The first season is a Steven Spielberg, Steven King pastiche. It’s ET mashed up with Stand By Me and various other 80s cinema, which all revolved around coming of age stories, using the supernatural as a metaphor for the challenges of adolescence. They center around kids fighting against inexplicable dark forces that they can’t go to the adults in their lives about, because they wouldn’t believe or understand it. It’s expressing what puberty can feel like from the perspective of a child just beginning to experience it. Stranger Things also had Joyce as the one adult who really does get it, who cares to listen and takes these mysterious things the kids are going through seriously, because it directly impacted her son, more than any of the other kids. You know, cause he’s gay, and puberty is that much more difficult for queer kids. She’s a positive example of a parent doing everything she can to help her son through the darkest time in his life, despite not really understanding it herself, which is a refreshing change of pace for the genre. There’s also a subtheme of cycles of abuse explored through El. Her central character struggle is with whether or not she’s really the monster. The demogorgon is her foil, her shadow, the monster she feels responsible for bringing into the world, when it was the adults abusing and exploiting her that are ultimately responsible.
Season 2 went into the aftermath of how puberty in the closet being trapped in the upside-down affected Will. He has been changed by the upside-down in ways no one else can understand or relate to, because none of them have had that experience. He also missed out on all of the emotional maturing his friends did in his absence, and now he’s struggling with still just wanting to be a normal kid, playing D&D with his friend, whom he loves, but doesn’t know how to process the fact that the way he loves him is different than the love the rest of them have for each other. Meanwhile, they’re starting to develop an interest in girls, something he can’t relate to. That thematic core still mostly works in season 2, but the rest of the show starts to lose thematic cohesion and instead pursues the pastiche of 80s genre films. They completely lose site of El’s thematic arc, as the demogorgons are replaced with an army of smaller, less threatening versions of the same thing, and El herself goes off on an irrelevant side-adventure that feels like it was meant to set up a spinoff but then nobody liked that episode so they dropped that plotline immediately.
Season 3 is an 80s spy movie wrapped in consumer culture nostalgia. It has completely lost the thematic core, and it shows In generally having been considered the weakest season.
Season 4 did some things right. It remembered El’s central conflict and tried to re-center the thematic core around that, introducing Henry/Vecna as a new foil to El, largely filling the same role as the demogorgon did in Season 1. Rather than continuing with the upside-down-as-puberty metaphor, they opt to shift things around to make the upside-down a representation of the characters’ trauma. Max carries this new take on the upside-down most clearly, as she’s struggling with grief over her brother’s death, as well as guilt over her own mixed feelings due to his death having also freed her of his abuse. It mostly works, but it does have the less-than-ideal effect of personifying the upside-down, which hampers its impact as a mysterious, inexplicable force and makes it a product of very understandable human evil. And then they made the very bold choice of ending the season with the villain’s plans succeeding, representing a huge change in the status quo.
Season 5 opens with them immediately undoing the bold status quo shifting choice at the end of the previous season and saying “just kidding, actually life is still mostly normal in Hawkins, except for all the soldiers.” And they’ve just kind of given up on the upside-down having any thematic meaning at all, it only exists in service of the plot, to give the military a place for their base of operations, which itself only exists because it needs to, to wrap up El’s story. Vecna’s plan gets pretty heavily retconned, as does the upside-down itself, so now it’s a wormhole connecting to the planet the mind flayer and the demogorgons come from (they’re just aliens, by the way), to reduce it to something that can be resolved by blowing it up. There is a new subtheme of the passing on of the torch to the next generation of kids, as expressed through Holly and her classmates contextualizing the upside-down through media that’s relevant to them, using A Wrinkle in Time the same way the original group did with D&D. That part works pretty well and is broadly the strongest aspect of Season 5. They also remember that for Will, the upside-down represented his struggle coming to terms with his queer identity, and every scene between him and Robyn is pure gold, which culminates in his beautiful and empowering moment of self-acceptance as he uses Vecna’s own power against him by making the choice to stop being so goddamn scared (of himself). Unfortunately, they almost immediately undercut that excellent moment by having him be newly scared that his friends and family won’t accept him, which eventually results in an incredibly disempowering coming out scene, where he asks everyone to accept him as he is, instead of asserting who he is whether they accept it or not. It’s a very non-threatening, straight-audience-friendly coming out that really just says this boy was not ready to come out to this group of people yet. And then they blow the problem up and we get 30 whole minutes of the worst part of Harry Potter where we get shown how everyone is living their best life now and there are no long-term repercussions for anything, nobody was meaningfully changed by their experiences, and the status quo is all neatly restored.
