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We loved the first season and loved the fourth. We patiently waited three and a half years for the fifth, aware that – never more than in the era of hit-and-run emotions – working on beauty takes time. Having reached the point, the glance leaves us a little perplexed: after having seen seven of the eight episodes of the final season of Stranger Thingswe must confess that we are a little perplexed. Netflix may have invested 480 million dollars to bring down the curtain on its most iconic product, but this time the Duffer Brothers appear less inspired, the episodes full of scholastic narrative solutions and the season, unfortunately, devoid of the magic we were used to. To write these lines, we have to fight with an internal demon that certainly won’t be Vecna but is still the affection we have for what the Duffer brothers have shown (and cleverly avoided showing us) in the 34 episodes of Stranger Things released from 2016 to 2022. For the love of truth, we list here five reasons why the fifth season (at least so far) has not convinced us. With a warning: this article contains spoilers.
1. They have pierced the veil of mystery
Without mystery, masses cannot be sung. It’s as true in church as it is in TV series. The first four seasons of Stranger Things they worked like a charm because you couldn’t quite figure out where the driver wanted to take the bus. You took a nice panoramic ride, between prohibitive hairpin bends and breathtaking views, and only episode after episode did you acquire a few more elements to understand the meaning of the general picture. The fourth season, beautiful, revealed the unrevealable. It was clear that it would be very difficult to move the story further. In the first seven episodes of season five this difficulty is clearly evident.
2. A team-up that never ends
The fortune – and the problem – of contemporary Hollywood is called The Hero’s Journeya fundamental book by Cristopher Vogler who raised generations of screenwriters, dictating to them a precise scheme according to which to build stories. The typical dynamics of Hero’s Journey is that the character «Guardian of the threshold» (the antagonist, the «monster» who prevents the protagonist from passing the level), once overcome, becomes an unexpected and welcome ally of the «good guys». Stranger Things begins to abuse this dynamic a bit and so, having reached the fifth season, we witness an unprecedented team-up of characters. With this very high concentration of good people it is inevitable that the narrative nuclei multiply and the story breaks up.
3. The video game effect
What do you make the “good” do when there are so many of them? The Avengers teach: you make them beat their hands. And here we come to another problem of the fifth season of Stranger Things: there’s too much action, too much video game effect. Sometimes it’s a shooter, other times even a platformer where you headbutt the wall and earn the mushroom that makes you invincible. Every couple of episodes the condominium meeting of the protagonists meets, develops a plan and enters and exits the Upside Down to take it out somewhat generically against Vecna, with the bad scientists and the thieving government of the United States. Of course: the actors are good, we’ve been fond of their characters for a while, but it’s not enough.
4. The great quotation binge.
Quotes have always been the spice of Stranger Things. Season after season: Stephen King’s books, in particular Stand by me – Memory of a summerthe fraction of Nightmare, the house… there was a bit of everything, expertly dosed. Here lies much of the success of this series set in the 1980s which is uniting generations of spectators in front of the screen. In the fifth season, however, we find that the Duffer brothers’ quotation has become a little confusing. And above all it no longer refers only to the Eighties: there is the saga of Matrix (the kids intubated in the muddy squalor by Vecna and forced into an apparent flourishing life), the wormhole of Interstellareven The shark (The oxygen tank that makes demo-dogs explode). In the story of Holly’s kidnapping, then, the tribute to is made explicit In the folds of timea novel by Madeleine L’Engle which became a Disney film in 2018. And the setting between the fifties and sixties of the parallel world in which Henry/Signor Cosè/Vecna imprisons the children does a lot Welcome to Derry. A great citation binge.
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