Stranger Things Season 5 Turns The Show's Wildest Cliffhanger Into A Massive Disappointment

This article contains spoilers for "Stranger Things" season 5, episode 1 — "Chapter One: The Crawl."

Remember that wild cliffhanger ending of "Stranger Things" season 4, part 2? You'd be forgiven for being hazy on the details — after all, it was well over three years ago. In the climactic moments of the season finale (titled "Chapter 9: The Piggyback"), a chasm opens in Hawkins, allowing the Upside Down to enter our world. What's more, Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) realizes that Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) isn't done yet, despite the villain's apparent fiery death. 

With a setup like that, surely the show's final season would be a "Jurassic World: Dominion" type situation where the creatures of the Upside Down are stalking the normal world? Or perhaps a smaller-scale invasion that provides an appropriate backdrop for the show's grande finale? As it turns out, nope. The "Stranger Things" season 5 premiere ("Chapter One: The Crawl") does the seemingly impossible by just up and restoring the status quo.

Granted, there are some changes to what was before. Chunks of Hawkins are still in ruins and the whole area is under gated military quarantine. Still, the day-to-day life is going on, with people going to school and work per usual. There are even folks in the town who don't seem to be aware of the Upside Down's horrors at all. If I'm being honest, the whole thing smells like a ploy to keep the show's "normal small town with terrible things lurking on the background" motif intact for one last ride. Even the show's own characters don't really seem to buy the way the show duct-tapes the status quo back together after a wholesale dimensional invasion, seeing as Robin (Maya Hawke) specifically refers to the metal strip covering the chasm as a band-aid.

I get that "Stranger Things" wants to take the premise that made it famous for one last spin. It's just that in order to remain a small town supernatural mystery, it has to jump through so many hoops to undo its own world-building that it's just not believable anymore. 

For its first three seasons, the show managed to give us a series of ever-escalating versions of the "kids vs. Upside Down monsters" theme, but the globe-trotting fourth season raised the stakes. Like the rest of "Stranger Things" season 4, part 2, "The Piggyback" was an epic, overstuffed thing with big emotional moments, and the things it teased for the show's future were potentially world-changing, "Hell on Earth" stuff. Against that backdrop, waiting over three years to see the Upside Down invasion casually turn into yet another installment of the patented "the government has a portal into an evil dimension, and our heroes have to figure out what to do" scenario is a bitter pill to swallow. 

Perhaps the show will be able to turn this into an advantage, starting with a comparative slow burn before escalating into the sort of utter mayhem "The Piggyback" promised us. But even if that turns out to be the case, putting a temporary cork on the invasion that the show already explicitly teased seems like a bit of a cop-out. 

"Stranger Things" season 5, volume 1 is streaming on Netflix.