Netflix’s monster hit Stranger Things is finally over. Was it worth it?
After five seasons, the sci-fi-horror-nostalgia series has wrapped at last. But did the Duffer Brothers stick the landing?
- ★★★★½
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Stranger Things (finale) ★★★★½
Warning: This contains spoilers for the final episode of Stranger Things.
After nine years, five seasons, and the awkward disconnect of seeing young teens played by actors a decade older, Stranger Things has wrapped up its tangled, messy, highly intertextual storyline with a bang followed by a strangely satisfying whimper.
Jamie Campbell Bower as Vecna.
Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bowers) was defeated, as we always knew he would be, but not before we finally got to see his origin story. And it was a quite masterful piece of storytelling that wound the various strands of narrative together as tightly as the otherworldly sinews of the vile creature’s hyperextending arms.
As a young Boy Scout, Henry Creel was transformed into the metaphysical supervillain of this story during a tragic encounter in an underground mine with an injured man who mistook him for a pursuer and shot him, piercing his palm. As the man took aim again, a desperate Henry struck him with a rock, the defensive instinct soon morphing into an act of pure rage.
Opening the briefcase attached to the man’s wrist, Henry found a strange glowing lump of rock, an artefact from another dimension, another planet, which quickly bonded with the wound in his hand. With his dying words, the man urged him to resist, or it would take him over. Worse, it would take over the world.
The episode in which Will (Noah Schnapp) comes out was review bombed online, but made perfect sense within the overarching narrative.Credit: Netflix
The rock came from the same realm as the Mind Flayer, and it was to Henry as the Ring is to Gollum – a gateway to unbridled ambition, jealousy, fury and power. Only Henry didn’t lose his key.
In pursuit of Holly and the 11 other kids he needed to bring about a calamitous meeting of the Flayer’s realm and Earth, Henry was dragged inside the cave of his memory and forced at last to confront this foundational trauma. But from outside, Will (Noah Schnapp), now imbued with psychokinetic powers of his own, attempted to reason with him.
