Review: Stranger Things, "The Crawl" | Season 5, Episode 1

Welcome to Episodic Medium's coverage of the final season of Stranger Things, which debuted its first half this week before returning in late December. Reviews will follow roughly daily after each release, with the caveat that holidays can holiday. This first review is free for all, but subsequent reviews will be exclusively for paid subscribers. See what else your $5 a month will get you by checking out our calendar for the rest of the year.

As perhaps befits the premiere episode of the final season of the closest thing the streaming landscape has to a four-quadrant monocultural hit, “The Crawl” is getting me a bit existential about Stranger Things. Most pressingly, it’s making me wonder: What is a Stranger Things opening episode for, exactly?

In season one, of course, the answer was simple: to give us the damn premise. “The Vanishing of Will Byers” opened on a Hawkins, IN that knew nothing of the supernatural; it’s inherently more action-oriented than most of the season openers that follow it because it needs to give us that titular vanishing. Still, it manages to give viewers a sharp, clear understanding of its characters, in large part by being careful to keep those characters from knowing too much more about this world than we do. We come to care for them by learning alongside them. 

In seasons two through four, the approach had to vary a bit, since Hawkins—or at least the small subset of it we see in the show’s ever-growing roster of protagonists—had already lost its innocence to the monsters that lurk beyond the veil. Instead, each opener gave us a purely realist new premise for these characters to explore: there’s a cool girl at school; there’s a cool new mall in town; there are some nasty bullies out in California. This exposition carried the bulk of the episode’s emotional weight, even as the season’s new supernatural element (and it was always a new supernatural element, emanating from that season’s particular big bad) cast its shadows across the town.

This approach—watching the kids (and adults) navigate a new social dynamic as evil lurks in the background—accomplished a few things for Stranger Things. It kept each opener from being an exposition dump in the way particular to long-running science fiction franchises with long season gaps, sure, but it also kept the show’s interpersonal and cosmic stakes in balance. Key to Stranger Things’ appeal since its beginning has been its careful ratio of Freaks and Geeks-like plots to Eighties horror-inspired battles with the eldritch; it’s leaned one way or the other from time to time, but the way it chooses to begin its seasons helps ensure the more grounded, realist plots (the Apatowian tendency, I guess) never gets entirely forgotten.

I’ve now spent four hundred words feeling this out, so I’ll just cut to the chase: “The Crawl” breaks this pattern pretty sharply. It drops us into Hawkins’ ongoing monster-based disaster in media res, drowns us in exposition (Editor's note: Squawkposition?), and focuses much more on the supernatural than the interpersonal. It’s a choice that’s perhaps necessary considering the way season four’s stakes escalated, but it’s one that leaves the show feeling thin and, worse, indistinctive. All of this, to be clear, is a structural challenge that Stranger Things season five will have to continue to deal with more than an individual flaw of this particular episode. “The Crawl,” in fact, handles the show’s new monsters-all-the-time purview about as adeptly as it can; I may not have liked it very much, but it did significantly exceed my (pretty low, considering this season’s marketing) expectations. 

The best choice made in “The Crawl,” and by extension Stranger Things’ fifth season, is to give us a sense of normalcy within chaos. Hawkins is now under military quarantine, which is a huge status quo change, but the uneasy quiet of a city forced to cosplay daily life behind a barbed-wire fence succeeds at offering the show a sense of unnerving peace. Joyce and her kids are wearing out their welcome at the Wheelers’ house; baby Holly’s tall enough to ride a big kid bike now; other kids ride sleds down the metal plates the government threw over the eldtrich chasms that opened up last season. It may be a false sense of quiet, but it certainly offers a more settled Hawkins than the blatantly apocalyptic imagery season four’s final episode suggested. (I’d be remiss as a critic if I didn’t note that it’s a pretty thematically rich setting, too: Hawkins is an ostensibly quiet and perfect community kept that way under seal and gunpoint, just as it was in season one but on a different scale now that the military is treating all the town’s innocents the way it once treated Eleven.) 

The show uses this peace-in-the-midst-of-crisis setting to focus at least part of “The Crawl” on its newly reshuffled character dynamics. Steve and Robin run a radio station together now because its prior owners fled town; the help they get from Nancy and Jonathan on the regular brings Steve’s old crush on Nancy to the foreground. Joyce and Hopper are an item now and are coparenting an on-the-lam Eleven, who’s training to be able to go into the Upside Down with her dad. Dustin, reeling from Eddie’s death last season, has bought a trenchcoat. Even when the show does give us heaps of exposition, it’s softened by the characters’ insistence that the episode’s titular crawl is a low-stakes, likely useless recon job, leaving plenty of emotional room for petty squabbles and friendships growing tense. In theory, it’s what I’d want out of a Stranger Things season premiere.

But it’s still hard not to feel a little bit cheated. For one thing: every single social dynamic I listed above (except, I guess, Robin and Steve owning an FCC-licensed broadcast station) is old hat, the fulfillment of choices the show made seasons ago. This makes many of those characters feel like they’re bobbing in stasis even as they’re ostensibly in new situations. She may be running the team’s dungeon crawls (yes, I smiled when I realized why they called them that) now, but Nancy is still as always the object of male desire without doing much of her own desiring. Eleven is, again, in danger from the government and determined to prove herself. Lucas is still a kind-hearted nerd/jock hybrid; Will is still deep in his feelings about his sexuality; Mike is still (I say this lovingly!) kinda giving us nothing. Even Dustin’s turn to dressing like JD from Heathers, this season’s most interesting character turn, feels on some level unsurprising and expected, particularly consider that Max had a near-identical arc last season after her own big trauma. 

The show may see all the above as evidence that it cares about the consequences of its characters’ actions (which, to be eminently clear, is one of the show’s best traits!). But the advantage seasons two through four had in their openers was that, by offering their characters a soft reset via new non-sci-fi challenges, they managed to in turn reveal new aspects of those characters. Meanwhile, the reason “The Crawl” feels to me so oddly empty is that everything actually, strikingly new it shows us is either jargon or world-stakes plot. It’s surprising and intriguing that, say, the military has built a new base in the Upside Down, but what’s surprising or intriguing about any of the characters we’re meant to care about here?

I believe that Stranger Things’ fifth season can exceed the constraints the show’s ever-escalating stakes have put on it. This, after all, is a show that specializes in teetering right on the edge of losing what makes it special without ever fully derailing. And the focus “The Crawl” puts on non-supernatural character dynamics, even if they’re a bit reheated, gives me hope that the Duffers know the situation they’ve put themselves in and are actively trying to correct.

But I also believe that Stranger Things’ careful balancing of its realist and horror plots (its Apatowian and Kingesque elements, if you will) has always been the source of its alchemy. It’s like aqua regia: the ratio, not the mere presence of both ingredients, is what allows the transmutation of gold. In “The Crawl,” that ratio began to wobble a bit. Let’s see if it holds.

Stray observations:

• This is a review rather than a recap, so I didn’t talk very much about Holly’s kidnapping, which is clearly season five’s inciting incident. My take on it: feels like they’re going back to the same well one too many times. I’m not sold on it yet.
• AS A LESBIAN WHO IS IN A SAME-SEX MARRIAGE, I am asserting my right to say that the scene where Will stares wild-eyed at Robin smoochin’ her girlfriend, drops his Coke really loudly, then Naruto runs through a crowd of hospital patients was, regrettably, really funny.
• Another thing I didn’t have room for up above: this episode’s kind of unfortunate visuals! The show’s been getting less and less visually grounded ever since season one’s carefully-constructed, clearly tangible interiors, but woof. In particular, the opening scene’s digital de-aging, CG swirls of color, and odd wet glossiness gave the whole thing the sense of a video game demo. It’s ungrounded, boring, and looks terrible. Ugh.
• I want to know how the toilets work in the Upside Down laboratory.
• One beat here I really liked was that Mike is into D&D again! It’s a character note that works on a couple different levels: it shows him growing into an older brother role with Holly, it gives a subtle sense of how the quarantine has driven people back to old hobbies and old friends, and it’s all too realistic that a twenty-six-year-old like Mike would be getting nostalgic for his favorite childhood games.
• All joking aside, I should address the elephant in the room, which is that all the kids look way too old now. I will (mostly) leave the goofs about this to other people and will simply say that it enhances this season’s sense of ungroundedness and unreality, and is made worse by the fact that it’s not even an intentional artistic choice.
• Finally: my wife has encouraged me to pick a Strangest Thing in each episode of this season, which I think is a great idea! The Strangest Thing in “The Crawl,” is, of course, Hopper’s plum-colored velour shirt. It looks like something that Barney the Dinosaur would wear to the club. Congratulations, Hopper!