Something incredible happens in the five-minute preview of the “Stranger Things” finale season — maybe not by the standards of modern technology, granted, but watch and you’ll notice right away what I’m referring to.
The clip rewinds to Nov. 12, 1983, six days after Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) went missing — the series’ inciting incident. We’ve only seen Will’s vanishing from the perspective of our world. Now, the Duffer Brothers are at last showing what happened to Will while he was trapped in the Upside Down, the phantasmic shadow realm ruled by a man-made demon lord.
Will battles the monster he and his friends eventually name Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) as best as he can, but inevitably, he loses because, and this is the part that doesn’t escape notice, Will is once again a small, skinny and terrified boy.
(Netflix) Gaten Matarazzo as Dustin Henderson, Finn Wolfhard as Mike Wheeler, Caleb McLaughlin as Lucas Sinclair and Noah Schnapp as Will Byers in “Stranger Things”
Thanks to digital de-aging, he looks 10 or 11 years old, the age Schnapp was when “Stranger Things” first went into production. If you happen to binge the seasons leading up to “Stranger Things” Season 5, this reversion may be jarring.
Then again, some of us already experienced another Will-related “whoa” moment at the top of the fourth season, supposedly set shortly after the third. The Will Byers who left Hawkins, Indiana, at the close of Season 3 still looked like a child. The high school freshman appearing at the top of the fourth season slams against the door of adulthood. By the story’s chronometer, a mere eight months had passed. By the audience’s calendar, three years divide the seasons. Time may move strangely in the Upside Down, but the actors’ hormones do not care. This is the fate of long-running series about kids. At some point, all such shows lose their battles with biology.
When “Stranger Things” premiered in 2016, Schnapp, Finn Wolfhard (who plays Mike Wheeler), Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin Henderson), Caleb McLaughlin (Lucas Sinclair) and Millie Bobby Brown (Eleven) were between 10 and 13 years old. Now, everyone besides Priah Ferguson’s Erica, Lucas’ kid sister, can legally buy a round of shots for you and your pals at any bar in America. That includes Sadie Sink, who joined the show for its second season, which premiered in 2017. Her character, Max, is still a juvenile. Sink is 23.
Mike’s older sister Nancy (Natalia Dyer) entered college, while her ex Steve Harrington (Joe Keery) and friend Robin Buckley (Maya Hawke) failed to launch for a while and worked retail jobs, first at an ice cream shop, then at a video rental store. Will’s older brother, Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), provided he survives the finale season’s underworld invasion, may end up chasing his dream of becoming a professional photographer.
(Netflix) Finn Wolfhard as Mike Wheeler, Caleb McLaughlin as Lucas Sinclair, Natalia Dyer as Nancy Wheeler, Joe Keery as Steve Harrington, Charlie Heaton as Jonathan Byers, and Gaten Matarazzo as Dustin Henderson in “Stranger Things”
With one exception, all these characters are played by actors who are now in their 30s. Hawke is a spry 27.
None of this is out of the ordinary for television, which has a long history of casting 20 and sometimes 30-somethings to portray adolescents. The children of the ’80s to whom “Stranger Things” pays homage surely recall that the patron saint of this practice, Gabrielle Carteris, was 29 years old when she began playing 15-year-old Andrea Zuckerman on “Beverly Hills, 90210.” Among her present-day versions are “Overcompensating” lead Benito Skinner, 32, playing a college undergrad, and not the midlife edition; and “Landman” star Michelle Randolph, a 28-year-old actor playing a whiny, horny late teen.
But it does push the limits of belief when a tale that supposedly unfurls over four years in Hawkins takes nearly a decade to complete.
Like Vecna, “Stranger Things” is a different beast than other shows gazing backwards through rose-tinted lenses because Hawkins is an idealized version of Reagan’s fabled “Morning in America” era. Back in its day, the myth insists, life was nicer and simpler. The show’s nostalgia for a Spielbergian childhood that never existed for most, but surely did for some, draws us back to a fantasy land of Midwestern cul-de-sacs where kids breezily ruled their own version of the world. Freedom was as easy and available as a bike ride to a friend’s house. Curfews were determined by when the streetlights came on. To some extent, there was a time when such carefree wildness reigned. Then came helicopter parenting.
As “Stranger Things” resumes, the level paved streets where Will and his friends raced their Schwinns and Huffys have been ripped apart by what local officials are calling an earthquake, but the military knows to be something else. No longer the quaint small town we first visited at the end of the Obama years, and to which we desperately wished to move in the ugly months leading up to an election that turned the world on its head, Hawkins’ illusory innocence died overnight, too.
(Netflix) Caleb McLaughlin as Lucas Sinclair and Sadie Sink as Max Mayfield in “Stranger Things”
This is the fate of long-running series about kids. At some point, all such shows lose their battles with biology.
And now there are circumstances to navigate that are pricklier than the actors’ five o’clock shadows. The fifth season arrives on the heels of a one-two punch of PR nightmare, David Harbour’s messy split from Lily Allen and a Daily Mail report that Brown had filed a complaint of bullying and harassment against Harbour before production on Season 5 began. The stars’ portrayal of a loving father-daughter relationship is one of the show’s major touchstones.
Variety shared its account of Brown and Harbour gamely presenting a chummy front in a recent red carpet appearance. Unnamed sources told Variety that Brown’s complaint was investigated and the matter subsequently resolved.
The audience has been steadily aging as well, feeling every ache that the decade between the show’s first season and the present has inflicted. “I was 12 years old when the first season came out. All my friends used to watch it together. Now I’m 97, living in a nursing home. Can’t wait for the final season,” jokes a commenter on the YouTube version of the preview.
(Netflix) Priah Ferguson as Erica Sinclair in “Stranger Things”
“Stranger Things” is often viewed as a puberty parable primarily realized through Brown’s Eleven, a girl who struggles to control her abilities and her effect on the people around her, especially the boys she calls her friends. Puberty inspires some of the show’s biggest monsters, too. Season 3’s Mind Flayer substantiates every hormonal nightmare in one monster, series writer Kate Trefry told Entertainment Weekly in 2019.
Trefry likened this awkward time of life to the stage in a butterfly’s development when a caterpillar disappears inside a chrysalis and dissolves into goo before reforming into something entirely new. “Season 3 is this sticky, gross, toothy, weird monster because [puberty] is that — it’s that moment of everybody is turned to jelly and we’re waiting on the edge of our seats to see what they become,” she said.
Meanwhile, the audience has perched between seasons, with little indication of whether the show will sufficiently account for its young stars’ off-camera maturation within the story once it returns.
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In case you’ve forgotten where the show left us, Vecna revealed that Eleven accidentally created him by banishing him to the Upside Down. But he’s found a way to breach the gates between our plane and his netherworld that involves killing guilt-racked children to unlock each one. Max is his final sacrifice, dying for more than a minute before El revives her. But she’s in a coma and Hawkins is now split wide open, with particles from the Upside Down pouring in. No amount of Kate Bush’s heroic crooning will save them.
There was also a whole Russian side adventure with Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) and her conspiracy theorist pal Murray Bauman (Brett Gelman) playing action heroes to rescue Harbour’s Jim Hopper from a Russian prison. With everybody back Stateside and topside, save for Max’s consciousness, the band is gearing up for one last stand on the cliffs of Hell.
(Netflix) Winona Ryder as Joyce Byers in “Stranger Things”
If the “Stranger Things” actors no longer resembled children in 2022, imagine how they may look as high schoolers in the fall of 1987. That’s one year after the fourth season’s action and three years for viewers.
Like childhood, “Stranger Things” had its golden time. But we may be reminded in these last episodes arriving on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s that there is no going home again when it comes to certain shows, and the unstoppable force none of us can hold at bay forever is the clock.
The final season of “Stranger Things” premieres with four episodes on Wednesday, Nov. 26, followed by three episodes on Thursday, Dec. 25 and the finale on Wednesday, Dec. 31 on Netflix.
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