After nine years, billions of viewing hours and more nosebleeds than a boxing tournament, the end is almost nigh. This fifth and final season of Stranger Things (Netflix) is being unloaded in three batches: four episodes now, three more on Boxing Day (in the UK) — when it will prove a significantly more tempting prospect than anything on terrestrial TV — and the grand finale on New Year’s Day.
Volume one doesn’t rewrite the manual but why would you want it to? This is richly entertaining stuff with proper jeopardy and bags of emotion. It’s 1987 and Hawkins has been sealed inside a militarised zone, the giant fissure patched with a “giant metal Band-Aid”. Our heroes are surreptitiously scouring the Upside Down for Vecna, the villain played with demonic poise by Jamie Campbell Bower.
He is one of several Brits in the cast along with Millie Bobby Brown (Eleven), Charlie Heaton (Jonathan) and the excellent newcomer Nell Fisher, who plays Holly, the little sister of Nancy and Mike.
Yes, it’s often hard to buy the central crew as teenagers. They are well into their twenties now. Brown is married with a child and Noah Schnapp has to be de-aged with distracting CGI to play Will in a flashback. Still, the 23-year-old Michael J Fox playing a schoolboy didn’t hurt Back to the Future, which incidentally is a touchstone for this season.
And casting older actors pays off in performances, with Schnapp and Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin) in particular making the most of some harrowing storylines. The graveyard beating dealt out to Dustin by a gang of “mouthbreathing” bullies is almost Scorsese-like in its brutality and the demogorgons, with their unpeeling jaws, remain truly horrible.
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The Duffer Brothers, who created the show, recently told this paper that Steven Spielberg, whose movies they have plundered so mercilessly, had advised them to look further back for inspiration. They’ve taken their sensei at his word — this season nods to Little Red Riding Hood, The Great Escape and A Wrinkle in Time, the cult fantasy novel of 1962.
Gaten Matarazzo as Dustin, Finn Wolfhard as Mike, Caleb McLaughlin as Lucas and Noah Schnapp as Will i
NETFLIX
That’s not to say that the Eighties references don’t also come thick and fast. Eleven has taken to leaping fences in a single bound and wearing red shorts over her trousers, Hawkins’s very own Supergirl.
Elsewhere, Linda “Terminator” Hamilton is the latest piece of retro casting and we get the genius needle drop of Diana Ross’s Upside Down. Were the Duffers waiting nine years to unleash that one? If so, bravo for their patience.
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At times you can’t move for Easter eggs but they invariably hatch into something great. What other show could give us a home-invasion scene that’s basically Aliens soundtracked by Abba? The Duffers’ world-building is also bearing fruit with a flashback to 1959, tying in satisfyingly with the Stranger Things stage show, which every fan of the series should see.
Maya Hawke, meanwhile, is a star and David Harbour and Winona Ryder’s Hopper and Joyce are one of the engagingly imperfect couples on screen — let’s hope it doesn’t end badly, and she makes a confessional album about him. Episode four features a set piece that would be the envy of most movies and a revelation that sets up the final chapters very nicely indeed. The big question is: who will they kill off? Roll on Boxing Day.
★★★★☆
The first four episodes of season 5 (and previous series) are on Netflix now
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