Stranger Things was never meant to end like this, largely because it was never meant to go on the way it has. The first season was conceived and written as a limited series, with the possibility of succeeding other, entirely different seasons, similar to True Detective or American Horror Story. Someone at Netflix decided during filming that the story should be extended, and so it was. Cue a never-ending series of gaping plot holes, awkwardly introduced new characters, and enough absurd retroactive continuity to make the producers of the Fast and Furious films blush.

Yet none of this has managed to address the show’s primary weakness, which is a complete and utter lack of original thought. The guiding concept of “children playing Dungeons & Dragons encounter something real” is, of course, borrowed from E.T., while the general look and feel of the monsters and evil spirits is best described as “community-theater H.R. Giger.” By the third season, the identical-twin directors Matt and Ross Duffer did little but pander to Generation X and millennial nostalgia. The plot was incidental; the real joy was in admiring the verisimilitude of the Starcourt Mall, which contained actual ’80s retailers like the Gap, and became so popular as an idea that there is a thriving online community dedicated to creating perfect 3-D renders of the mall in various programs and video games. If you ask a true member of the fanbase, they would tell you that all of this is both deliberate and extremely delightful. It’s a tribute show, you see! 

Some percentage of those folks would no doubt have been thrilled just to watch a half-dozen more tepid seasons of shopping malls, D&D games, functioning communities where children ride bikes to school, and other lamented casualties of our diverse modern e-commerce utopia. Unfortunately for them and the Duffer brothers, the series has an expiration date. The stars are all pursuing other projects, some of them are anxious to quit, and there have been accusations of misbehavior on set. Worst of all, the widening gap between the four-year timeline of the show’s universe and the nine years it’s taken to film it, combined with the Duffer brothers’ early decision to cast older actors as children, has required viewers of Stranger Things to practice even more suspension of disbelief than would normally be necessary in a TV show about demons from an alternate universe. 

Caleb McLaughlin as Lucas Sinclair, Finn Wolfhard as Mike Wheeler, Winona Ryder as Joyce Byers, Noah Schnapp as Will Byers and Maya Hawke as Robin Buckley in Season 5 of “Stranger Things.” (Courtesy of Netflix)

The fourth season was an ambitious attempt to reimagine everything that happened up to that point, create a durable antagonist who could chew up some screen time instead of just being a derivative and wholly mute CGI monstrosity, and generate a ton of extra plot threads to all be tied up in an even longer, more bloated, and more complex fifth season. Most memorable for the deft and even beautiful use of a Kate Bush song, the season was generally a conventional take on that old trope of the bad guy being created by the good guy. This plot device did not elevate the awful Bond film Spectre, and it did not help matters here, either. 

Which brings us to the plodding fifth season. Though more than 650 hours of footage were reportedly captured during over a year’s worth of filming, much of the fifth season looks cheap or hastily done. It’s hard to believe that what we see on screen represents the best of what was shot. But worse than the way it looks is the tangled story. In Game of Thrones fashion, the season manages to spend much of its energy adding new subplots rather than resolving old ones. The scope of the Stranger Things universe has become too unwieldy to operate logically, so the Duffers have contented themselves with using improbabilities to move the plot along. The entire U.S. Army is surrounding the gate to the netherworld? Well, there’s probably room for a 6-foot-4-inch sheriff to sneak into that gate without anyone noticing. Does the plot require one man in a box truck to survive being shot up by a bevy of automatic rifles? Then that’s what will happen. A monster that can kill dozens of people without pause or concern will suddenly become too slow and confused to kill one, simply because that person is of interest to the story. 

In an earlier season, there’s an arch film-buff joke about how the “dumb jock” thinks Return of the Jedi was the best Star Wars film, which has become increasingly ironic because Seasons 3, 4, and 5 all hinge on situations where, as in Return of the Jedi, multiple groups of characters are all fighting different problems at roughly the same pace. George R.R. Martin had the same crowded-rooms problem with the aforementioned Game of Thrones, and he partially solved it by killing cherished characters as often as possible. The Duffer brothers are unwilling to do the same thing here; after all, these are children. They are played by 26-year-olds, but you get the idea. 

What we get instead of plot streamlining is … fanservice. Linda Hamilton appears as an evil doctor. Why? Because she was great in The Terminator, of course. Did the plot need an evil doctor? You can guess the answer to that, but it takes 20 minutes’ worth of scenes to make it obvious. One character comes out as gay, mainly because the actor who plays him came out on TikTok a few years ago, and the Redditors wanted that to be honored. Naturally, the literal end of the world stops around him long enough for him to make a heartfelt speech on the subject. Oh, look! A child shows a G.I. Joe lunchbox to actual soldiers! There’s a lot of this, and much of it feels forced. 

The series finale, which will air after this review goes to print, will need to be extraordinary if it is to resolve both the Hanging Gardens’ worth of unresolved plot threads and address the already vociferous chorus of disdain coming from the show’s most rabid fans. Some viewers are so upset that they have gone to the trouble of creating a petition in which they demand to see all the “missing” footage. Fan theories about this footage are running rampant, and the majority of them boil down to “if we could see the other 600 hours they shot, or some of it, then maybe Season 5 would make sense.”

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If only. If Season 5 is bad, and it does seem to be at the very least not good, it’s because of the creeping sloppiness that, like those evil underground tunnels in the second season, has managed to spread unchecked throughout the entire show. Characters regularly speak in modern phrases: “I’m not doing this right now,” “you got this,” and so on. Hamilton’s evil doctor makes a joke about a soldier not learning sarcasm in ROTC, then addresses him as “sergeant.” Even the much-discussed BMX bikes of the early seasons are not close to being period-correct. 

You might say Stranger Things is the Happy Days of the COVID-19 era; a show where indifferently executed nostalgia provides most of the reason to show up. Years from now, fans and critics will probably try to pinpoint where this series “jumped the shark”, a Happy Days-derived phrase meaning “wore out its welcome.” And with apologies to Bush, it seems obvious that the common consensus will eventually be “after the first season,” which makes sense because nostalgia, like other strong but uncouth pleasures, is meant to be taken in small doses. But the Duffer brothers have insisted, for far too long, on feeding us a smorgasbord of it.

Jack Baruth was born in Brooklyn, New York, and lives in Ohio. He is a pro-am race car driver, a former columnist for Road and Track and Hagerty magazines, and writer of the Avoidable Contact Forever newsletter.