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FEATURE

🔥 Stranger Things S5 Drops Official Teaser

The Netflix show's final season trailer arrives with demons, tornados and flamethrowers.

Objectively, you should not be excited about the return of Stranger Things. Over the years, the Netflix smash has come to represent everything bloated about television's streaming era – a show that began as fun piece of fluff and morphed into a mythology-heavy marathon that takes years to produce and hours to consume.

What started as a one-and-done collection of 1980s film references became something else entirely when success demanded expansion. The Duffer brothers found themselves pulling an entire mythology out of thin air, creating a bloated universe full of bottle episodes about punky young superheroes and self-indulgent installments that grind on for hours.

And because the episodes were so gargantuan, they took years to make. This is why you shouldn't be excited about Stranger Things. Whatever happened in the last batch has long since receded from memory, and rewatching feels less like television and more like a Man v Food challenge.

The Most Trailer Ever Made

And yet the first trailer for the final episodes has dropped and damn it if I'm not suddenly really excited about it.

What happens in the trailer? It's hard to say.

• Joe Keery turns a wheel in a van.

• Lights flicker ominously.

• There are flamethrowers and lightning storms, four-legged monsters prowling through kitchens like Jurassic Park raptors, machine guns and fast cars, crying and flying and Vecna throwing a burning tornado at the sky

• …all accompanied by Deep Purple's thunderous "Child in Time."

Does it make sense? Not really. Is it overloaded with mythology and superfluous characters that demand a diagram to track? Almost certainly. But could I feel my heart start to race as it unfolded? Absolutely. The Stranger Things trailer isn't the best trailer I've ever seen, but it might qualify as the most trailer I've ever seen – and sometimes that does the trick.

The Spectacle Machine

More than anything, it reinforces the direction Stranger Things has been heading for nine years. There will be not a single atom of subtlety in these episodes. Any nuance will be forced out by a powerhouse of spectacle. Things will explode. There will be CGI by the gallon. Characters will operate exclusively in emotional red zones. For better or worse, you will end this series exhausted.

However, there is one small hint that – despite the heavy metal frenzy that whirls around it – Stranger Things knows how it will stick the landing.

The Heart Beneath the Chaos

It comes in the form of a snatch of dialogue between Hopper and Eleven. It isn't much ("Let's end this, kid") but it's a sign the key relationship of the entire series is back on track.

Despite all the excess – the monsters, the nostalgia – Stranger Things was always a show about parenthood. It's the story of a man who finds a weird little girl with nowhere to go, who helps him rebuild himself after experiencing devastating bereavement. Any time it has leant into the found-family dynamic between Hopper and Eleven, Stranger Things has found an emotional wallop that cannot be overwhelmed by the whiz-bang chicanery surrounding it.

This is where Stranger Things began and where it must end.

PUNCHLINES