While there is more to television than openings and endings, one can get a long way by doing them well. Stranger Things Season 5 Part 1 effectively reminds audiences that those are two of the things the show was—and continues to be—good at. Of course, viewers cannot live on attention-grabbing cold opens and heart-stopping cliffhangers alone.

Before we get into all that, though, it feels necessary to address the much-harped-on elephant in the room. Yes, the series began nine years ago. No, the child actors have not proven immune to the linear passage of time. However, it is to the show’s credit that it doesn’t invest much effort in trying to fool the audience. This isn’t Dear Evan Hansen, where every choice the production team made to hide their lead’s age actually had the paradoxical result. Stranger Things Season 5 Part 1 puts Millie Bobby Brown out there and says, “Yes, this is a 19/20-year-old (at filming) playing a 14-year-old. She’s married and a mom now. Can you believe it?! Anyway, do with that what you will.”

For me, someone who grew up with Luke Perry looking 30 at 24 playing a 15-year-old, this is not a big ask. If one can’t get past that, fair enough. By the standards of early 90s television teens, the actors are still well within established boundaries. But, hey, that doesn’t mean you have to embrace it.

If viewers can process former child actors still playing kids, what they’ll find is a protracted but solid new offering in the Stranger Days franchise. Hawkins is a minor police state in the middle of Reagan’s America. Soldiers openly patrol the streets after seizing large parts of town for their use. Robin (Maya Hawke) and Steve (Joe Keery) run the town’s radio station like a sanitized Hard Harry. As the DJ, Robin pokes fun at their occupiers while toeing the line enough to avoid a forced shutdown. As long as the military keeps looking the other way, the station can broadcast secret messages to the rest of their “kids on bikes” legion. It is a fun enough device, but a little perplexing. No one seems to care about them constantly interacting in person, so why all this extra work?

Only Eleven (the aforementioned) Brown) can’t move freely around town. Instead, she is hiding out in the woods, training with her surrogate dad Hopper (David Harbour). That involves a period-accurate, but nonetheless ridiculous, workout fit and a metric ton of exploding ripe pumpkins. Joyce (Winona Ryder) often drops in, again calling into question the necessity of the coded pirate radio. Things seem relatively calm, despite the battalion of military personnel. Then, Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) switches it up, targeting a new set of individuals in his quest to bring the Upside Down rightside up.

It is unclear—and probably will be for quite some time to come—exactly which parties are responsible for this “every episode will have something close to the running time of a feature film” approach that the series started in Season 4. Did Netflix pull a network TV and demand more blood from the stone? Did the Duffer Brothers cash their blank check to ensure every moment of every script ended up on-screen? One suspects it is a bit of column A, a bit of column B.  The result doesn’t ruin the experience, but there are moments of sluggishness. If one were curious what a television episode might feel like when no one had to make any choices, they could do worse for insight than episode 2 of Stranger Things Season 5 Part 1.

And yet, to bring things back around to the first point, the show remains good at openers and endings. Put another way, it presses buttons well. Of course, we’ve seen someone master their powers at just the right moment to save their friends, but the creative team still finds ways to make it surprising and perhaps give the audience a bit of a lump in the throat. The town besieged by holes ripped in reality and goopy, grey, toothy beasts has become a staple AND the show still stages the hell out of the sequences. They use geography and the way people’s brains subconsciously fill in knowledge gaps to dial up or reduce tension, letting them deliver surprises amid the nearly rote.

And that gift doesn’t stop at the fight-or-flight buttons. The series is perhaps better at dancing on those emotional triggers. Yes, this is at least the third time we’ve seen Hopper and Eleven say goodbye, death hanging over them. Still plays though. It gets stronger when it pushes into new territory, especially regarding Will (Noah Schnapp). His heart-to-hearts with Joyce and Robin don’t succeed on the back of soaring rhetoric. Instead, they feel deeply normal, the more common way we all wrestle with life. The struggle to move beyond trauma and the dangers of same sex romance during a deeply homophobic decade aren’t aired out with soapbox insistence but instead allowed to hang over the moments. Stranger Things Season 5 Part 1 slows down too often. However, when it does, it also frequently locates its heart. That’s difficult to give up.

It is difficult to imagine anyone coming into Stranger Days Season 5 Part 1 cold and not bouncing hard off it. It has become its own ecosystem where seemingly throwaway moments from 6 years ago gain resonance or lead to a pretty solid joke. If you don’t have the lore, you likely will end up with a fundamentally different viewing experience. But for the fans, the obsessives, the been here since Season 1s, this installment sets the table well. It’s too long, it has too few new tricks in its bag. Nonetheless, it feels good in a way that goes beyond mere nostalgia for the nine-year-old show, itself powered by 80s pop culture nostalgia. I confess I don’t know if that’s good for the future of entertainment. As its own discrete experience, though…? I’m glad to be back for a last (overlong) holidays visit to Hawkins.

Stranger Things Season 5 Part 1 is currently rolling for chills and thrills now on Netflix.

Stranger Things Season 5 Part 1 Trailer: