Entertainment
Did Stranger Things Just Retcon Season 4?
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Part of what made Stranger Things, Season 4 so exciting is that it ended on a wicked cliffhanger: we could see the Upside Down starting to bleed into the real world, and it looked like Hell on Earth was coming to the beleaguered town of Hawkins thanks to gates opened by the villainous Vecna.
However, Season 5 begins with an awkward time jump and the revelation that the military has contained most of the gates while also putting the entire town in quarantine. While some of this is addressed in the first episode, many fans can’t help but think of this as a lazy retcon of the promised apocalypse.
While every fan’s mileage may vary, most agree that the scariest part of Stranger Things is the existence of otherworldly creatures that humanity cannot truly understand or deal with. The show was originally very Lovecraftian in this regard, showing how a humble group of dorky middle school students would deal with demonic visitors from another realm. In later seasons (including the climax of Season 5’s fourth episode), the show leans into how unstoppable creatures like the Demogorgon can be by showing how they make mincemeat of trained and heavily armed soldiers.
The Apocalypse Is Canceled
That brings us back to what made the Season 4 cliffhanger so spine-tingling: the reveal of apocalyptic smoke rising into the sky while fires ravage the land, all while these ersatz clouds are pierced by red lightning. It genuinely looks like the end of the world is imminent, which is what makes the sight of Hopper and Joyce holding hands seem so poignant. As far as they know, life as they know it is about to be over.
That’s why the beginning of Season 5 is quite likely to give you tonal whiplash: we go from witnessing the impending end of days in the previous season’s finale to finding out that the military was able to quickly and efficiently contain everything happening to Hawkins while quarantining everyone inside the town. All of a sudden, the apocalypse can be contained by…a bunch of metal fencing? Furthermore, the soldiers who are completely useless when things like Demogorgons show up suddenly have no trouble shutting down what looked like an invasion of otherworldly forces?
Now, if you listen faintly, you can hear a small army of Stranger Things fanboys screaming at me that this isn’t a retcon because Robin explains what the military did to the town in the first episode of Season 5. But the blunt truth is that a character explaining that the army did something is not the same as explaining how they were able to do something. If nothing else, the fact that the Upside Down could be so quickly and thoroughly contained makes the end of Season 4 retroactively much less exciting.
Just The Latest Retcon
Of course, Stranger Things is no “stranger” to retcons. Season 4 revealed that Vecna was somehow behind all of the major events of earlier seasons, and Season 5 clarified that he abducted Will for a purpose rather than randomly snatching him. Furthermore, the stage play hardly anyone has watched (Stranger Things: The First Shadow) had its own retcon in which Vecna actually got his powers from the Mind Flayer. If history is any indication, you can bet your last waffle that we’ll get several more retcons before the final season ends.
But whether you want to call it a retcon or not, there’s no doubt that the premiere of Stranger Things, Season 5, is a letdown after the apocalyptic implications of the Season 4 cliffhanger. Overall, the latest season has been decent so far, but it’s still running up that hill and chasing the glories of Season 4. Fortunately, Stranger Things episodes are a bit like a slice of Surfer Boy pizza: even when they’re bad, they’re still pretty good.
