Stranger Things Season 5 Review: ‘The Crawl’ & ‘The Vanishing Of’ Set the Tone for The Final Season

We’ve come a long way from a group tween playing Dungeons and Dragons in their basement.

Stranger Things Season 5 kicked off the first part of its three-part episode drop with “The Crawl” and “The Vanishing Of” — two episodes that take us on an intense, dark, and thrilling ride through Hawkins and The Upside Down.

“The Crawl” picks the series up 18 months after the cataclysmic rift that tore through Hawkins. The military has placed a severe lockdown on the town complete with soldiers, martial law, militarized zones, and a gigantic gateway to the Upside Down. The lockdown puts the squeeze on all its residents.

The Wheelers (Cara Buono, Mad Men & Joe Chrest, Ant-Man) are at odds over the Byers crashing there. Eleven (Millie Bobbie Brown, The Electric State) is pushing herself beyond her physical limits in order to fight Venca. Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo, LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy) has assumed all the worst qualities of Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn, The Fantastic Four: First Steps) and has put himself at odds with the jocks of Hawkins, and his BFF Steve (Joe Keery, Free Guy), who is in a petty romantic rivalry over Nancy (Based on a True Story) with Jonathan (Charlie Heaton, New Mutants). Max (Sadie Sink, Spider-Man: Brand New Day) remains in her coma with no signs of improvement. Will (Noah Schnapp, The Peanut Movie) is tormented by his love for Mike (Finn Wolfhard, Ghostbusters: Afterlife), Joyce’s (Winona Ryder, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice) paranoia, and his still unexplained but horrific connection to Vecna and the Upside Down.

On paper this feels like a wild and nearly unbelievable turn of events for the series that started as a Goonies homage. However, it’s actually the exact opposite. These two episodes (and the subsequent two that follow — “The Turnbow Trap” and “The Sorcerer”) feel like the perfect evolution of the series from a narrative, emotional, and character-based perspective.

Our heroes, while they are involved in fairly intricate and expertly calculated strategies, are still extremely human, and their motivations remain honest to their characters. Far too often in final (or further) seasons of shows we’ll find characters in ludicrous situations where they act in ways that do not reflect who they are at all. Yes, right at you Game of Thrones. However, here we still find Joyce and Hopper (David Harbour, Thunderbolts*) as protective and somewhat paranoid parents who are frightened by the prospect of losing a child again. While Dustin has done an emotional 180, we can understand why — he idolized Eddie and watching him die in his arms has scarred the eternally adorable Dustin. We even see Mike, who has been a raging douche canoe through the series, becoming more of a warmer, more considerate person, especially when it comes to his sister Holly.

The Holly storyline might seem like a redundant diversion to the numerous plots running through the first episode. However, Nell Fisher’s (Evil Dead Rises) wide-eyed performance makes us immediately fearful for the future of the youngest Wheeler child. Her reactions to the crumbling marriage of her parents is so touching, and when the big reveal of her purpose in the series hits, it hits like a ton of bricks thanks to one of the most visceral and white knuckle horror/action sequences in series history.

From a production standpoint, these two episodes are the tableset of what’s to come. We see such an upgrade in the quality of the demogorgons, The Upside Down and Vecna himself and these upgrades ratchet the horror of characters we’ve seen so many times throughout the series. The Upside Down feels less like a fever dream, and more like a tangible, gross, perversion of Hawkins. It feels like scrim and CG backdrop, and more set-based. Everything feels bigger, scarier, and more dangerous than ever before.

“The Crawl” and “The Vanishing Of” are the initial escalation of story, production, and performance that is perfect for our farewell to Hawkins. Stranger Things has this weird place in pop culture where, due to the length of time between seasons, we seem to forget just how good this series can be, and has been. We often remember things we don’t like, or we joke about the cast getting Social Security now, or we just kinda write it off. These episodes are the evergreen reminder that when Stranger Things is on, it’s a series that few can touch.

Stranger Things Season 5 Episode 1 “The Crawl” and Episode 2 “The Vanishing Of” are now streaming on Netflix.