This juggernaut's hurtling towards - what, exactly?

The final season of the supernatural drama 'Stranger Things' is still great immersive fun. But does it know how to stop?

- NICK HILTON

The small town of Hawkins, Indiana, has been through a lot.

In the years since 1983, when a young boy disappeared, its citizens have faced down countless otherworldly ghouls, crazed scientists and government officials and, after all that, find themselves locked in military quarantine. This is, after all, the world of Stranger Things - a horror-tinged subversion of America’s Reaganite boom years - which returns, nine years after it began, for its final season.

And even though the show’s neon title card bears the branding “Stranger Things 5”, this is really a direct continuation of the show’s fourth outing. Its boss villain, Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower), is still lurking in the Upside Down, the ashen underworld beneath Hawkins, while on the surface the police chief Jim Hopper (David Harbour) has built a dojo to teach his telekinetic ward Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) the skills needed to take Vecna down.

Meanwhile, the remaining ragtag group of children and young adults tasked with saving the world are working on an elaborate mission to access the Upside Down and finish what they started. “It’s looking like a pretty regular day in Hawkins,” Rockin’ Robin (Maya Hawke) broadcasts to the townsfolk, knowing full well how irregular things usually are. Soon enough, Vecna’s incursions into the material world reveal a new and disturbing plan, in which history will soon repeat itself...