Critic’s Notebook: The Beginning of the End of ‘Stranger Things’

Before the feast, the gorge.

Such is Netflix’s diabolical strategy to deliver the first four episodes of the final season of its monster hit Stranger Things — after a three-year hiatus! — on the night before Thanksgiving. (The next batch arrives on Christmas night, with the series finale arriving on the night of New Year’s Eve.)

These long-awaited episodes feel like events, to be sure, though not exactly family viewing. Unless you’re the Addams Family maybe, who might get their jollies watching terrifying monsters from the underworld invade suburban homes to snatch children for the most nefarious purposes.

Any review of the final season at this point would by nature be incomplete — not just because of the streamer’s laundry list of spoilers, but because there’s still much more to come in what everyone is referring to as The Final Battle between the heroes of 1980s Hawkins, Indiana, and the malevolent supernatural fiend Vecna from the Upside Down dimension, who’s accurately described as “a psychic serial killer.” As Nancy Wheeler (Natalia Dyer) warns after one particularly vicious setback, “He’s not gonna stop until we’re drained of every ounce of suffering.”

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Happy holidays, everyone!

We’re not trying to be as flip about all of this as the snarky DJ Robin (the wonderfully droll Maya Hawke), who, when challenged whether she thinks all of this mayhem is funny, responds, “It must be my tone. My mother says I sound perpetually insincere.”

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The tone set by the Duffer Brothers is never less than sincere, even when the plans concocted by these young warriors to save the town and thereby the world verge on the wacky to, as Dungeons & Dragons devotee Mike (Finn Wolfhard) describes it, “insane.” Part One of Stranger Things 5 is pretty much a thrill ride start to finish, with all of Hawkins under quarantine and military occupation following the earth-shaking events that concluded Season 4 all those years ago. The soldiers, taking orders from the sinister Dr. Kay — played by Linda Hamilton, the Terminator veteran, bringing those 1980s nostalgia vibes — are searching for the all-powerful Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), who’s honing her super psychic powers under the protective guidance of her adoptive dad, Jim Hopper (David Harbour).

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While Eleven and Hopper try to evade capture, they and their loyal if ever-bickering friends are on a mission to find and destroy Vecna in the Upside Down, whatever it takes. And for that, they’ll need to rely on their most vulnerable member: sensitive Will Byers (Noah Schnapp), whose abduction into the Upside Down in Season 1 was the inciting incident in the war with the underworld. “We don’t have time for safe,” says Will, whose personal journey of self-acceptance adds a poignant undercurrent to his determination to step up and face the monster inside his mind, regardless of risk and the entreaties of his worried mother, Joyce (the great and goofy Winona Ryder). A shout-out here to the mothers of Hawkins, whose over-my-dead-body attitude toward the monsters endangering their children is something to behold.

Young Will describes his psychic connection to Vecna as being “like this scary movie you just can’t turn off.” If Netflix has its way, you won’t be able to throughout this holiday season.

Stranger Things, Season 5 Volume 1 (four episodes), Thursday, November 27, 8/7c, Netflix (Volume 2, three episodes, December 25, 8/7c; Series Finale, December 31, 8/7c)

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