Critics’ Conversation: ‘Stranger Things’ Goes Out (Finally) With a Confused and Protracted Bang
SOURCE:Hollywood Reporter|BY:Angie Han
After five seasons, Netflix's sci-fi horror hit wrapped up with an exhausting two-hour extravaganza that, unsurprisingly, delivered lots and lots of … stuff — but very little legacy-building substance.
[This conversation includes spoilers for the series finale of Netflix’s Stranger Things, which was all about making difficult choices and respecting other people’s difficult choices. We recommend you make the easy choice to watch the finale before reading our thoughts.]
DANIEL FIENBERGThe first season of Stranger Things, a little coming-of-age pastiche of Stephen King and Steven Spielberg marketed around co-star Winona Ryder, premiered on July 15, 2016, three days before the Republican Party formally coronated Donald Trump as its presidential nominee.
After a prologue suggesting that creepy things were happening at a government lab, the pilot was mostly introducing viewers to a group of nerdy friends who would soon be joined by a mysterious telekinetic girl with short hair in Hawkins, Indiana, circa 1983. Beginning with a heated game of Dungeons & Dragons, it had almost no special effects, but was charming in its hinting and insinuating about all the weird stuff to come, neatly contained in 49 minutes.
The series finale of Stranger Things, airing on New Year’s Eve 2025 and taking place in May 1989, runs a neatly contained 45 minutes and also contains almost no special effects, concentrating on the fate of those friends and climaxing with a game of Dungeons & Dragons, like the first one interrupted by Karen Wheeler (Cara Buono) summoning the kids, now recent high-school graduates, for dinner — this time lasagna instead of pizza. A fine piece of symmetry.
Wait.
No. That was the EPILOGUE to the finale of Stranger Things, the 45-minute wrap-up to a 128-minute episode, a special effects-free resolution set 18 months after the world-saving orgy of digital trickery — some cool, some really awful, honestly — that the show built to in the second of three parts in its final season.
Got that?
The epilogue, which will henceforth replace The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in all conversations mocking protracted franchise wrap-ups, was probably a worthwhile decompression after well over an hour of action, ill-timed conversations and lectures about choices, many of which either undermined or repeated aspects from the best parts of the penultimate episode. The finale was big and loud and, depending on your perspective, either rousing and emotionally operatic or incoherent and less effectively mawkish than those key beats from “The Bridge” — Will’s coming out, Nancy and Jonathan’s breakup-engagement in the Goo Escape Room and Steve and Dustin’s reconciliation.
As somebody who loved the first couple of seasons for their less-is-more ethos and DIY charm, I fit more into the second perspective. Sure, I admire the Duffer Brothers and Netflix for ponying up for not one but two big Prince needle drops, but I didn’t feel much when Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown, finally freed from the cruelty of the show’s costumers and stylists) made her choice and seemingly sacrificed herself. The fact that we got two full rounds of individual close-ups for every character both when they realized what Eleven was about to do and then when she did it added little.
I was just exhausted, which probably had the benefit of reducing my irritation when the show undid much of what was noble about Eleven’s choice (in the latest of several reminders that when it came to making choices themselves, the Duffers generally chose to accumulate characters instead of being ruthless). That’s why, when we were treated to a montage of deceased characters as motivation for Joyce (Ryder) beheading Vecna, I was like, “Eddie! That Guy Sean Astin Played! Two frames of BARB!”
Sigh.
So, Angie, where do you want to start? Or, rather, where do you want to end?
ANGIE HAN I’m with you in feeling more frustrated than satisfied by the finale. There were moments that worked for me in spite of my overall exhaustion with this show in general and this season in particular (among them: El asking Hopper to believe in her; El’s teary goodbye with Mike; Mike watching Holly and her friends take over the basement that was once his territory). But they were scattered among long stretches of ugly CG nonsense, repetitive story beats and montages to earlier seasons. I don’t entirely begrudge the show wanting to take a victory lap, but did it have to take over two whole hours? Like so much else in season five, this episode felt like it was serving up a lot of stuff but very little emotional or thematic substance.
Then there’s the fact that a lot of the moments it clearly wanted to hit hard … just didn’t, at least for me. I have never wondered what Vecna’s Formative Trauma might be, sorry, and I care even less now that I know it comes down to “umm, alien rock, I guess?” I know Joyce saying “You messed with the wrong family!” was meant to be triumphant, but mostly it just seemed a baffling choice to have her be the one to deal Vecna the killing blow, when she’s seemed like a peripheral member of the team for most recent episodes.
The giant spider felt like a failure of imagination — all that lead-up to the final battle, and that’s the most interesting thing the show could come up with? Just “What if another monster, but bigger this time?” For that matter, that was the dreaded Abyss? Just another CG wasteland that looks exactly like every other one we’ve seen already? What exactly are we doing here, besides trying to fill time?
This final extravaganza just hammered home for me why I’ve been so exasperated by this show lately, and so eager to see it end already. This is the ending of a series that’s completely run out of stream — that, having reached the limits of its curiosity and creativity, has turned around to burrow further and further into its own convoluted lore, throwing everything at the vine-covered wall in hopes that something might stick. I don’t want to take away from what the show was at its best, when it was, as you point out, a winsome coming-of-age story populated by remarkable young unknowns and decked out with loving homages to a past era. But I came into this season feeling like this show should have ended a lot earlier, and the finale did not change my mind.
What moments hit hardest or whiffed worst for you, Dan?
FIENBERG I also had some disappointment that they went back to the Mind Flayer well again, especially since the “giant spider” of it all made me think back to the miniseries adaptation of It and the giant spider that blew all the good will that came before. There was a lot of that this season, though. Like “Oh, demogorgons. Again. Again. Again.” Even if the demogorgon effects were vastly improved and the show occasionally found creative things to do with them — or entirely not-creative things, like the Jurassic Park takeoff that abandoned homage for straight-up mimicry.
Then, when Dustin got all excited about wormholes and all that stuff, it was strange how anticlimactic the big reveals actually ended up being. It’s hard to take end-of-the-world stakes seriously when the solution continues to simply be “Kill that one guy they’ve been wanting to kill for three seasons now.” It’s the genius of what Stephen King accomplished with Derry and Castle Rock and Salem’s Lot: He was able to make stakes that simultaneously meant everything to the characters involved and kept the action contained to small towns in Maine. Otherwise, you’re stuck with characters walking on a “planet” and even they aren’t impressed, so why would we be?
Things that worked? Well, I already said I was glad that Barb got her 0.5 seconds of flashback screen time. I appreciated that Hopper got his act together enough to maintain a tidy mustache (and to contemplate a move to Montauk, which fans know is a reference to the series’ original location). I was more moved by the passing of the basement torch from Mike and his trauma buddies to Holly, Delightful Derek and her trauma buddies than any of the things that had all the main characters on the verge of tears in the final 20 minutes.
What do you want to say about the way the show handled the Animal House-style acknowledgement of the characters and their futures? And, perhaps more importantly, did Mike’s theory about Eleven and Kali’s silly “fake death” plan completely undo all the blather about honoring people’s choices? If her sweet babboo (and the show itself) are already rewriting Eleven’s heroism with their own wish fulfillment, are they any better than Hawkins, with its memorial to “earthquake” victims?
HAN I don’t think I ever fully believed Eleven was dead — as you said, this is a show that historically hates killing off main characters. So the shot of her alive and well and hiking around in the first non-hideous outfit she’s worn all season didn’t feel to me like an undoing of an emotionally significant choice, so much as the show just admitting what I’d already assumed.
Then again, I guess it’s not totally clear in the first place if we’re meant to interpret that scene as settled fact or just a fantasy being floated by Mike. Which is part and parcel with one of my biggest frustrations with the finale — that it seems loath to give definitive endings for any of the main kids.
We’ve spent the past 10 years watching Mike, Dustin, Lucas, Will and Max come of age, but now that they’ve closed the books on their childhoods (literally!), Stranger Things is suddenly coy about who they’ve become. We get hints that Dustin might be off to college (but where?), that Will’s probably moving to the big city (which one?), that Mike wants to become a writer (sure?), and that Lucas and Max may someday … uh … share a popcorn at the local cinema (this one seems very doable). But are these even real, canonical fates for these characters, or just what Mike wants for them? And either way, why are these futures so vague?
It’s an especially odd choice from a finale that elsewhere went out of its way to let you know exactly where Nancy, Steve, Jonathan and Robin have ended up (working for a newspaper, working for Hawkins High, NYU film school and Smith College, respectively), and where Hopper and Joyce are headed next.
But it speaks to an increasing problem over the last two seasons. There’s a moment earlier in the episode when Hopper, begging El not to sacrifice herself, urges her to “fight for the happy days on the other side of this, for a world beyond Hawkins.” It’s everything a father should be saying in that moment, but it lands weirdly coming from a show that itself seems to have forgotten that Earth is bigger than just Hawkins, whose high-school-age heroes seem to have stopped thinking at all about what life might be like after graduation.
I get that SATs might not seem like the most pressing problem when there’s a whole second planet about to crash-land into your own or whatever. (They still had time for Will to list approximately 97 of his favorite things in his coming-out speech, though!) But as the show has leaned more and more into the Vecna material at the expense of the coming-of-age plots that used to be its heart and soul, it’s also steadily lost the groundedness that used to give its storylines real emotional heft. In short: What does it matter if Eleven is alive or dead when everything in her universe is so weightless anyway?
FIENBERG I’m not convinced El can read and you’re worrying about her taking the SATs? But yeah, it’s hard for me to take El and Mike seriously as a love story for the ages when their relationship is entirely composed of the three or four cute scenes they flashed back to before El’s sacrifice-that-maybe-wasn’t-a-sacrifice. So many flashbacks. So many reminders of puberty.
I really struggle to get past the idea that there’s an imaginary world, an alternate world, an upside-down world, in which Stranger Things could have aired five seasons between 2016 and 2020. The actors could have aged up semi-organically and I wouldn’t have needed to watch with the utter sense of exasperation pondering how old the characters are supposed to be, how old they look and how much time has or hasn’t passed within the world of the show.
Sure, you could have characters joking about the ridiculous haircuts they never changed or how nobody knew how old Holly was. But the fact is that the series didn’t play fast-and-loose with time — it ignored chronological regulation entirely. I’m still perplexed by how the characters spent the time between the fourth and fifth seasons, a duration that felt like it was constantly in flux, and by why Holly was simultaneously 9 and 13 at all times.
So much of the immediate pleasure of the show came from how unforced and unstudied the young ensemble was in the beginning, but what felt like brilliant casting in the beginning became increasingly more hit-and-miss as the show progressed. If you were to ask me which young Stranger Things stars I’d expect to see still acting onscreen in a decade, I’d say Sadie Sink, Maya Hawke and … dunno. I figure Millie Bobby Brown wants to be a producer and Finn Wolfhard wants to be a director and Gaten Matarazzo can probably work steadily on Broadway and Joe Keery’s got his music?
But as a concluding question: What do you see as this show’s legacy? I struggle to get past the gap between the first season, which I loved, the next two seasons, which I enjoyed, and the last two seasons, which became a chore. It spawned a play, which was impressive for its stagecraft but awful as a piece of scripted drama, though no spinoffs or movies. A brand that once seemed like it might be boundless ended up oddly contained and limited.
HAN Well, there’s already an animated spinoff on the way and another live-action one in the works, so I fear its legacy will just be more attempts to keep tapping a well that ran dry, by my estimation, like three years ago. Part of me even suspects the real reason the finale was so noncommittal about Mike and Eleven and their friends’ fates is so the powers that be can just write them back in as needed. Oh, did you think Vecna was hard to kill? Turns out the biggest, most unbeatable boss of all might just be a studio’s appetite for endlessly expandable IP.