Welcome to the Upside Down.
“Stranger Things” is getting review bombed online following the negative fan reaction to the Season 5, Volume 2 episodes that dropped on Christmas.
Heading into the series finale airing New Year’s Eve, Season 5 is now the show’s lowest rated season on Rotten Tomatoes.
Season 5 had an audience score rating of 73% before Volume 2. Now, it’s at 56%.
Additionally, the show’s penultimate episode, “The Bridge,” is the worst rated episode of the entire series on IMDb, with a 5.5 rating.
That’s even lower than the infamously critically panned Season 2 episode, “The Lost Sister,” which has a 6.0 rating,.
By comparison, the rest of the Season 5 episodes all have a score of 8.0 or higher.
After Volume 2 dropped, fans took to X to air their grievances with the show, specifically the penultimate episode, calling out the repetitive plots, overstuffed cast, weak acting, and more.
“Can’t believe I’m watching this show can it be over already?” one fan tweeted.
“Because season 4 was so good, this feels that much worse,” another fan wrote.
A third fan tweeted, “Stranger Things has genuinely become so f—ing stupid. Terrible plot. Terrible cliche lazy writing. Terrible acting. Why am I wasting my time with this sh-t.”
“Stranger Things Season 5 the worst season of the series by far. Comically bad,” another fan wrote.
On Reddit, someone said, “Also, the acting is kinda…all over the place from everyone, including Winona. It was giving HS drama class.”
“Seems like dialogue scenes between characters are too long to the point of dragging. It has happened a few times for me during this set of episodes. Three scenes in particular I’m like WE GET IT STOP CHATTING NOW TROUBLE HAPPENING!” a different fan complained.
“I feel like in this episode the show became a parody of itself, and for a penultimate episode it really did not hype me up for the end,” another person on Reddit said.
Someone else added, “The convoluted way they have been revealing major plot points is what I hate. Do we really need characters running off multiple times an episode to create some dumb analogy when they figure something out with the rest of the cast following them? It’s just bad writing.”
A different chimed in about the show’s writing, saying, “By the time the episodes get to the last 10-15 minutes, the good stuff happens for the cliff hanger into the next. Then the next episode starts and it’s dead again. Rinse and repeat.”
A lot of the online negativity was also directed at the scene in “The Bridge” where Will (Noah Schnapp) comes out as gay to the group as the prepare for their final battle with Vecna.
“the worst part of the coming out scene was that no one even properly addressed it after?? like they just immediately went back to planning??????????” one fan wrote on X.
“Woke ruins EVERYTHING,” another account tweeted. “Netflix decided to RUIN their most popular show of all-time, Stranger Things, by focusing their final season on Will coming out as a homosexual, promoting the propaganda that Will’s superpowers are because he’s ’embraced his sexuality’ & the villain telling Will that his friends won’t like him if they find out he likes dudes.”
“How did Stranger Things go from such a great show to the only way they could defeat Vecna is if Will tells everyone he’s gay first,” a different fan said.
A fourth person added, “The Will coming out scene may be the worst in the entirety of ST. Making that the most important plot point for the penultimate episode of the show is such a waste. Plus it was super cringy too. A hard watch.”
During a recent interview with Netflix’s Tudum, Schnapp, 21, revealed he was “crying” when he first read the script for Will’s coming out scene.
“I read it alone in my room, and I was crying, and it really resonated with me,” Noah added. “I texted them [the creators], and I was like, ‘This is great. This is awesome.’ I didn’t know if they were ever gonna write that story for Will. They could have just left it up in the air, so getting to finally see it happen was amazing.”
The two-hour series finale of “Stranger Things” premieres on Netflix at 8 p.m. on Jan 31, and in select theaters.
