Stranger Things Was The Ultimate Vibe Show, Season 5 Is What’s Left After It’s Gone

By Joshua Tyler
| Published 31 seconds ago

Stranger Things has always been a vibe. Read any of the reviews praising the show in its season one debut, and that’s the one commonality you’ll find among them.

It was the word on the street, too. In Season One, Stranger Things was the extremely rare streaming-era show that nearly everyone was talking about in real life. When they talked about it, the first thing mentioned was always the vibes.

People were excited about how perfectly the show captured the 1980s, and even more importantly, how perfectly the show captured what it was like to be a kid in that time. Stranger Things was beloved because it felt authentic, it felt genuine, and that was its vibe.

Almost none of that is left as the show begins season 5. It has become entirely constructed and artificial.

There’s a scene early on in season 5’s first episode where Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) and Steve (Joe Kerry) climb a radio tower for no reason other than some writer thought this might a fun scene to artificially insert into the plot. When they reach the top, what’s shown on screen is some of the most obviously artificial green screen footage I’ve seen on my television set since the last film of Neil Breen. 

By the way, Stranger Things season 5 cost around $800 billion to produce. Somehow, that price tag gets you obviously spray-painted toy guns, instead of legitimate-looking props.

It no longer feels authentic, and it’s also not about the kids anymore, either, because, well, they aren’t kids. The Duffer Brothers have dragged their heels so long on making these seasons that it’s been nearly a decade, and now the youngest members of the cast are entering their mid-twenties.

Rather than leap forward in time and have them play their age, Stranger Things still has them playing kids. It’s creepy as hell and feels every bit as inauthentic as that green screen radio tower.

Even if the kids were still kids, it wouldn’t matter because the cast has grown so large and overstuffed that they’re only a small piece of what’s happening. The Duffer Brothers have made the mistake that most long-running modern shows do, and they’ve gotten drunk on casting. They’ve expanded their narratives to turn their show into one massive ensemble of final season paydays spread around to as many people as possible.

Stranger Things season 5 is like watching a Ponzi scheme happening in real time, and Netflix has fallen for it. Given the fact that big ratings were guaranteed, I suppose they had no choice.

So now an authentic feeling show about four kids has become a mishmash of whatever and some monsters with a primary cast of at least sixteen people, many of whom are thirty-year-olds playing high school students. Vibe? There’s no longer any real room for it.

All Stranger Things left is Vecna, who was never part of the first season and has always felt like something that was tacked on. He was likely tacked on because they’d never planned to have five seasons, and when they didn’t have any ideas on how to do more, The Duffer Brothers decided to rip off Voldemort.

Stranger Things was a show people loved because of the vibe. Now, Stranger Things is a show people watch because they remember loving that season one vibe, and they figure they might as well finish the rest of it. After all, it’s basically over. Cash those checks, not-kids.