The Final Season Brings Epic Spectacle, But Is It Too Much Story?
- First four episodes confirm the return of the show’s dark humor and nostalgic heart.
- Critics are split between calling the final run “thrilling” and “largely joyless and grim.”
- The massive cast and convoluted lore keep Volume One from achieving true greatness.
- The new episodes are worth indulging one last time for the powerful, action-packed ending.
The Upside Down has ripped open again, and chaos is officially reigning in Hawkins. Netflix dropped the first half of Stranger Things’ final season, hitting the region in the early hours of Thursday morning and immediately crashing the platform (briefly, thankfully). With Vecna looming and the core crew finally grown up, Volume One dives into a complex, sprawling story that promises a huge, emotional end to the nostalgic horror saga. This is the beginning of the end, and the series is pulling out all the stops for its loyal fans.
The fan dedication was immediate. Many viewers across the region were up before sunrise to catch the premiere at 5:00 AM GST. Dedicated fans reported skipping sleep to binge the new episodes, confirming the payoff was absolutely worth the early alarm. Volume One delivers a massive dose of what made the show famous. Ed Potton in the Times called it “richly entertaining stuff with proper jeopardy and bags of emotion,” confirming that the series retains its emotional core even as the stakes multiply.
This return is “top-rank comfort viewing,” according to the Telegraph’s Ed Power. Empire magazine agrees, noting that the show “remains a show that knows exactly what it is” and reassures us it has “not lost its sense of fun.” They’ve clearly pulled out all the trademark elements: the dark humor, the whimsy, and the poetry of hard-earned resilience. If you’re invested in the gang’s journey, this luxurious final run will, as the Guardian suggests, “have you standing on a chair, yelling with joy.”
Yet, the immense success of Stranger Things has created a unique writing challenge: how do you manage a massive cast of mature characters while navigating years of complex lore? The answer, according to some critics, is messily. The reception has been visibly split, swinging wildly between spectacular moments and stretches that feel unnecessarily complicated.
Kelly Lawler at USA Today captured this perfectly, saying the show “seesaws between thrilling and annoying.” Others were harsher, finding most of the action “largely joyless and grim.” The central tension seems to be that the story keeps getting bigger without necessarily going deeper. When you have this many characters, it’s tough to give everyone a meaningful arc, leading to a sprawling narrative that feels “stretched thin” and trapped in “arrested development” at times.
Despite the narrative sprawl, the consensus is that when the show fires on all cylinders, it’s a magnificent spectacle. BBC Culture highlighted the “bombastic” fourth episode as Stranger Things “at its best,” suggesting it’s a cinematic precursor to a truly great conclusion.
The critique that the show needs to “switch off its boombox, hang up its catapults and admit it’s too old for these capers” is fair, but that doesn’t mean we should miss the payoff. The Duffer Brothers have set up the ultimate showdown with Vecna, and they are leveraging the full scale of their budget and ambition to deliver a high-stakes climax.
Volume One is clearly a lot of story, a lot of lore, and a lot of commitment. But for the dedicated fan, the high stakes and the spectacular action deliver exactly what we hoped for. The remaining episodes are highly anticipated, with the Duffer Brothers planning to drop the final volume over the global Christmas and New Year holiday period. Get ready, because the final, defining moments arrive at the end of the year!
