‘Stranger Things’ Season 5, Volume 2 Review: Genuinely Dreadful Netflix Slop

I’m still in a bit of a state of shock after watching the latest three episodes of Stranger Things Season 5. This is “Volume 2” of the three-volume season, with one more 2+ hour-long episode to come on New Year’s Eve. But do we even care what happens at this point? The writing has fallen off a cliff. What was once a compelling sci-fi adventure story about a small group of kids facing down impossible odds is now . . . something else. A show capsizing under the weight of its own success.

The cast is too big to let any one character shine. Exposition dumps and emotional heart-to-hearts have replaced any sense of urgency. The stakes, or what’s left of them, are theoretically higher than they’ve ever been, but in practice the story feels flat and lifeless. I’m not really bothered by the fact that the Duffer Brothers haven’t killed off any main characters this season; I’m bothered by the fact that I don’t think I’d care anymore if they did. Spoilers ahead.

Where to begin?

(I should note that I was quite positive about Volume 1, but the show falls off a cliff in Volume 2).

‘Stranger Things’ Keeps Fallin’ Down That Hill

I’m just going to go down the list, one by one, as there’s a lot to cover over the course of three bloated episodes.

The De-Powering of Will the Wise

My expectations got in the way when it came to the Will (Noah Schnapp) storyline. Season 5, Volume 1 ends with Will embracing his powers at long last, killing three demogorgons in the process and saving his friends. It’s a really cool moment.

If I were writing this show, I’d follow that up with Will finally being a badass for the remainder of the season. With just four episodes left, why not? Have Will go into the Upside Down where he and Eleven can lead a frontal assault on Vecna and his minions. It was weird that they resurrected a demogorgon to do this, when they could have just walked into the Upside Down to tap into the hive.

Instead, Will gets one shot at Vecna, giving Holly (Nell Fisher) and Max (Sadie Sink) time to escape. Then Vecna forces him out of his head and traps him in some vines, using him to spy for him “one last time” so he can find Max’s location in the real world and send his minions to kill her. After this, Will needs to be rescued by Eleven and doesn’t use his powers again.

It’s so unsatisfying! Will has been the victim for four-and-a-half seasons and then the moment he gets powers and real agency, it’s taken away.

The Constant Talk-it-Out Scenes

Instead of using his powers to do cool stuff, Will has a bunch of heart-to-heart scenes, mostly with his mom, Joyce (Winona Ryder) where he’s mostly complaining tearfully about everything being his fault.

These one-on-one conversations are not confined to Will. Often, they’re contrived conflicts that take place in the middle of a really dire scene. Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and Steve (Joe Keery) bicker constantly, though when Dustin finally opens up about his fear of losing Steve, this is one of the rare emotional beats that actually works. Unfortunately, the Duffer Brothers apparently want every character to get some kind of emotional catharsis, and pack dozens of these scenes into Volume 2.

Check out my weekend streaming guide here.

ForbesWhat To Watch This Weekend: New Shows And Movies To Stream On Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, Apple TV And MoreBy Erik Kain

Joyce and Hopper (David Harbour) get their talk-it-out. Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and Eleven have theirs (with such atrocious lines as “This isn’t one of your campaigns, Mike. You don’t get to write the ending.”)

The worst of these is between Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) and Nancy (Natalia Dyer) who, after shooting a big energy sphere, find themselves trapped in a room as white goo drips everywhere around them. They’ve been bickering up to this point, with Jonathan non-stop whining at Nancy (who rightfully points out that this is not the time to discuss their relationship). As they huddle on a table for safety, goo filling the room around them, he “un-proposes” to her and they both basically admit that they love each other but aren’t right for one another. It’s an odd thing to do when you’re about to die. The more sensible thing might have been to actually have sex for once. One last hurrah, as it were. Instead, Nancy accepts his “un-proposal” and tosses the ring. Nobody even kisses on this show anymore, so expecting any kind of romantic last stand was pretty silly of me.

(And yes, the Duffer Brothers have confirmed that this was a break-up scene).

These countless heart-to-hearts and bickering scenes slow the pace of Stranger Things 5, Volume 2 down to a crawl over and over and over again. It got to the point where I started laughing out loud whenever it was obvious that another one was about to happen. Oh here’s Will and Robin (Maya Hawke) having a super awkward conversation about their previous conversation! Here’s Eleven and Kali (Linnea Berthelsen) having a long drawn-out flashback conversation.

The flashback conversations were some of the worst, because they just don’t sound like real people talking at all. Both Will and Kali exposit over scenes of things that happened to them previously, replete with weird dramatic pauses and ellipses. It all feels very unnatural and stilted.

The Numerous “Here’s A Genius Idea!” Scenes

Every season of Stranger Things has had a scene like this, but usually only one. The group gets together and comes up with a plan. They argue a bit, and somebody has a light bulb go off over their head, a “Eureka!” moment, and they explain how the plan is going to work.

In Season 5, there’s a scene like this at least once an episode. Now that the cast is so big, these often involve five or six or even a dozen people. The camera bounces from one character to the next as they each get their single line, often finishing someone else’s sentence. It’s artless both in terms of cinematography and writing. It’s cheesy. They often use heavy doses of analogy and visual aids to get their point across – mostly for the audience’s sake rather than one another’s. The most hilarious was Hopper drawing a helicopter on the whiteboard and an arrow indicating that it would fly up and another arrow indicating that it would fly back down. What a useful visual aid, Hopper!

These are exposition-heavy and frustrating simply because they’re so frequent. Most of these three episodes seem to be broken up into something like this: Short action scene followed by bickering / heart-to-heart / followed by brief action / followed by expository dialogue that over-explains everything / followed by a heart-to-heart / followed by a group idea session with more exposition and planning and “Eureka!” moments that often have to do with some pop culture reference or analogy / rince / repeat. Nothing flows organically. Everything, from feelings to plans, is over-explained.

Max and Holly’s Escape from Camazotz

This “stop action to have a talk-it-out” problem reaches its apex when Max and Holly finally find a portal out of Camazotz / Vecna’s mind. They see the portal and Max stops and, rather suddenly, informs Holly that she can’t follow her out this way and will have to find her own way. Oh, and also Holly is probably trapped in the Upside Down, but don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll be just fine, kid. And off Max goes, but not before several minutes of teary dialogue and pep talk (though Mike remains the king of “I’m only here to give pep talks).

This not only slows down the action – Max already failed her escape once, it’s genuinely bizarre for her to just stop and chat at this moment – it also makes Max look bad. She just leaves and lets Holly fend for herself!

The show is obsessed with telling us everything instead of showing us. It allows no room for surprise, because everything is spelled out. Imagine, instead, if Max and Holly had seen the portal and they’d both run toward it, Kate Bush’s “Runnin’ Up That Hill” playing as they leaped into the portal . . . and then Max woke up in the hospital but Holly was nowhere to be found. Max’s face would go pale as she realized that Holly didn’t make it out. “We have to go back for her!” she would shout, aghast at this cruel twist of fate. Holly would wake up in her vine prison, horrified.

We’d lose the silly action-stopping dialogue and Max wouldn’t look like a jerk. Instead, we’d have an exciting twist that sure, maybe we’d see it coming, but the characters (who know less about what’s going on in the big picture) wouldn’t. It’s an easy fix and it makes me wonder why the script made it to production in this shoddy state. The writing has taken a massive nosedive, and it’s scenes like this that really drive that home.

All of these things achieve one outcome: A loss of any sense of urgency. Don’t worry about rushing to the escape portal, we have time to talk it out. Don’t worry about the myriad dangers in the Upside Down, let’s have a petty argument and split up.

The Weird Plot Holes

Speaking of bad writing, I laughed out loud when Eleven just moved one of the giant steel plates that the military placed over the rifts to the Upside Down. This whole time, all they had to do to get into the Upside Down was move a steel plate, something that could be done without any powers? Why go to so much trouble sneaking in with a military transport? Why, in Episode 7, do they have to take Murray’s truck through the military outpost when they could just go in through the rift? It’s very strange.

The military is also very strange. Dozens of soldiers were killed or injured at the end of Volume 1, but most of the remaining soldiers seem . . . totally unfazed. They even send MPs to find Robin at the hospital, because her drug theft was somehow discovered. Why would you send military police to catch a nurse stealing drugs? That’s not what MPs do. They police the military. The hospital might call the cops, or send their own security, but the military wouldn’t be involved even in the best of times. It’s not the best of times.

The military should be scrambling in full panic mode, evacuating the city. When Murray (Brett Gelman) and the others break through the checkpoint, the guard on duty is casually reading. Would you be bored enough to not really pay attention after dozens of your friends and fellow soldiers were just brutally killed by monsters? Where is the sense of urgency and danger?

The Abyss / The Bridge

The big twist this season is that the Upside Down is actually just a bridge or wormhole between our planet and some other evil planet that they end up calling The Abyss. This is supposed to be some shocking revelation. Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) is using the children he’s kidnapped to draw the Abyss to Earth, where it might consume everything and kill everyone and so forth.

Apparently we are now supposed to believe that Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine) created the Upside Down and knew all along that it was just a wormhole leading to this other world, but this feels like a major retcon to me. It also feels entirely pointless. The story could just be about Vecna trying to merge the real world and the Upside Down and it would achieve the same thing. Introducing another world and changing the nature of the Upside Down in the 11th hour just feels like ideas they came up with at the last second.

The Cast Is So Bloated

Another big problem I have with the show at this point is the size of the cast. There are just too many characters vying for screentime. Somehow, Holly has become basically the chief protagonist of the entire show, getting far more screen time and a much more important role than basically any of the main characters.

Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) has been relegated to side-character status at this point, her powers heavily nerfed. Mike only shows up to give pep talks. Lucas has some nice moments, but it’s pretty weird that he was stabbed in the chest at the end of Episode 4 by a demogorgon but is able to easily carry Max around the hospital. In this scene, they give Mrs. Wheeler (Cara Buono) the big action moment, saving the kids from the demogorgons by blowing them up in the laundry room, but that just robbed the main characters of a chance to come up with a solution themselves.

Robin feels like mostly comic relief at this point, but her big joke (about Steve’s package) fell very flat. Please, no more dick jokes, Stranger Things writers. Her girlfriend, Vickie (Amybeth McNulty) gets far too much screen time this season, and is mostly pretty useless.

The show does give Mr. Clarke (Randy Havens) an actual role in the group this season, after mostly being sidelined, but it feels like too little too late. Just another character lost in a massive roster.

Max gets her escape from Camazotz storyline, but once she’s out in the real world she’s pretty much confined to a wheelchair and unable to contribute much. At this point, we really should have mostly only the core characters in the thick of it. Hopper should have died at the end of Season 3. The adults should be busy with some other conflict while the kids, led by Eleven and Will, take down Vecna.

Will’s Coming Out Scene

All of these problems culminate in the ultimate heart-to-heart scene. Will finally comes out of the closet . . . to the entire group. This isn’t an intimate moment with his closest friends. Kali is there and Murray. Everyone is there, listening to Will admit that he’s gay, and it’s just terrible. What ought to have been an emotionally powerful scene with a handful of friends is this weirdly staged monstrosity. I wanted Murray to interrupt and say something like “Yeah, we all know kid. It’s fine. We have work to do.” This is yet another botched emotional moment that interrupted the sense of urgency and tried way too hard.

Compare this scene to Robin and Steve’s intimate moment back in Season 3. That scene worked so well. It felt so honest and real. This one was staged and hokey, and framing it as “I need to do this so Vecna can’t use it against me” felt forced. Holly and the other kids are trapped and the world is about to end, but let’s gather everybody together for a coming out speech.

So we are left with one episode to go, a big two-hour finale on New Year’s Eve. Maybe we’ll learn what was in that briefcase in the mine that Henry got off the guy that tried to kill him. Maybe they’ll keep that an unknown, a little Pulp Fiction homage.

But really, do we even care anymore? The downgrade in writing, cinematography, storytelling, and all these characters is just so insane, I found myself rooting for Vecna. When Jonathan and Nancy were un-proposing, I just wanted the floor to fall out and both of them to fall to their deaths. Even Derek (Jake Connelly) who we finally started liking in Volume 1 was downgraded immediately in Volume 2. And poor Mr. Wheeler (Joe Chrest) is basically written off the show.

Meanwhile, Kali is still a terrible character who is clearly plotting against Eleven, but at this point a much greater threat to Eleven is the writers who seem so intent on sidelining her and taking away her powers. The military’s plot to make more Henry Creels out of her blood, basically, feels lame and tacked-on at this point. And fun, light moments like “The Neverending Story” song from Season 4 are nowhere to be found.

Somehow Stranger Things Season 5, Volume 2 managed to be way too long and slow and feel way too rushed at the same time. What a tragic end to a once-great TV show. I don’t think the finale can redeem this season, even if it’s good. While all the previous seasons are worth a rewatch (though only Season 1 remains genuinely great) I doubt I’ll ever watch Season 5 again.

What did you think? Let me know on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. Also be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me here on this blog. Sign up for my newsletter for more reviews and commentary on entertainment and culture.