Review: Stranger Things, "Shock Jock" | Season 5, Episode 5

Welcome back to Episodic Medium's coverage of the final season of Stranger Things. You've already gotten the first review of the season for free, but here's a preview of Lily's review of the fifth ahead of the series finale next week. A reminder that our holiday deal for 10% off a yearly subscription is still accessible below.

Yesterday, in between stints in the kitchen making Christmas dinner for my inlaws (orecchiette in arrabbiata sauce with garlicky broccolini and some nice sourdough! It turned out Mostly Fine), I lounged on the couch in the living room, watching my father-in-law watch football on Netflix in the half-dark of a rainy evening with only a glittering Christmas tree for illumination. There, during a commercial break, I saw maybe the darkest portent yet for the rest of Stranger Things' fifth season: a Google ad in which an unseen protagonist watches the show and searches the web for things that are largely either very easy to figure out simply by watching the show or by using basic logic. It was treacly and nostalgia-baiting, built mostly out of clips from the show's first through third seasons and stuffed with empty catchphrases; I feel like it kind of made me dumber having seen it, and it certainly made me like the show less.

Mind you, I'm not complaining about this because I have any unrealistic expectation about Stranger Things' marketing strategy. This show is stratospherically popular, the centerpiece of the lineup of the country's biggest streaming service. I can walk into a big box store anywhere in the country and leave wearing an outfit composed solely of Stranger Things merch. The mere fact it's premiering its final season across three major American holidays should tell you that this is meant to be a television event with a marketing budget to match. I'd be shocked if there weren't gloppy commercials telling you that you need a large language model to explain to you what telekinesis is.

No, the feeling this Google ad brought forth in me was more chilling: watching it didn't feel that different than watching (most of) the first half of Stranger Things' fifth season. At its worst—particularly in its first two episodes—this season has leaned far too heavily on the twin pillars of meaningless lore and frictionless nostalgia, feeling more like a commercial themed after Stranger Things than the thing itself.

"Shock Jock," the first installment from the show's second tranche of episodes this year, both assuaged and exacerbated my worries. Stranger Things is a show that has always been more interesting—grimmer, more interior, funnier—than its cultural footprint lets on, and even the demands of big I.P. television in the 2020s can't steal that away entirely. But it's hard to completely shake the sense that, in attempting to write a finale that would speak to the show's gargantuan cultural footprint, the Stranger Things production team is leaning more on the assumed beats of a grand conclusion than on the deft character writing that won them a fanbase in the first place.