Thoughts on the first four episodes of Stranger Things Season Five — with spoilers — coming up just as soon as I save a child by kidnapping him...
The Duffer Brothers reportedly wanted Netflix to do a weekly release of this final season. While the streamer's reluctance to elongate the amount of time people have to subscribe to watch their biggest hits remains baffling, this approach of dropping the episodes in three batches over a bit more than a month is at least more manageable than getting them all — some of which will undoubtedly be even longer than the 86-minute final episode of this group — at once.
Alan Sepinwall
And for our purposes, it's simply easier to discuss if we're talking about four episodes at once rather than eight. I already weighed in with my overall take on the season with last Wednesday's review, so let's dive into various aspects of these episodes that I couldn't say much about in that earlier piece: