The series finale of Stranger Things represented the end of an era. When the series debuted on Netflix in July 2016, it was the last summer of the Obama presidency. The triumphant, sold-out theater screenings of the final episode happened in an entirely different world. Stranger Things has been rightly accused of being a giant nostalgia machine, but I think maybe the legions of fans who ponied up to watch a show they could have watched at home were nostalgic not for the 1980s, the period when the show is set, but for the good America they lived in before Trump.
The visual language and thematic concerns of Stranger Things come from the giants of ’80s popular culture, all works which have, in their own way, stood the test of time. There are the rollicking, kids-on-bikes adventures like The Goonies, which was produced by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment. The Stranger Things kids play Dungeons & Dragons because the kids in Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial did. There’s the gory horror of Wes Craven, whose A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors was a major inspiration for the series’ later seasons. The screenwriter of that film was the legendary Frank Darabont, director of The Shawshank Redemption and creator of The Walking Dead. He came out of retirement to direct two episodes of the final season of Stranger Things because he was such a huge fan of the show. There’s the suburban paranoia of John Carpenter, an artist regarded as a hack in the ’80s, a decade when he was churning out classic after classic. In the final season, when archvillain Vecna, aka Henry Creel (Jamie Campbell Bower), finally emerges from the Upside Down, the shot echoes the chilling emergence of the Antichrist in Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness. The shot returns in the final episode, its meaning reversed when Eleven aka Jane Hopper (Millie Bobby Brown) seals the portal between worlds for the final time.
And then, of course, there’s George Lucas, who even has a character named after him, played by Caleb McLaughlin. Without the mega-hit of Star Wars in 1977, the sci-fi fantasy boom of the 1980s would never have happened, and Lucas’ friendship with Spielberg revolutionized the action/adventure genre with Raiders of the Lost Ark. In the last episode, set in 1989, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is playing at Hawkins, Indiana’s main street movie theater. But the Lucas project which Stranger Things most resembles is American Graffiti. Lucas’ breakout hit came in 1973, and was set in small-town Modesto, California, in the early 1960s. The film spawned a wave of nostalgia which only deepened when stars Ron Howard and Cindy Williams were cast in the poodle-skirt sitcom Happy Days. Thanks to Stranger Things, the ’80s occupy a similar place in our culture today.
But Stranger Things has never been as starry-eyed about the ’80s as Happy Days was about the ’50s. As Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) says in his valedictorian speech at the Party’s high school graduation in the final episode, much of the decade sucked. Lesser shows would have portrayed the Reagan era as looking like Miami Vice, all pastel clothes and blobby, impractical Memphis Milano Group furniture. (At one point, Hopper [David Harbour] reveals that Miami Vice is appointment viewing for him and Eleven.) In fact, the real 1980s were overwhelmingly brown, which Stranger Things’ secret weapon, production designer Chris Trujillo, never shied away from.
Landing a series that is as acclaimed by critics as it is beloved by viewers is never easy. Witness the debacle of Lost, the supremely unsatisfying finale of Game of Thrones, or the long, meaningless twilight of The Walking Dead. Identical twin show runners Matt and Ross Duffer manage to get it pretty much right. After having their cast scattered from Hawkins to California to the Kamchatka Peninsula in season 4, season 5 begins with everyone back in Hawkins, whether they like it or not. The town’s secret government lab is not such a secret anymore since the alien hive mind known as the Mind Flayer and Vecna split the ground asunder with rifts to the netherworld of the Upside Down, and now the whole town is under military lockdown. (Wow, so relatable in Trump’s America!) The military, led by Dr. Kay (Linda Hamilton, extremely intimidating) is up to no good in the Upside Down. Here in the Prime Material Plane, they’re looking everywhere for Eleven. Meanwhile, she has come to terms with her origin as a genetically modified psychic weapon, and is training to use her new head-exploding powers in the search for Vecna. The crew is staging “crawls,” where Hopper sneaks into the Upside Down and searches a grid square for signs of the lich. But so far, they’ve come up empty. When a botched crawl attempt goes awry, Eleven and Hopper are trapped in the Upside Down, just as Vecna’s plan to kidnap 12 more children like he did Will Byers (Noah Schnapp), beginning with Mike’s (Finn Wolfhard) sister Holly (Nell Fisher) is revealed.
The Duffers and co-conspirator Sean Levy make sure every penny of their $400 million budget appears onscreen, but none of it would matter if they didn’t have one of the greatest casts ever assembled for a television show, anchored by the legend Winona Ryder as Will’s long-suffering mother Joyce. Maya Hawke, who still feels like the new girl in her third season, walks away with every scene she’s in. Nashvillian Natalia Dyer and Charlie Heaton, who became a couple in real life after playing Nancy Wheeler and Jonathon Byers, share a heartfelt scene in a melting Upside Down deathtrap, while Alpha nerd Dustin and Steve “The Hair” Harrington (Joe Keery) bicker instead of rescuing them.
The season has its faults. The pandemic and the SAG/WGA strikes meant that the cast is a few years older than they should have been at this point in the story (Dyer is playing a college student at 30, and Brown now has a kid of her own), but the extra downtime seems to have enabled the Duffers to fully develop their scripts. The final episode, “The Rightside Up,” has a Return of the King-sized denouement, but after nine years of excellence, I think the Hellfire Club has earned it.
Stranger Things Season 5 is now streaming on Netflix.