By 
In advance of the fifth and final season of Stranger Things, which will hit Netflix in November and December 2025, I thought I would produce a handy guide of seasons 1-4, much like I did with the Mission Impossible movies earlier this year.
In case you don’t know, the 80s-set show features pesky kids fighting Dungeons and Dragons monsters from a shadow realm known as ‘the upside-down.’ A myriad of 80s pop culture references reminds us of how good we had it back then, without resorting to pandering nostalgia bait.
Stranger Things season 5 comes hot on the heels of season 4 which was released a mere…three-and-a-half years ago? Wait, what? I realise that time speeds up as you age, but damn. The brakes on my life must have completely failed at this point.
Season 4 seems like yesterday… and a lifetime ago. Weird how time works.
Given the time gap, you can be forgiven for forgetting a few details and may need a refresher. That’s where I come in. The gap between seasons of Stranger Things is typically so long that each time a new one rolls around, I end up rewatching the whole show. That puts me in a perfect position to produce this handy guide.
But I don’t rewatch it because I’ve got memory problems. I watch it because to me, this show is one of the finest pieces of popular fiction of the 21st Century.
Yeah, I said it. Go nuts in the comments.
About time
Here is the release dates for each season of Stranger Things and the time gaps between them:
Season 1: Jul 2016
Season 2: Oct 2017 (1 year, 3 months gap). Set at Halloween, so the timing seems deliberate.
Season 3: Jul 2019 2 (1 year, 9 months gap) Set in summer, but come on. This is too long.
Season 4: May 2022 (2 years, 10 months gap). COVID excuse.
Season 5: Nov 2025 (3 years, 4 months). Err…I got nothing. All I can say is it better be good.
That’s nine years and four months in total! Almost a decade. Those pesky kids sure aren’t kids anymore.
She’s married now. With a child. Adopted, but still.
What’s an acceptable gap between seasons anyway? In the era of broadcast television in the USA, you might wait a maximum of four months. The UK always had shorter seasons and odd timings for the release of shows, so we never had any expectations for when our favourites might return.
Streamers operate a bit like the UK model, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. Three-and-a-half years is pushing it by anyone’s standards.
Modern entertainment moves fast, with the average person’s attention span measured in seconds like a toddler. People lose interest and move on to the next thing. It’s a big risk to wait multiple years between seasons, especially when your core cast is a bunch of kids who aged out of their cute phase three seasons ago.
But if there’s one show that can weather this storm, it’s Stranger Things. Not many modern shows can be considered cultural touchstones due to the fragmentation of the industry. When everyone is watching at different times or something else entirely, you lose that sense of shared experience.
But Stranger Things comes close. With a clear release schedule for season 5, and this handy guide, we may just be able to experience the end of this decade-long journey together.
Stranger Things Season 1: Synopsis
Spoilers alert!
Welcome to Hawkins, Indiana, where nothing exciting ever happens until scientists at a secret government laboratory rip open the fabric of space and time and create a portal to a shadow world dubbed the Upside Down. Oopsie.
The Upside Down looks just like our world except with way more ivy and everything is in black-and-white for some reason.
I’m not saying I’d like to build a summer home here, but the trees are really quite lovely.
A humanoid creature from the Upside Down, the Demogorgon, abducts twelve-year-old Will Byers and takes him to the shadow world. His highly strung mother, Joyce (Winona Ryder) tries to persuade the Sheriff, Jim Hopper (David Harbor) that Will is alive and talking to her via the flickering lights in her house.
Hopper, who lost his own daughter several years ago, becomes invested in finding Will and is convinced the laboratory has something to do with it.
While searching for Will, his friends Mike, Lucas and Dusty encounter a strange girl in the woods with superpowers who goes by the name Eleven. She has escaped from the same laboratory and is being hunted by the evil scientists. Mike hides her in his house and doesn’t tell his parents.
Meanwhile, Will’s brother Jonathan teams up with Mike’s sister Nancy to investigate another disappearance: that of Nancy’s friend, Barb. Jonathan is a keen photographer and may have accidentally photographed the moment Barb was snatched by the Demogorgon. Nancy’s boyfriend, Steve, becomes very jealous.
These disparate story strands gradually come together and culminate in a showdown at the lab, a battle at Hawkins High School between Government agents, Eleven and the Demogorgon, and a trip to the Upside Down to find Will before it’s too late.
Season 1 Review
There are several story strands to Stranger Things season 1, but the show’s beating heart is the core group of kids: Mike, Lucas and Dustin.
Mike is the leader, Dustin is the comic relief and Lucas is the hothead. Mike’s burgeoning relationship with Eleven threatens to tear the group apart, with Lucas feeling particularly threatened by the new arrival. He gets very aggressive and is annoying at times.
Imagine E.T: the Extraterrestrial, except replace E.T with a young girl. She hides out in a boy’s house. They dress her up in a wig to disguise her. They get chased by government agents in vans while riding bikes.
Eleven has similar telekinetic powers to E.T but lacks a glowing finger and definitely doesn’t want to phone home. She’s notable for being the only fictional character in history to get regular nosebleeds without it being a symptom of a terminal illness (it happens every time she uses her powers).
Eleven possesses incredible psychic powers and can locate people from great distances, and even different dimensions. Flashbacks showing the experiments inflicted on her by scientist Dr Brenner (Matthew Modine) are a tough watch. Dr Brenner has…questionable ethics, to say the least. He forces her to make contact with the Demogorgon, which rips open the portal to the Upside Down.
She’s also a killer. For real. With a tilt of her head, Eleven is able to snap the necks of her guards. She almost kills Lucas at one point by throwing him across a junkyard with her mind. This is where the E.T comparison ends. She’s no cutesy innocent: she has a real dark side.
Darkness on the Edge of Town
The show itself has a dark edge too. Some scenes still unnerve me on the third or fourth watch. Will’s abduction. Eleven’s treatment in the lab. Barb in the swimming pool. Joyce’s phantom phone calls from Will. The Demogorgon breaking through the wall of Joyce’s house.
Hopper’s efforts to save Will, intercut with his daughter losing her fight against cancer, brings a real emotional heft. But despite all this, the show never feels too dark. It’s a kids’ adventure with real stakes. It’s fun, but you believe that they could actually come to harm.
The acting is top notch (I never knew Winona Ryder had it in her) and even minor characters are given proper attention. Nancy’s boyfriend Steve, who would be a one-note bully in any other TV show or movie, receives an unexpected but welcome redemption arc.
All this is wrapped up in a 1980s comfort blanket that never feels forced. The eight episodes move with real momentum, and apart from a couple of ‘walking through the woods’ scenes, it never seems to be spinning its wheels.
So what’s wrong with it? As I said above, Lucas tends to overact at times. The Demogorgon appears impervious to bullets, which is a monster trope that needs to go away. Every father is absent, useless or a deadbeat. But these are minor quibbles. There’s a reason this show has become so popular, and a large part of that is due to the foundation laid by season 1.
We’ll see how it holds up for season 2 in the next article.
Handy checklist
Number of episodes: 8.
Timeline: 1 week, beginning 6 November 1983. Epilogue in December 1983.
Inciting incident: the abduction of Will Byers.
The human monster: Dr Martin Brenner (Matthew Modine).
The actual monster: the Demogorgon, a humanoid creature from the Upside Down.
Red shirt character: Barbara ‘Barb’ Holland.
Movie posters on the walls: The Evil Dead, Jaws, The Dark Crystal, The Thing, Risky Business.
Main movie influences on the season: E.T: the Extraterrestrial, Poltergeist, Stand By Me.
Key song: Should I Stay or Should I Go, by The Clash.
Season MVP: Joyce (Winona Ryder) or Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), a kid with no front teeth
‘Fuck yeah!’ moment: Eleven flipping the van with her mind.
There goes my insurance
Volume 1 of Stanger Things season 5 (the first 4 episodes) is released on 27 November 2025. Volume 2 (the next 4 episodes) is released on December 26, 2025. The finale, Volume 3, is released on December 31, 2025. For UK viewers, this means 1am on the following day.
The post A Handy Guide to STRANGER THINGS: Season 1 appeared first on Last Movie Outpost.
