Congratulations, fellow Stranger Things fan! You’re on the home stretch of the three year wait between Stranger Things season 4 and Stranger Things season 5. The final episodes will be split into three releases – volume 1 on November 26, volume 2 on December 25 and the season 5 finale on December 31 – so there’s still a small wait to go, but rumour has it we’re getting the first full season 5 trailer at some point this week.
Today (July 15) marks the first time we ever saw one of the best Netflix shows of all time on screen, with the series debuting nine years ago in 2016. If you can’t remember what happened when we last visited Hawkins (and that’s understandable), our group of best friends attempted to defeat Vecna, causing Max's apparent death as well as the opening of a massive rift between the town and the Upside Down. No big deal, I’m sure.
But as Netflix finally tries to get its fanbase excited about the drawn-out end, a painful question has to be asked. Why should anybody care about Stranger Things season 5 when we’ve been left in the lurch for so long? I’m wondering if it would have been less of a hassle to have been eaten by Vecna when we first met him, and that’s a problem.
Stranger Things season 5 and its trailer are coming, but do we even care?
Let’s put it into context. Since Stranger Things season 4 aired, we’ve had four seasons of The Bear, five seasons of Slow Horses (if you count new episodes we’re going to get in September) and two seasons of Severance… and look how long that took to return. In the Stranger Things world alone, we’ve had the arrival of non-canon West End play The First Shadow, plus the announcement of two spinoffs: animated series Stranger Things: Tales from '85 and live-action show The Boroughs. Everyone and their nan has seemingly complained about not getting season 5 in the meantime, and they’ve got good reason to be annoyed.
Back in the good old days of the mid-2000s, we were regularly whipping through 22-episode seasons of TV like there was no tomorrow. Desperate Housewives and Lost were great examples of this, each requiring a high level of input and resource in their own way. Fast forward two decades, and the consolation prize of feeling lucky to get eight new episodes in three years doesn’t feel like something worth investing in.
Sure, these upcoming episodes are basically feature length movies and the technical craft needed to achieve them is immense, but this is Hollywood, for goodness sake! Every resource we allegedly have at our disposal is supposed to be at the top of its game, able to give us everything we have and haven’t yet dreamed up. From a marketing perspective, Netflix might have thought dragging out the jewel in the crown of its streaming back catalog would make fans hungrier for the end product, but there’s only so far you can stretch the theory in practice.
Of course, I’ll be streaming Stranger Things season 5 like the rest of us, but it will be a reluctant watch. The endless wait over the last few years has definitely made me think twice about investing in shows on one of the best streaming services around, and that’s before we even touch on the frequent cancellations (another story for another day).
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