hoops to undo its own world-building that it’s just not believable anymore.

Over its first three seasons, the series managed to give us a series of ever-increasing versions of the “Kids vs. Monsters in Reverse” theme, but the globe-trotting fourth season upped the stakes. Like the rest of “Stranger Things” Season 4, Part 2, “The Piggyback” was an epic thing overloaded with big emotional moments, and the things it teased for the show’s future were potentially world-changing, “Hell on Earth” stuff. In this context, waiting more than three years to see the invasion of the Upside Down turn into a catastrophe. yet another The patented “the government has a portal to an evil dimension and our heroes have to figure out what to do” scenario is a bitter pill to swallow.

Perhaps the series can turn that into an advantage, starting off as a relatively slow burn before escalating into the kind of utter chaos that “The Piggyback” promised us. But even if that turns out to be the case, putting a temporary end to the invasion that the show has already explicitly teased seems like a bit of a cop-out.

“Stranger Things” season 5, volume 1 is streaming on Netflix.