In the finale episode of Stranger Things 4 back in 2022, after nearly two-and-a-half hours of runtime, the Duffer Brothers and co. threw one final twist at audiences; as the protagonists watched, the Upside Down seemed to erupt into the town of Hawkins in unprecedented fashion. This established a bold new status quo moving forward, seeming to imply that rather than the traditional structure of prior seasons, the subsequent final season would hit the ground running, with the story already in motion.
Of course, when season 5 finally did release in 2025, a few critical details had changed. It wound up taking substantially longer than anticipated to bring Stranger Things 5 to audiences, and as a result, the series opted to allot for a bit of a time jump between seasons, presumably to avoid picking up seconds after the fourth season in narrative but having all the actors noticeably age so much. While many online have critiqued this choice, I would argue that the first episode of season 5 actually does a really solid job of establishing this new, quarantined, mid-siege Hawkins, but the show fails to deliver on it at all.
In the first episode of Stranger Things 5, “The Crawl,” audiences are reintroduced to Maya Hawke’s character Robin Buckley as the town’s resident DJ at the local radio station, WSQK. During this scene, Robin gives listeners in-story and audience members watching the show alike a quick rundown of all the ways that Hawkins has changed recently, with the military moving in full-time and the “big metal band aids” across town being used to cover up the gates into the Upside Down that Vecna opened at the end of the previous season.
While I can absolutely see how some people would’ve found this a resetting of the normal status quo, I gave the Duffers the benefit of the doubt and was, if nothing else, fascinated by this take on the town. For most of the show’s run, the main characters have been the only characters in the town with any knowledge of what was really going on. The idea that now all of Hawkins was confined and caught right in the middle of this raging war that they would surely come to learn something of? That seemed to promise great potential for the town itself to play an active role in this final season, at least to me.
However, I was apparently alone in that sentiment, because Stranger Things 5 has done absolutely nothing with the idea since. In fact, more so than any previous season, Stranger Things 5 is obscenely insular. Sure, the show now has several dozen lead characters that it has to divvy its focus between accordingly, but diluting the town of any actual normal people or citizens makes the whole thing feel so empty and erroneous. So much of the early seasons focused on the responses of normal people to these insane high-concept shenanigans, but in this season, it literally feels like a set, where the only people occupying the town are the main characters and the army.
Especially in the first season, there was a naturalism to the way in which Hawkins was filmed. Inspired by Amblin films of the ‘80s, there was a real sense of quaint Americana to the setting that helped the town feel authentic and lived in. This in turn made the Upside Down such an effective contrast to it; a deserted space. But in Stranger Things 5, Hawkins and the Upside Down might as well be entirely interchangeable.
Ultimately, the end of season 4 and the beginning of season 5 seemed to promise a storyline that would raise the stakes and truly feel massive, but Stranger Things 5 as a whole has routinely failed to deliver on that promise. Despite the massive budget and CGI-filled setpieces, it is the most insular and claustrophobic season of the series.