To be fair, I can totally see why some would feel a bit disgruntled.
With a final season, expectations for the penultimate episode are usually just as high as the finale itself as this is where the stakes are plainly laid out along with any shock twists that may erupt along the way to further heighten the tension. However, with The Bridge, anyone expecting an apocalyptic cliffhanger may find themselves taking their frustrations out on the episode when both the Duffer Brothers and Shawn Levy have united to deliver an installment that may boost the scale, but is, at its heart, just a plain old average episode with a few more bells and whistles.
Oh, the basic juice is still there of course and the revelations concerning what the Upside-Down actually is, but anyone counting on Stranger Things doing anything out of the norm will no doubt be wondering what the point actually is.
After finally escaping from Camazotz, Max awakens from her two year coma in Hawkins hospital to find Lucas, Robin, Vickie and a ravaged, Demodog slaying Karen Wheeler gathered around her. However, despite being incredibly weak due to her extended period in a trance, she gets a far better deal than Holly, who ends up waking from Camazotz to find herself not in the Upside-Down, but in Vecna lair located in a whole new environment. We discover that this is an entirely new dimension that Dustin gets round to naming “The Void” that’s connected to our world via the worm hole that we know as the Upside-Down and after managing to find a portal back to it, Holly finds herself appearing over 200 feet in the air.
While Vecna manages to retrieve his prize and turns the rest of the kidnapped children against her, Dustin, Steve, Nancy and Jonathan mamage to get back into Hawkins to pass on the staggering discoveries that they’ve found. It seems that when they bring everyone’s information together, Vecna’s plan finally becomes clear. It seems that the vine-covered bastard has never truly resided in the Upside-Down and instead wants to use the kidnapped children to use the in-between world to pull both worlds together in order to merge them as one.
With only hours to spare, Steve manages to come up with a ballsy, but feasible plan, but before the rapidly swelling group can roll out, there’s a couple of issues to smooth over first. One of them is that Kali seems to be convincing Eleven that the final battle should be their last stand, lest their DNA be used by whomever will follow to just create yet more telekinetic monsters like Henry Creel; however, taking precedence is Will Byers, who feels that he needs to come clean about all of his fears if he’s going to come at Vecna with all the confidence that he can muster. The end of the world may be looming, but there’s always a bit of extra time to let Will have a coming out party…
Properly rating The Bridge is proving to be something of an interesting puzzle for me. For example, if the penultimate episode of the entire series had been placed during any other season, it would be a perfectly acceptable slice of Stanger Things that brings the (now noticably bloated) group all together to swap information in order to mount their final battle plans. All rifts – or at least emotional ones – are healed and everyone manages to get their various plot threads mostly in check in order to build up maximum emotional resonance and make valuable space in order to cram as much into the final episode as humanly possible. However, you’d hope that both the Duffers and Levy could have come up with something a bit more risky and unpredictable than just another episode filled with exposition and people spelling out endless plans with whatever visual aids they can they their hands on in the heat of the moment.
But while we have the final plan spoon fed to us thanks to Steve Harrington fiddling around with a slinky, you can’t help but feel that the makers could have been far bolder, in order to make good on the promise that this Christmas would be significantly darker. I’m not saying there should have been some massive cull among the cast to add some genuine threat, but when you take into consideration that the central group has now also absorbed Vickie, Karen Wheeler and even science teacher Mr. Clarke into their mass, the Hawkins resistance has now grown way too ungainly to give them moments that actually stick. Yes, Eleven has her sacrifice all planned out with Kali, Steve and Dustin properly make up and Vecna convinces his child hostages to turn on Holly, but by this point, the machine is too big to spend substantial time on these moments and lay out their super-involved plan.
So it’s somewhat divisive that the show suddenly pumps the breaks super hard to pause the action in order for Will to have yet another big moment. Obviously, the show is trying to stretch out his ascension to superhero by bequeathing him with kick ass powers and then almost immediately have him get captured and used once more by the all-powerful big bad, but in order to have Will get to an emotional state where his doubts won’t give Vecna the ammo he needs, he has to come out to approximately three quarters of the cast at a time when everyone really needs to be hauling ass. Is it an important scene? Considering that we’ve been building to it for 5 seasons, sure, and I can hardly complain about it when similar, show stopping character beats provided the saving grace of the previous episode. However, the fact that seemingly unbreakable time constraints keep getting broken in order for someone to shoot for an Emmy is kind of messing with the flow of the show almost if the season is taking some sort of victory lap before it’s actually finished. Also, while Noah Schnapp gives it everything he has, Will’s also been crying for almost every scene he’s had this season, so it does tend to detract from the message.
With a hefty amount of baggage to now keep track of (swelling cast, four separate realms), even the expanding runtimes aren’t enough to give everyone their due. Almost all the adults are practically bystanders now and I’m wondering why they’d hire someone like Linda Hamilton as Kay when she’s now just a typical, snarling, military sub-villain. On top of that, with no shock deaths (yet) and no big last push to remind us why Vecna is so dangerous, it feels like there’s no extra sauce to carry us over during the six day wait for that gargantuan finale.
While that final scene has it’s heart well and truly in the right place, there’s a feeling that Levy and the Duffers are so dead set on hammering home these character beats, it’s not balancing too well with the speed the sheer bulk of the rest of the plot is being forced to maintain. While this doesn’t necessarily spell disaster for that touted big finish coming down the pipe (Stranger Things always knows how to finish with style), there’s a sense that the show is just coasting on familiarity rather than digging new tunnels and serving up genuine surprises.
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