Stranger Things Season 5: Rooting for the Villain | The American Spectator

This holiday season, I wish for all of Vecna’s Christmas wishes to come true.

My Christmas list plaintively petitions Santa Claus to kill Eleven, Mike, Lucas, Dustin, Will, and all of the ancillary characters on Stranger Things. Yes, I root for Mr. Whatsit, One, Henry Creel, or, if you will, Vecna.

Sometime in Season Four, Stranger Things reached The Brady Bunch Cousin Oliver stage, the Happy Days of Fonzie waterskiing over a shark, and the Cousins Coy and Vance iteration of The Dukes of Hazzard. The series, which mercifully ceases over the next week or so, feels about as vibrant as Max hooked up to that life-support machine. Even rewinds of “Running Up That Hill” cannot resurrect it.

It nevertheless needs someone to pull the plug on the life-support machine or press stop on the Walkman. Why?

Stranger Things can move from Hawkins to the Upside Down with encouragement and not protest from loyal viewers. But once it time-travels from 1985 to 2025, it loses that portion of its audience that recalls 1985 more fondly than 2025.

The increasingly politicized mindset of the writers — alien to normal people during the 1980s — represents a projection of today onto yesterday. In the early seasons, viewers watched kids wearing Nikes and shirts with three-quarter-length sleeves riding bikes until the streetlights came on. That appealed because it rang true to the times. Too much of what viewers now see pulls at the sensibilities of 2025.

When the Stranger Things kids aim to sedate the Turnbows and use the clan’s fat, brat son as bait to lure the Demogorgon into their trap, the entire coercive, heavy-handed scheme alchemizes into benevolence through a magical device inserted into the script.

“Derek, wash up,” Mrs. Turnbow tells her son. “Tina, get the door, and be polite — unless it’s a Mormon, or a Democrat.”

Did you catch that? The Cosbyesque forced drugging and Ottis Toole–style kidnapping is okay because the Turnbows vote Republican, which automatically transforms a family who supported the same candidate in 1984 that citizens in 49 of 50 states voted for into a sort of human representation of the Demogorgon.

In an earlier season, Hopper, the former Hawkins police chief and foster father of sorts of Eleven, killed Russians. That feels so Red Dawn, very, very Rambo even. In Season Five, he kills and tortures American soldiers in the Upside Down. That’s about as ’80s as Wavy Gravy reciting Allen Ginsberg’s poetry on the hood of an AMC Rebel station wagon while wearing bell-bottoms and a dashiki.

Ditto for the homosexual themes that invade the later seasons.

In the back of a van in Season Four, Will asks Mike: “Can I … show you something?” He then reveals a phallic item to Mike’s “This is amazing” response.

The directors want us to notice but not to accuse them of any intentionality. In doing so, the one who notices rather than the one who inserted homoerotic imagery into a scene between two teenage boys becomes the perv.

The conversation continues in a less sexual but more emotional tone.

“When you’re different, sometimes you feel like a mistake,” Will explains to Mike ostensibly about Eleven but really about himself. “But you make her feel like she’s not a mistake at all. Like she’s better for being different. And that gives her the courage to fight on. If she was mean to you or she seemed like she was pushing you away, it’s probably because she’s scared of losing you.”

This theme continues into Season Five. Robin and Vickie’s lesbian relationship similarly jumps into the foreground. And with that, the 2020s invade the 1980s more pervasively than the Upside Down invades Hawkins.

Why not give the characters iPhones and Facebook pages, too?

The most obvious, and annoying, deviation from the 1980s does not involve any hot-button topics. It instead pertains to the emotions that Americans displayed, or hid, or did not feel, in dealing with other Americans way back when.

In Season Four, the introduction of Eddie seemed like a telegraphed maneuver to provoke a vicarious emotional response in the viewers who see matters through Dustin’s eyes. All of the bonding between the two appeared unnatural, forced, and designed to lead to a big emotional moment that never really came for any intelligent viewer who could see through the scriptwriter’s cheap trick.

In Season Five, Joyce becomes more of a nervous wreck, sentenced to overacting in a perpetual loop of high-string melodrama. This puts Winona Ryder, a fine actress, in the unenviable position of imitating Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest. If the various former child actors (several of them now in their thirties) do not deserve better than to be cast in an afternoon soap opera, Ryder does.

More so than the Mind Flayer, post-1980s, touchy-feely sentimentality possesses Will. He not only seeks to play childish games as a teenager, but he also obsesses over Dungeons & Dragons in the mid-to-late 1980s when it struck everyone else as about as current as Gary Numan, John Anderson, and The Greatest American Hero. He cries, hugs, and displays a serious penchant for heart-to-heart talks.

“I’ve been a total third-wheel all day,” Will whines to Mike in one such feelings-nothing-more-than-feelings conversation in Season Four. “It’s been miserable. I’m so sorry that I wasn’t smiling.”

Not everybody acted like Bob Knight during the 1980s. But nobody talked like Will Byers.

One wishes Millie Bobbie Brown, Caleb McLaughlin, Sadie Sink, Noah Schnapp (who looks like he took acting classes before the current season), and the rest better success than Dana Plato, Corey Haim, Carl Switzer, and others who endured a curse disguised as a blessing in achieving fame at a young age. As to their characters, they deserve a fate worse than the Upside Down.

To love the brilliance of the early seasons of Stranger Things, one must necessarily root for Vecna’s complete triumph. To quote the title of the debut album of Eddie’s favorite band, “kill ’em all.”

Stranger Things ran its course just as 33-year-old actors playing teens do. A show about fending off an invasion from another dimension instead met its demise through the encroachment of a different time.