i fucking HATE season 5 of Stranger Things.
like not “oh it disappointed me :(” hate. i mean full-body, teeth-grinding, “why did i bother sitting through this” hate. season 5 feels like the writers forgot how their own show works and then decided that was actually fine.
nothing is happening. and yet everything is happening badly.
everyone is a SIDE CHARACTER. everyone. characters who used to drive the plot now just drift through scenes like cardboard cutouts of themselves. they show up, say something vaguely on-brand, and then vanish until the script remembers they exist again. there is no central emotional arc. no spine. no urgency. it’s just events. disconnected, weightless events.
and the pacing? criminal. entire episodes go by where i’m like “okay but what is the POINT of this scene.” tension never builds, it just sort of flickers and dies. stakes feel imaginary. danger feels theoretical.
the ONLY thing. the ONLY thing i like about season 5 is the wormhole theory and the science angle. that shit? cool as hell. genuinely interesting. weird physics, reality folding in on itself, consequences that should be terrifying? YES. FINALLY. except they barely explore it. they introduce these ideas and then immediately refuse to dig into them. it’s all surface-level, vibes-over-logic nonsense when it could’ve been the most compelling part of the entire season.
everything else? fucking shit.
dialogue feels flat. emotional beats barely land before the show moves on like it’s embarrassed to linger. relationships that used to matter are hollowed out. it feels like the show is afraid to commit to ANYTHING that might be messy, emotional, or meaningful.
and yeah, some actors are clearly trying. lucas’s actor. max’s actor. dustin. steve. they’re acting with their whole chest while the script gives them crumbs and vibes and tells them to make it work. respect to them for carrying scenes that have no business being this empty.
(side note, because apparently my brain won’t shut up: eddie mattered because he felt REAL. specific. weird. alive. that’s it. that’s the sidetrack. moving on.)
season 5 doesn’t feel like a finale. it feels like a rough draft that somehow made it to production. like a checklist of “things a final season should have” without understanding why any of those things worked in the first place.
i don’t hate season 5 because i’m a hater. i hate season 5 because this show USED to know what it was doing. and now it feels like it’s coasting on nostalgia and hoping we won’t notice that the soul fell out somewhere along the way.
anyway. fuck season 5. wormholes deserved better. the characters deserved better. WE deserved better.
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