Provided by Netflix

The finale of “Stranger Things” was a disappointing ending to an incredible series.

“Stranger Things” is a science fiction drama series that is so popular it hardly needs an introduction. After its release on Netflix in 2016, it immediately gained traction for its lovable characters and supernatural horror elements cushioned by 1980s nostalgia. Now, ten years later, many are dissatisfied with the show’s turnout in the finale, “Chapter Eight: The Rightside Up.” 

“Stranger Things” mainly follows Mike Wheeler, Will Byers, Lucas Sinclair and Dustin Henderson after Will becomes trapped in a dangerous parallel dimension called the Upside Down. Throughout the series, this group works together alongside Eleven, a girl with psychokinetic powers, to defeat a power-hungry man named Vecna who wants to merge the human world with the Upside Down.

Season Five picks up 18 months after the end of Season Four. The military has taken over Hawkins after the town was fractured by gates to the Upside Down, and the cast prepares to take down Vecna once and for all.

While most of Season Five’s plot was decent, the finale unraveled everything interesting about it into a lackluster excuse for a final episode. As a warning, there are spoilers for Season Five ahead. 

Most of the season was spent with Holly Wheeler after she was captured by Vecna to be turned into a vessel for the Mind Flayer, a powerful hive-mind entity from the Upside Down. While that subplot was interesting, I was uninterested because it centered around Holly. This storyline followed an almost random character in the last season, which was a poor choice since the plot should have centered around pre-established characters. 

Most of the scenes about characters other than Holly were uninteresting, instead being dedicated to meaningless dialogue and planning. As a result, viewers were left with mountains of buildup for almost no payoff in the finale. 

For example, the entire season was spent foreshadowing that Vecna would read everyone’s minds and use their fears against them. Characters insisted that Vecna would do this during the final battle, but that was never mentioned. The amount of buildup just for those plot points to be insignificant made the ending feel anticlimactic. 

As a result, the finale was weak. Once the battle against Vecna actually started, I found myself somewhat bored. 

Vecna and the Mind Flayer are both powerful entities with psychic abilities, but for some reason, the fight was almost entirely physical. Then, despite the fact that Vecna was literally bullet-proof four episodes before the finale, he was somehow defeated in around six minutes.

The battle was so easy that I genuinely thought that there would be another fight after. Instead, almost everyone escaped without a scratch.

Another reason Season Five was significantly worse than the others was because of the lack of focus on characters. Mike did not contribute to the season in the slightest. He had no impact on any events throughout the finale, despite being a main character. The lack of focus on well-known characters felt like a way to force the action to keep rolling without pausing for emotional impact. 

Alongside Mike, Eleven was also completely sidelined. Eleven barely reacts to anything that happens to her throughout the season and finale, and is instead used as a plot device who only does anything interesting when it benefits other characters. 

In the finale, Eleven decides to let herself die to “end the cycle” of her abuse. That idea was entirely random and was obviously added just to make the ending tragic, not to complete Eleven’s arc or add any sort of meaning to her character. 

The messaging behind Eleven’s death is harmful because it implies that the only way for someone to stop hurting is to die by suicide. The implication that someone who has been abused should end their suffering by dying defies the series’ central idea of recovering from trauma through friendship. 

Speaking of poor thematic choices, the way the writers handled Will’s sexuality and resulting character arc could have been improved upon. Season Five depicted Will as more comfortable with himself than in previous seasons, but it felt rushed because the writers waited until the last second to develop that side of him. The writers’ refusal to lean into Will’s character development earlier caused his storyline in Season Five to feel rushed and disjointed from the rest of the show.

While Will’s character arc is centered around self-acceptance, the reason he comes out is not that he has accepted himself. The only reason he tells anyone is that he was threatened by Vecna, and he decides to tell everyone he knows all at once. 

It is unrealistic for him to want to do that, and as a result, the scene loses its emotional impact. Even in that scene, Will refuses to actually call himself gay and only directs his attention to his close friends. If he had only told his close friends and family instead, it would have come across as genuine and heartfelt rather than awkward and misplaced. 

The way the show talked about Will’s sexuality did not feel like acceptance, it felt like dancing around the topic just enough to appease viewers who wanted Will to come out while keeping the mainstream audience comfortable. It is obvious that the writers wanted to make Will gay, but not lean into it or represent it as a positive trait until the final season to avoid backlash. 

While I have my grievances with the finale of “Stranger Things,” I still found myself enjoying it while I watched it. The plot has its issues, but it is not completely unwatchable. I was entertained the whole time, and the epilogue did a decent job of sticking a pretty bow on top of the finale’s poorly-wrapped present. However, with how poorly the writers handled the show’s themes, the “Stranger Things” finale entirely missed the mark. 

Contact Emma Lynch at [email protected]