I know that many people with good taste believe Stranger Things - which has returned for its fifth and final season after a three-year wait - has been a little too high on its own supply since season two, but I am not one of them. Every time the show has returned, I've been impressed by how the Duffer brothers (the duo behind the show) have expanded the story without diluting the Spielbergian magic that made it fun in the first place. At its best, Stranger Things 4 delivered the TV equivalent of the moments in Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame that had full cinemas losing their minds, literally whooping and hollering - Eleven dropping a helicopter! Max floating to Kate Bush! Hopper with the sword! This kind of silly sci-fi storytelling may not be your thing - and, honestly, fair enough - but if it is, Stranger Things really delivers. Well, it did deliver, at least.

I have now seen the first four episodes of season five, which dropped as one block on Thursday and will be followed by two more drops on 26 December and 1 January, respectively. It's unfortunate, but they're a bit of a drag. Where previous seasons have felt like they had their own individual identity, this one feels like the equivalent of Taylor Swift dropping a whole 'nother 15 songs on top of the already-quite-stuffed Tortured Poets Department album. These episodes feel like offcuts from season four, not something new and exciting of their own.

Firstly, to state the obvious, the 1,245-day wait between episodes has not done anyone any favours. There are approximately 73 main characters in this show, each of whom has their own shit going on, little of which I can fully remember. The shortest recap I could find on YouTube was 18 minutes long, and not even I - watching this being part of my job - have time for that. Here's the shortest explanation I can muster of where we're at: the Dungeons & Dragons boys (Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin and Noah Schnapp), Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown's telekinetic hero), Joyce (Winona Ryder), Hopper (David Harbour) and Steve (Joe Keery), Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), Nancy (Natalia Dyer) and Robin (Maya Hawke) are all back in Hawkins, where the evil parallel universe of the Upside Down is spilling over into their world. Vecna is hiding somewhere, ready to enact his plan to swallow everyone into the Upside Down. As season five begins, the Hawkins lot are trying - and failing - to find Vecna and destroy him before he can pull it off. This is basically all I can say about the plot, because Netflix considers absolutely everything else to be a spoiler.

Where previous seasons have started with impressive world-building - the summertime 1985 vibes of season three, with the Hawkins pool and mall, were vivid - this one just kinda lumps us back in to where we were at the end of season four. Everyone is together, so there's no tension in how they'll find their way back to one another, as there has been in previous instalments. There is little left in the way of mystery, either - we know who Vecna is now (it's too long to explain here, if you even care), and what he wants to do. The season basically starts in finale mode. But sustaining that energy over the course of eight episodes that could total anywhere between 10 and 15 hours of TV... on current evidence, it's just not possible. There is more exposition than you could ever imagine, with characters constantly explaining elaborate plans to make a dent in Vecna's army that may or may not have any consequences. It often feels like a friend explaining a card game to you - which, I'm sorry, but I'm glazing over. On top of this, the Upside Down has become a Russian doll of parallel universes, seemingly encasing several different planes of existence, which is deeply confusing.

The most damning thing I can say about season five is that it's dull, which Stranger Things has never been before. While these episodes feature relentless action, it doesn't feel like they actually get anywhere, like the characters are all just pumping away on a treadmill. It's hard not to feel like they've just stretched the show out a little too far - season four was perfectly executed blockbuster TV. It was so well constructed and executed that anything they did here was going to feel like a step down.

These are only the first four episodes of the new season, and if the ever-increasing runtimes are anything to go by, they probably won't make up even a third of the whole thing. Maybe they can turn it around in the last four? I genuinely hope so. The one thing that makes me a little more optimistic is that the last 30 minutes of the fourth episode are by far the most entertaining of the lot, and there's a big reveal that could shake things up as the season draws to a close. So I'm not fully out on Stranger Things yet. But going by this lot, it's not looking great.

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