Three and a half years—a long, drawn-out period since the last season of Stranger Things premiered in May 2022. The opening episode of the hit series’ fifth and final installment—delayed by dual historic Hollywood strikes and the unstoppable inflation of production value—brings us back to the Fall of 1987. That is 18 months after the climax of Season 4, where the arch-villain Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) ruptured the metaphysical border between our reality and the alternate dimension known as the Upside Down.

The astounding reality is that the real-life gap between two individual seasons of the show is now nearly equal to the entire canonical span of the series itself.

This statistic, already absurd on its face, illustrates the escalating tax on viewer patience from a medium once defined by consistency and predictable output. But it also sums up the greatest challenge facing the creative minds of twins Matt and Ross Duffer as the show steers into its final stretch, an eight-episode season broken into three chunks, with the first dropping just before Thanksgiving. Stranger Things is a story about children, about the innocence of childhood, pitting a scrappy gang of bike-riding Dungeons & Dragons nerds against misguided adults who mess with forces they don’t understand. The show has run long enough to see its cast literally grow up, bringing with it undeniable tensions from this glaring contrast.

The list of data points is long: Millie Bobby Brown, who burst onto the scene as Eleven, is now a married adult. Voices have dropped; IMDb pages have lengthened. But what matters most to this critic is how these changes manifest—or fail to manifest—within the work itself. The truth is that Stranger Things has not reflected the obvious maturity of its stars with a corresponding complexity of depth. The entire series is an exercise in nostalgia. In Season 5, the show seems to pine not only for the neon hues and synth-driven pop of the 1980s it so evocatively conjures, but also for a simpler time in its own run, a time that cannot be recaptured, no matter how high the budget.

The four episodes that comprise Volume 1 predictably walk back the Season 4 cliffhanger. Hawkins, Indiana, has not devolved into a hellscape of Demogorgons and slimy vines. Instead, the town has been placed under military quarantine, occupied by the same reckless industrial complex that started this whole mess in the first place. Dr. Kay (Linda Hamilton) is the deep state’s latest ambassador, a scientist and officer commanding a base constructed right inside the Upside Down. Uncle Sam has stapled over most of Vecna’s rifts with crude metal plates, but left just enough open to use for his own ends.

This human-made “bubble” makes Season 5 more geographically focused than its predecessor, which scattered the protagonists thousands of miles apart. This pays off in more concise run times, avoiding the bloat of Season 4, yet the return to Hawkins only underscores the familiarity of the structural setups. In lieu of a mall, this year’s throwback locale is a radio station operated by the duo Robin (Maya Hawke) and Steve (Joe Keery), who use the airwaves to send coded messages. The team once again fragments to complete a sequence of self-assigned side quests before their inevitable reunion in the season’s back half. The series-long love triangle between Steve, ex-girlfriend Nancy (Natalia Dyer), and current boyfriend Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) continues to be “litigated.” The same pieces are on the board, in only slightly different configurations.

Season 5 shows us the Upside Down on a larger scale than ever before. Hopper (David Harbour) and Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) venture into this realm, showcasing the production team’s increasing technical ability, realizing the other world more immersively. But after last season’s revelation that Vecna governs the Upside Down via a hive mind, Season 5 has yet to add to our understanding of the realm, either in its mechanics or as a metaphor. Only the scope changes, not the approach. The Stranger Things version of “evolution” is that our heroes now use radio waves, not Dungeons & Dragons creatures, as their analogy of choice for sussing out how the Upside Down functions where science cannot. Once endearing instances of middle-schoolers making sense of the nonsensical, coming from actors old enough to be college graduates, the relative haziness of the world-building begins to peek through.

To the extent that Stranger Things conveys the expanding emotional lives of its main characters as they plunge further into adolescence, it is through Will Byers (Noah Schnapp), Vecna’s original victim, who comes to terms with his homosexuality in tandem with his enduring connection to the Upside Down. Will bonds with Robin, the only other queer person he knows, over his fear and uncertainty. Robin’s advice mostly boils down to “be yourself” platitudes, but Maya Hawke—whose star power is literally in her blood—sells them convincingly.

However, instead of giving similar treatment to the rest of the Hellfire Club, Stranger Things reveals its hand by effectively swapping them for a new generation of kids who provide the cuteness factor they once did. Holly Wheeler (Nell Fisher), Nancy and Mike’s baby sister, gains new prominence as the latest Hawkins resident caught in the paranormal clutches. Her classmate Derek Turnbow (Jake Connelly), derided as “Dipshit Derek,” provides some of the comic relief Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) once delivered. It is no coincidence that Fisher and Connelly are basically the same age their older castmates were back in 2016, when Stranger Things first set the world on fire. Holly’s interpretive lens of choice is A Wrinkle in Time, not a fantasy role-playing game, but she is another child confronting the unknown using the tools at her disposal, with grown-ups proving more of a hindrance than a help.

As it hurtles toward a final showdown with Vecna, Stranger Things is resetting the clock rather than riding its forward momentum. The Duffer brothers have always worn their influences with pride, and the ghosts of Steven Spielberg and Stephen King helped jump-start the series into a phenomenon. But in these final hours, Stranger Things remains primarily pastiche, so indebted to inherited archetypes (mad scientist, reformed bully) and cultural references (The Clash, Peanut Butter Boppers) that its main cultural impact stems from extratextual elements like casting and the ascent of Netflix. By refusing to enrich its characters as they age, Stranger Things traps itself in arrested development. When you get bigger without going deeper, you end up stretched thin.