It’s all turned upside down.
Finally, after what feels like a hundred years, “Stranger Things” has ended.
The show first premiered in 2016, and ended with Season 5, now streaming on Netflix, following Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), Will (Noah Schnapp), Nancy (Natalia Dyer), Steve (Joe Keery), Hopper (David Harbour) and more as they live in Hawkins, Indiana, and deal with threats from the sinister “Upside Down.”
Spoilers below for the ‘Stranger Things’ series finale
In the show’s two-hour series finale, called “The Rightside Up,” the show plays it safe and sentimental. Nearly everybody got a “happily ever after” ending.
Pretty much all of the expected things happen. The gang battles a giant monster, and Nancy gets to shoot a gun. Steve and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) share quips and cute moments. They recover Holly Wheeler (Nell Fisher). They defeat the evil villain, Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower). In a surprisingly entertaining move, Joyce (Winona Ryder) delivers the killing blow, telling him, “you f–ked with the wrong family.”
As usual for “Stranger Things,” nobody from the main gang gets axed, and the only deaths are random side characters, like Kali (Linnea Berthelsen). Steve has a near-miss, as he almost plummets from a tower, but fear not, Steve lives! Jonathan saves him. Dustin has a near miss, as a monster nearly crushes him, but Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) pushes him out of harm’s way.
Everyone thinks Eleven is dead, but Mike reveals at the end that she faked her death and is living out a quiet life in a peaceful town near waterfalls (which he had told her at the beginning of the season).
At least, that’s how he’s choosing to believe she’s living out her days. Eleven is shown onscreen in a beautiful nature vista, walking amid hills and waterfalls, but Mike is narrating. It could be a project of Mike’s imagination, as he admits that he doesn’t know for sure. But, he does confirm that she’s not dead. So even if she’s not in that location, she’s alive.
After the gang defeats the villains and saves the day, the kids graduate — class of ’89. Dustin is valedictorian.
Move over “Running Up That Hill,” for those keeping track of the show’s tunes, “Purple Rain” plays during a key moment, when Eleven sacrifices herself to save everyone, leading everyone to believe she’s dead.
Steve becomes the local kids’ baseball coach and sex ed teacher. Nancy drops out of college and works at a newspaper. Jonathan is making an “anti-capitalist cannibalism movie,” whatever that is. The three of them and Robin plan to meet up once a month in Philadelphia, now that they’re living adult lives in spread-out locations.
For those keeping track of romance, Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) and Max (Sadie Sink) go the distance, staying together. Hopper proposes to Joyce, and they plan to move to Montauk together, where his buddy got him a job as the chief of police.
It’s not a terrible finale; this is no “Game of Thrones.” It has some good moments, such as emotional conversations between Hopper and El reminiscing about how he “became” her dad, or Steve and Jonathan bonding over how they’ll never be friends, but they both care about Nancy.
But it’s predictable, needlessly drawn out — it didn’t need to be two hours — it doesn’t do anything interesting, risky, or memorable. It’s fine. It’s like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. If you’re hungry, it sustains you and gets the job done, but it’s hardly gourmet.
Fans who were anticipating big deaths will be disappointed, as it went in the opposite direction, to be sentimental.
On one hand, a big genre show doing “happily ever after” ending and refusing to axe main characters is risky in its own way. It’s the anti “Game of Thrones.” It’s almost rebellious.
But on the other hand, “Stranger Things” is not “Heated Rivalry,” a romance where a “happily ever after” ending feels appropriate. It’s a show that has brutally killed characters in the past — RIP poor Bob (Sean Astin). Has it forgotten that? So it does feel somewhat toothless for “Stranger Things” to have such a death-free, cheerful ending.
Clearly, the Duffer brothers were anticipating this criticism, because in a meta-moment, as Mike narrates what happens to everyone, Max scoffs at him. “Comfort and happiness? Could you be more trite? I thought you were some kind of master storyteller.”
Mike responds that happiness can be found in “many places.” That’s right, the show ends with a thesis statement that’s straight out of a fortune cookie.
Overall, Season 5 was a rocky finish for the once-beloved Netflix hit.
Divided into three volumes, it started off strong enough in the first four episodes, with the gang banding together to rebel against the military quarantine imposed on Hawkins. But in the second drop of episodes on Christmas, “Volume 2,” the wheels started coming off.
The Duffer Brothers have been reluctant to kill off anyone in the main cast – sure, there have been deaths over the years from side characters like Barb (Shannon Purser) Billy (Dacre Montgomery), Eddie (Joseph Quinn), but none of the stars. They’ve even done two death fake-outs for Hopper, which only dilutes the emotional impact of any real death. They’re like the boy who cried wolf.
The result is that the final season was overstuffed with too many characters.
Season 5 even added additional characters, like Derreck Turnbow (Jake Connelly) and Holly Wheeler, who isn’t new but who has taken on a bafflingly large role. And they brought back Kali, from that Season 2 episode that everyone hated, instead of sweeping that episode under the rug, taking the loss, and moving on from it.
Characters we’ve followed for 10 years only got scattered moments in the spotlight.
Remember when Winona Ryder was one of the show’s leads? In Season 5, Joyce became a background character.
The writing in the final season was filled with clunky exposition. Every other scene was a character explaining the plot – or a boring sci-fi concept – to other people.
It felt like the writers had a checklist of questions they wanted to answer and character moments that needed to happen – Mike and Eleven moment, check, Vecna backstory, check – and didn’t bother putting it together elegantly.
It shouldn’t have been this hard to end the show. They had three years – Season 4 came out in 2022 – and unlike “Game of Thrones” or “Lost,” the mythology wasn’t that dense; they hadn’t written themselves into a corner or run out of source material runway.
The ending was labored, and not in a good way.
To be fair, some people on social media were acting like Season 5 of “Stranger Things” was as bad as the final season of “Game of Thrones.” Those people forgot how bad “GOT” was; this isn’t that level. The leads didn’t act wildly out of character, and no fan favorites committed sudden mass murder.
Still, it wasn’t nearly as good as it should have been.
“Stranger Things” ended, and nobody important died. It’s a strange thing, indeed.
