On the Eve of the Upside Down: Before Stranger Things 5
Thoughts before the final season of Stranger Things.
Tomorrow morning in Europe, the first four episodes of the final season of Stranger Things arrive. It feels strange—appropriately so—to look back at how much the series came to represent, not only for Netflix but for the streaming era more broadly.
When the first season appeared in 2016, Netflix had already demonstrated that streaming services could produce serious original television. House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black, Daredevil, Narcos and Sense8 had all arrived before it.
Stranger Things did something slightly different. It showed that a streaming original could become a broad pop-cultural event: a series capable of producing instantly recognisable characters, imagery, music and mythology while still feeling like a coherent story rather than a calculated franchise.
In that sense, it was a signal flare. Netflix was no longer merely a convenient library or even an ambitious television producer. It was becoming a studio capable of creating the sort of cultural event that had once belonged primarily to broadcast networks, cable channels and cinemas.
The show did not single-handedly fragment streaming, but its success helped demonstrate why exclusive original programming could anchor an entire service. Every major media company wanted its own platform, its own franchises and its own reason for viewers to maintain another subscription.
The early promise of streaming as a simpler alternative to cable gradually gave way to something resembling cable rebuilt through separate apps. At the same time, the competition for attention produced an enormous quantity of original programming. Some of it has been excellent; much of it has felt commissioned merely to keep a catalogue moving.
There is an irony in that transformation. One of the shows that made streaming feel exciting also became an emblem of the business model that eventually made it exhausting.
Why Stranger Things Worked for Me
Much has been written about the nostalgia: the 1980s setting, analogue technology, bicycles, arcades and Dungeons & Dragons sessions. I certainly recognised the appeal, and I identified with the nerdy children gathered around the gaming table, but nostalgia was never the main attraction.
What hooked me was the worldbuilding and atmosphere—the sense that something was lurking just beyond ordinary perception. I have always loved stories about parallel worlds, mysterious laboratories and the thin membrane separating everyday reality from something stranger.
Stranger Things combined those ideas with characters I genuinely cared about. Its ensemble sometimes recalled the Scooby Gang from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, although without quite the same single organising protagonist. Eleven sits at the mythological centre of the story, but the emotional structure has always depended on the group.
I watched the first season almost in one sitting. It had that rare combination of pacing and mystery that made “one more episode” feel less like a decision than an inevitability.
The Seasons in Retrospect
The second season did not land in quite the same way. It often felt like a remix of the first season’s structure rather than a genuine transformation of the story. My interest drifted, and it was not until the third season—helped by my oldest son beginning the series from the start—that I found myself fully drawn back in.
What surprised me most was how much darker the show became, especially in its fourth season. Stranger Things had always contained horror, but it increasingly allowed that horror to dominate rather than merely flavour the adventure.
I was also surprised by how openly the fourth season tore away the boundary between Hawkins and the Upside Down. I had assumed that the parallel dimension would remain hidden from ordinary society, as it often does in stories of this kind.
Series such as The X-Files relied heavily on the tension between extraordinary events and a world that continued to believe itself ordinary. The strange remained just below the surface, visible to the protagonists and the audience but rarely allowed to alter public reality.
By the end of the fourth season, that arrangement was no longer sustainable. Hawkins had been physically ruptured. The official premise for the final season places the town under military quarantine. That does not mean everyone understands the Upside Down, but the catastrophe can no longer be dismissed as a private secret shared by a small circle of children and government officials.
This removes an important narrative constraint. The story no longer has to restore the appearance of normality after each confrontation. The consequences are now part of the visible world, and the final season must deal with them rather than closing the gate and resetting Hawkins once again.
The Cast Growing Up
One practical concern is that the actors have visibly aged beyond the roles they originally inhabited. This was already noticeable in the fourth season, particularly because of the long gaps between production and release.
The final season moves the story forward to the autumn of 1987, giving the characters some chronological room to grow. Even so, the emotional foundation of Stranger Things was built around children confronting dangers they could barely understand while the adults around them remained oblivious or powerless.
That dynamic inevitably changes once the cast looks and behaves like a group of young adults. This is not necessarily a weakness. The question is whether the series can allow its characters to mature without losing the vulnerability and intimacy that originally made their confrontations with the impossible so effective.
Looking Towards the End
Despite my complaints about the wider state of streaming, I am genuinely excited to return to Hawkins. Whatever flaws the series accumulated, it remained ambitious, atmospheric and oddly earnest for a story so steeped in body horror and cosmic dread.
Its later seasons became larger, louder and more openly apocalyptic. The challenge for the finale is not merely to escalate one last time. It is to remember why the first season mattered before the series became a global franchise.
The mystery worked because it was attached to recognisable fears: a missing child, frightened parents, damaged friendships and the suspicion that the adults responsible for keeping the world safe either did not understand it or could not be trusted.
The best possible ending will therefore not be the one with the largest monster or the widest portal. It will be the one that makes the fate of the world matter because it remains, at heart, the fate of a small group of people we have come to know.
Comments
Post a Comment