This article contains spoilers for Stranger Things, namely Season 5 of the show. However, if you are enjoying Stranger Things thus far and plan to watch Season 5, especially the finale, maybe you shouldn’t. It’s for your own good.

It’s been an increasing phenomenon to see extremely popular shows that leave audiences at the edges of their seats, such as Sherlock, have such a downright stupid or anticlimactic ending that the fans of the show go into collective schizophrenia. I was not expecting Stranger Things to follow this same path, but well, here we are.

The Duffer brothers somehow managed to screw up the ending of their 57 Primetime Emmy Award-nominated show to a point where half of the fandom refused to believe that it was the ending, and began to note inconsistencies within past episodes to prove that there was more to come. (In the end, though, it just made things worse as there was no “Conformity Gate,” or 9th episode to the season, and now there are a bunch of inconsistencies to forever torment the minds of Stranger Things fans for years to come.) 

Some fans have admitted that maybe even the Byler fans were not wrong after all, as anything, including teenage girls’ angsty Wattpad-core gay ships, would have been better than what the Duffer Brothers did. In theory, it should have been fine–Max was freed, Vecna died, the evil government project was put to an end, and everybody (except maybe Eleven and Mike) gradually healed and moved on. Or, perhaps, it was all just a figment of Mike’s imagination. What made it so bad?

Nostalgia Bait

This may be a controversial take, but the writing of Stranger Things was never good to begin with. However, the visuals, music, and incorporation of nostalgic elements into the plot are what drew many to the show in the first place. The concept of a sci-fi show being set in the 80s and staying true to that time is a sick concept, and if done correctly, could be a masterpiece in the sense of execution. That is exactly what the first couple of seasons did–rather than force-feed the audience nostalgia, the beginning of the show felt much more rooted in the actual 80s. I’d rather gouge my eardrums out than listen to “Running Up That Hill” another time; I’d rather let Vecna take my soul than have to listen to the same song play endlessly for three episodes.

However, in the 4th and 5th seasons, it seemed like the Duffer Brothers had not only wrung the concept of nostalgia-baiting dry, but they also suffered a lapse in their memories and began to incorporate things that didn’t even exist in the 80s into the show. While, of course, trivial, it just shows the lengths they went just to try and squeeze one more drop of “this is so relatable” out of their audience. In Will’s coming-out speech, why did he feel the need to name-drop McNuggets? What point did that even serve? Literally anything else could have been said to get the point across, or rather, half the things he said could have been cut since the scene was drawn out so long (more to come on that point later). Inconsistencies that were not intentional, such as Under Armour shirts, Apple watches (come on, really?), HTML coding and the Trump Tower in the Chicago skyline were much more minuscule issues, but it really shows how unprofessional the show’s recording was in its later stages.

Pacing

Another thing that drew away from the buildup from the prior seasons to season 5 was the final battle with Vecna. It quite literally took 30 minutes for a ragtag bunch of teenagers to beat some interdimensional being with an eternal vendetta against this small town in the middle of nowhere, Indiana. The show’s total run time nears 48 hours. It almost took two days out of thousands, if not millions, of people’s lives, and the climax of the show just ends up being a random blip in the show. 

Before I dive into the meat of what irked me about the finale, I am going to touch on one of the arguably most annoying things in the entirety of the show.

Max. Well, more specifically, her running. She was literally about to escape Vecna’s mind, but she did not, as she had to look back fifteen times before getting caught by him. Then, when Holly found her and led her to the exit again, we spent another fifteen minutes getting a monologue of how Holly needs to find her inner power and strength and blah blah blah and all the while, “Running Up That Hill” is blaring in the background. Then, ever so slowly, Max begins to walk up to the portal. She’s just casually walking when at any moment, Vecna could come tearing across the craggy landscape, and then when the music swells for the bajillionth time, she actually starts running. Wow. It seems like the Duffer Brothers were trying very hard to recreate the scene in Season 4’s “Dear Billy” episode, but to no avail.

Perhaps our perception of time was also skewed by Will’s 5-minute coming-out monologue, though. Stranger Things characters’ wacky ways of explaining things have been the subject of many memes, and Will’s final confession only made it worse. I understand that the Duffer Brothers wanted to tackle the topic of how taboo homosexuality was in the 80s. However, the way it was executed was just not it. It’s a bit goofy to have the climax of the scene be “I just- I just- I- I don’t like girls. I mean, I do just- Just not like you guys do,” preceded by at least 4 minutes worth of listing things that he and everyone else had in common. Will was worried that he would be hated, I mean, it was the 80s. There was rampant homophobia, and in fact, I was very well expecting there to be some repercussions given the climate around the topic during the setting of the show. (However, thankfully, that was not the case. I think there were more important things to worry about, such as two dimensions that were on a crash course for each other.) But even then, just the manner in which the scene unfolded, and directly afterwards, Vecna is beaten in a matter of minutes, it is extremely anticlimactic. It felt as if there was more to the show; it felt like maybe Vecna had not been beaten, and something better would happen in the last couple of hours in the movie. Right?

Well, yes. But also no.

Instead of an actual face-off between Vecna and the gang, we get an hour of what happens to everyone else, and that the cycle of D&D is now being continued with Holly and her newfound friend, Mr. “Suck-My-Fat-One”. And that pretty much concludes the finale. I mean, hey, at least we got one good thing out of that season: Derek the Delightful.

Plot Holes

With all of the prior things combined, you may have thought it could not get any worse. However, I feel that this, by far, is what led to the mass lunacy following the finale of the show. What happened to all of the pregnant women in the upside-down? How the heck did Max graduate along with her peers after being in a coma for almost two years? Where were the demodogs in the Upside Down and in Henry/Vecna’s dimension? Demogorgons? Why are demodogs and demogorgons immune to bullets, yet a couple of shots to the innards weakened the mind flayer enough so that Dustin and Steve didn’t get trampled? It just made no sense.

And then, of course, we have the other forgotten characters who have just seemed to disappear into thin air. What happened to Vickie? Heck, what happened to Argyle after season 4? Did he get smuggled out?

The truth is, we will never know the answers to these questions. They’re plot holes, large gaping ones, that for some reason, the Duffer Brothers did not have the wit to notice. 

Or perhaps, these are just plot holes in Mike’s fictional story, as this was all just made up in his mind, except the Duffer Brothers also did not have enough wit to say that when asked about said plot holes in interviews. 

Losing Emotional Factor

Stranger Things is classified as a sci-fi/horror show. At the beginning of the show, I will admit that I found myself having nightmares about being trapped in the Upside Down (to be fair, I was about 9 years old). But, even after rewatching all 5 seasons, the Upside Down and the concept of the supernatural within Hawkins in the first few seasons were considerably more terrifying than whatever the conclusion held. Of course, as the characters navigate through the Upside Down, they get more familiar with it, and it loses some of that scariness, but it shouldn’t have lost all of it. It’s a sort of warped waiting room between dimensions, after all. Everything seemed off. The lighting was considerably worse, and the ambience of the whole area was extremely different. Compared to the Twilight-esque green filter on the season 1 Upside Down, the season 5 Upside Down had a murkier, greyer one or even none, which I felt gave it a colder sense rather than an unsettling one (see below).

S1

S5

Some people argue that the lessening fear symbolises the characters’ growing up, but I digress. I feel it is just poor production quality. 

S5 Running Scene

S4 Dear Billy Scene

S3 Mind Flayer

S5 Mind Flayer

More S5 Upside Down

S2 Upside Down

S3 Upside Down

It is just not as scary and mysterious anymore. The Upside Down’s terrifying factors, which included demogorgons and demodogs, had somehow disappeared; the fog thickened and thinned depending on when the plot needed to be furthered; and somehow, the little “snowflakes” that had characterised the Upside Down (and which caused Hawkins to go into a lockdown in the first place) were seemingly forgotten in many scenes in the Upside Down in the final season.

Also, the gut-wrenching deaths of characters we were close to in previous episodes provided us with something to feel emotionally charged over. Sure, Eleven “dies” at the end of season 5, but it’s very much up for the viewer’s individual interpretation. While it is amazing that all the characters survived, compared to the emotional struggle of moving on from deaths in prior seasons, we were not provided with such scenes in the 5th season.

Conclusion

In conclusion, yeah. Stranger Things ended horribly. But, hey. If you want some form of reconciliation, here’s my take on the ending. It may not be what you are looking for, it may not account for all of these things that I have listed above, but it is the only sense that I can make out of this jumbled web of Upside-Down viscera.

In the end, we see the group of kids (well, now adults) finishing off their game of D&D. It ends rather anticlimactically. So, Mike tells them the ends of their characters, and later, the scene dissolves away to reveal Mike writing a story. My theory is that none of this actually happened. This was all just a story written around Mike’s D&D campaign that later in life, he turned into a sci-fi novel.