Ian YoungsCulture reporter
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Millie Bobby Brown returns as Eleven
The first half of Stranger Things’ final season has been unleashed on viewers, with many critics giving the return of the hit Netflix show glowing reviews – although others said it’s past its prime.
The first four episodes of season five are “richly entertaining stuff with proper jeopardy and bags of emotion”, wrote Ed Potton in a four-star review in the Times.
Another four-star write-up, by Jack Seale in the Guardian, declared that “this luxurious final run will have you standing on a chair, yelling with joy”.
But not everyone was so enthusiastic. The show “seesaws between thrilling and annoying”, according to USA Today‘s Kelly Lawler, while the Atlantic‘s Sophie Gilbert described most of it as “largely joyless and grim”.
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‘Top-rank comfort viewing’
Netflix briefly crashed when the four new episodes were released on Wednesday in the US, and early on Thursday in the UK. The streaming service told Variety normal service was resumed within five minutes.
Three further instalments are due to be released at Christmas, with the finale at New Year.
With the hugely popular sci-fi show approaching its climax, the end may also be nigh for the plucky inhabitants of Hawkins, Indiana, as a showdown looms between the (now mature) teenage heroes and the evil Vecna.
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Some fans got up early to binge the new episodes after they were released in the UK at 01:00 GMT on Thursday.
They included Eve Edmunds, 25, who woke up at 04:45. “I did want to get up earlier but I slept through my first alarm,” she told BBC Radio 1’s Newsbeat.
“I didn’t take my eyes off the screen and I’m really glad I made that decision.”
The episodes are “incredible”, she said. “It’s absolutely worth the wait. It keeps you gripped. They’ve not held back, they’ve pulled out all the stops and I was very impressed.”
‘Not lost its sense of fun’
The Standard‘s Vicky Jessop was equally satisfied. She wrote: “It’s classic 80s adventure fare, in the best way: kids outsmarting adults, lashings of humour and a surprising amount of heart. I gulped it down – more please.”
The Times added: “Volume one doesn’t rewrite the manual but why would you want it to?”
Empire‘s four-star review by Leila Latif said it “remains a show that knows exactly what it is, and one that reminds us that youth may be precious, but growing older can still be exhilarating”.
She wrote: “All the trademark elements are intact: the dark humour, the whimsy, the poetry of trauma and hard-earned resilience. Most reassuring of all is how quickly the show proves it has not lost its sense of fun.”
‘Worth indulging it one last time’
The “bombastic” fourth episode is Stranger Things “at its best”, according to BBC Culture‘s Laura Martin.
“It’s thrilling; and if it’s a precursor to how the Duffer Brothers plan to wrap up the show… then viewers are in for an all-time great TV ending.”
In the Telegraph, a three-star review by Ed Power wrote that Stranger Things “remains top-rank comfort viewing”.
“For now, despite a slightly slow start, the signs are promising that it will go one better than Game of Thrones, and deliver a send-off that lives up to audience expectations,” he said.
The Guardian also put some caveats in its positive review.
“Stranger Things definitely needs to switch off its boombox, hang up its catapults and admit it’s too old for these capers, but it’s worth indulging it one last time,” Seale wrote.
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The show’s fifth season has a healthy 86% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing, although some reviewers were not completely enthused.
“The cast keeps growing up, but the show hasn’t,” said Sam Adams on Slate.
“It’s not just Hawkins that feels cut off from the world. It’s Stranger Things itself, a show now sealed in an airless, impenetrable bubble of stagnant characters and snarled lore.”
‘Let them grow up and move on’
Others also pointed out the advancing ages of the central characters.
The Hollywood Reporter‘s Angie Han said: “It’s time to let these adolescents do as adolescents are meant to do: grow up and move on with the rest of their lives.”
Variety‘s Alison Herman wrote: “By declining to enrich its characters as they age, Stranger Things traps itself in arrested development. When you get bigger without going deeper, you end up stretched thin.”
IndieWire‘s Ben Travers declared that season five “leaves you wanting less”, while Nerdist‘s Michael Walsh agreed that less could have been more.
“The start of Stranger Things 5 is a lot,” he wrote. “A lot, a lot.
“While very little from these four overly long episodes is outright bad on its own (with one major exception), too much story, too many characters, and too many complicated/convoluted developments keep Volume One from being great.”
The next three episodes will be released on Christmas Day in the US and Boxing Day in the UK, and the finale will arrive on New Year’s Eve in the US and New Year’s Day in the UK.