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As Stranger Things’ final season has played out, I realized something. Namely, the show has ended up with the Jurassic World Dominion problem. Now, the fifth and final season of Stranger Things is decidedly better than the sixth Jurassic Park movie, but it does suffer to a degree from the same issue that Dominion had. Namely, an oversaturation of characters.
The “hook” of Dominion was that the Jurassic World gang and the Jurassic Park gang would both be there. On top of that, they added new characters in that film as well. That left the movie with so many characters to serve. Swaths of the film saw characters standing side-by-side in groups of, like, eight or nine people. The main characters broke off into a smaller group that was still several people. It was a lot.
I had this thought in the second batch of Stranger Things episodes in this season. The traveling party by the end is a dozen people! That’s a ton of characters! This is what happens when a show is too reticent to have characters die. It’s, like, one person per season that dies, which is enough to be considered “stakes,” and then everybody else just amasses.
Again, I’ve enjoyed this season of Stranger Things, but there is something to seeing everybody together in one place that makes it feel excessive.
