The kids from Hawkins are finally back with the release of Stranger Things: Season 5, and the first reviews are online and very positive. Only the first half of this fifth and final season has been made available on Netflix until Christmas, but the four episodes are enough to satisfy fans after three years of waiting. The show remains a nostalgic thrill with plenty of scares, but it’s the character moments that really make it worth sticking with to the end.
Here’s what critics are saying about Stranger Things: Season 5:
For a series that’s been MIA since 2022, it hasn’t lost a step in terms of vibrant personality and PG-13 horror spectacle.
— Nick Schager, The Daily Beast
It’s a welcome but bittersweet reunion for fans of the show who’ve spent the last decade watching a gaggle of misfit kids (now teens) weaponize their nerd skills against supernatural and mortal enemies in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana.
— Lorraine Ali, Los Angeles Times
What a start to the last season it is. Epic action, heartbreaking moments, all done on a grand scale.
— Tessa Smith, Mama’s Geeky
It remains a masterful interplay of light and dark, funny and tense, playful and deeply serious.
— Karl Quinn, Sydney Morning Herald
No Stranger Things fan is going away disappointed from these episodes, which leave anticipation for the rest of the season at fever pitch.
— Laura Martin, BBC.com
On the basis of these maiden chapters, it’s regained some of its footing, maximizing its lengthy runtimes with urgent, breakneck action.
— Nick Schager, The Daily Beast
The Duffer Brothers have come up with a newly beguiling, action-packed way to lead viewers down a very familiar road.
— Eric Deggans, NPR
A three-year break and the prospect of a clear ending has allowed the show to regain its focus — which was sometimes lost in previous, more sprawling chapters.
— Rebecca Nicholson, Financial Times
Stranger Things definitely needs to switch off its boombox, hang up its catapults and admit it’s too old for these capers, but it’s worth indulging it one last time.
— Jack Seale, Guardian
Its balance of suspense and humor is more assured than in Season 4, due in no small part to fewer extraneous elements.
— Nick Schager, The Daily Beast
There is something familiar and comforting about knowing that Eleven, Mike, Will, Robin, Steve, Dustin, Nancy, Jonathan, and Lucas are all training to fight this evil together. It is reminiscent of season one, but with much higher stakes this time around.
— Tessa Smith, Mama’s Geeky
Season 5 [is] more geographically focused than its predecessor, which put thousands of miles between groups of the protagonists. That pays off in more concise run times than the bloat of Season 4.
— Alison Herman, Variety
It’s Robin and Will, having a heart-to-heart that includes a beautiful speech from Robin about her identity that proves very important for the plot — but more importantly, who she and Will are as characters. It’s genuine and human and real.
— Liz Shannon Miller, Consequence
It’s a good assembly, and even when the plot starts to drag or becomes hard to follow, there’s enough charisma that it can, like Kate Bush warbling through a cassette player, drag you back into the room.
— Nick Hilton, Independent
The big bro/little bro relationship between Dustin and Steve is still the series’ heart, and its most believably complex.
— Kelly Lawler, USA Today
Elevating the storylines of younger characters helps bridge the age gap created when the core cast of kid actors had the audacity to grow up over the show’s run.
— Lorraine Ali, Los Angeles Times
Fans will be pleased to see the Duffers linking back to scenes from the first series, and answering crucial questions – namely, who first kidnapped Will, and for what reason, and how they may have underestimated him.
— Laura Martin, BBC.com
If a certain development in Will’s relationship to the Upside Down comes off a bit cheesy, it’s still a satisfying payoff to years of watching poor fragile Will rub his neck and seize up in psychic pain.
— Angie Han, The Hollywood Reporter
The episodes are [not] devoid of shocks — one major sequence features some perfect home invasion horror, with serious stakes for all involved.
— Liz Shannon Miller, Consequence
There’s no escaping that the show has morphed into an allegory about child exploitation and sexual abuse. It’s the logical fulfilment of its Stephen King-inspired destiny, perhaps, but it’s made Stranger Things a much darker thing than anyone could have predicted when it all began.
— Karl Quinn, Sydney Morning Herald
The visuals have once again stepped up a notch… The scale is massive, the production is insane, the sets and effects look incredible.
— Tessa Smith, Mama’s Geeky
The Duffer Brothers stage this latest Stranger Things run with lots of whiplash camerawork and sharp, punchy edits to make sure that things move as fast and furiously as Vecna’s Demogorgon minions.
— Nick Schager, The Daily Beast
Stranger Things’s superb production design [is] a demonstration that not every Netflix show needs to look terrible.
— Nick Hilton, Independent
The initial quartet of chapters are so packed with gory action [and] movie-grade visual effects.
— Bob Strauss, TheWrap
It’s hard not to notice that it, too, seems caught in a murky CG expanse that looks big but feels small, full of scenes that look sort of like life from a distance but don’t feel much like it up from up close.
— Angie Han, The Hollywood Reporter
We get closer, longer looks at the Demogorgon and that thing is absolutely terrifying.
— Tessa Smith, Mama’s Geeky
The horror has been dialled up a notch… We don’t just get a Demogorgon now, we get a horde of them. And when they attack, those talons don’t just rip at flesh, they pierce it.
— Karl Quinn, Sydney Morning Herald
It is like IT, if 90 per cent of the novel involved Pennywise baring his teeth and chasing the children. It lacks the contrast – the light and shade – which in earlier seasons really brought out the emotional heart of the show.
— Nick Hilton, Independent
Netflix and the Duffer brothers spared no expense for the final episodes… There are several big action set pieces and battles just in the first few episodes.
— Tessa Smith, Mama’s Geeky
The fight scenes remain action-packed and heart-palpitating.
— Kelly Lawler, USA Today
It goes big with its set pieces, highlighted by a fourth episode attack that the Duffers orchestrate with plenty of sharp CGI murder and mayhem.
— Nick Schager, The Daily Beast
The bombastic Episode 4 is Stranger Things at its best; 81, presumably very expensively produced, minutes culminating in an epic battle between the demons, the military and the people of Hawkins. Grenades, gunfire and flame throwers abound, before two explosive twists in the final minutes.
— Laura Martin, BBC.com
It’s amusing to watch the crew booby-trap a house, Home Alone-style, against a Demogorgon, or turn to a hilariously unlikely hero for a highly complicated rescue mission.
— Angie Han, The Hollywood Reporter
Little Holly Wheeler is a fun new addition, even if it’s extremely unclear how old she is supposed to be (wasn’t she a toddler just last season?).
— Kelly Lawler, USA Today
Maya Hawke, now 27, has the most convincing youthful energy in this acting cluster… Hawke overdoes it in an entertaining, charming way. As usual, Winona Ryder just overacts.
— Bob Strauss, TheWrap
The cast is as solid as before, no matter that they all look too old for their parts.
— Nick Schager, The Daily Beast
One or two have developed into slightly awkward screen presences, but for the most part that early casting was good. Winona Ryder and David Harbour, too, give committed, full-throated performances.
— Nick Hilton, Independent
What hinders the show is its overly dense mythology, as well as its reliance on cliches and borrowed plot elements.
— Liz Shannon Miller, Consequence
At least one of its subplots is groan-worthy even by the series’ standards.
— Nick Schager, The Daily Beast
This final series is also the victim of what I call Marvelisation: a feeling that the drama needs to be set against an interminable fight between humans and extraterrestrials.
— Nick Hilton, Independent
By declining to enrich its characters as they age, Stranger Things traps itself in arrested development. When you get bigger without going deeper, you end up stretched thin.
— Alison Herman, Variety
It’s thrilling; and if it’s a precursor to how the Duffer Brothers plan to wrap up the show then viewers are in for an all-time great TV ending.
— Laura Martin, BBC.com
We will have to wait until the New Year to see how Stranger Things concludes, and whether it can stick that particular landing. But the Duffer Brothers have created something, in the beleaguered town of Hawkins and its luckless citizenry, that is admirably immersive.
— Nick Hilton, Independent
If these first few episodes of Stranger Things Season 5 are any indication, we are in store for one wild, chilling, thrilling, and heartbreaking adventure.
— Tessa Smith, Mama’s Geeky
When Stranger Things hits the level one might call epic, it’s not because of CGI battles, but because unexpected heroes are rising to the occasion. That happens more than once in the first half of Season 5, making it a promising start. Let’s hope the second half lives up to that.
— Liz Shannon Miller, Consequence
Possibly (probably) Stranger Things will have to open itself up in the second half of its final season, as it prepares to send the characters off for good.
— Angie Han, The Hollywood Reporter
There are still a few chances left for Stranger Things to take our breath away. I want us all to expect that kind of greatness from a show as expensive, influential and far-reaching as this one.
— Kelly Lawler, USA Today
Volume 1 (four episodes) of Stranger Things: Season 5 premieres on Netflix on November 26, 2025; Volume 2 (three episodes) premieres on December 25; and Volume 3 (the series finale) premieres on December 31.
