STRANGER THINGS SEASON 5 SPOILERS AHEAD!!!
As an avid Stranger Things fan, I was bursting with excitement to watch season five. After the first volume came out, I was sure the final season would end the show beautifully. Boy was I wrong.
Instead, on a beautiful Christmas morning spent in Hawaii, I opened Netflix to a horrendous second volume and ruined my day—dare I say my week. It was so terrible that fans theorized it was purposefully bad and that we were all under Vecna’s curse (Playgate!!). I valiantly tried to keep my hopes up, and tuned into the finale on New Years Eve full of nerves and anxiety. And after watching the overly long finale (two whole hours!!!), I wished I had never watched Stranger Things at all.
The final battle with Vecna was incredibly underwhelming, and in fact took less time than Will’s coming out scene (which, while I thought was an important moment despite its poor execution, should not have taken up more screen time than the climax of the show).
As for the battle itself, Eleven’s show of powers were cool, but nothing I hadn’t seen before; and Will’s history with Vecna and the Upside Down, as well as his newfound powers, were brushed over in favor of Eleven’s Marvel-esque final confrontation with Vecna.
I don’t want to admit this, but I honestly found the battle a bit boring and cringey—at times it felt like it had been written by ChatGPT (which, if the Stranger Things documentary is to be believed, it likely was).
The Duffer Brothers had mentioned some sort of plot twist for season five; the only thing that shocked me was that Mike and Eleven were still together—I was convinced they had broken up because of the lack of romantic interactions, or even just general interactions, between the two. After four seasons of a painfully dry (and just plainly bad) relationship, I thought the Duffers had finally pulled the plug on it, but I guess not? Besides Mike and Eleven, the final season also managed to ruin Vickie and Robin’s relationship (they implied they broke up in the epilogue) and Nancy and Jonathan’s relationship (who broke up—rather romantically so I’m not too mad at it—on screen during episode six). The Duffer Brothers also sidelined many main characters (especially Will, who they said would be the focal point of season five) in favor of the newly introduced kid characters like Holly and Derek (who I’m convinced were only introduced for the sake of a spin off). It’s safe to say, I was disappointed by almost all of the character arcs.
The only time I truly felt any strong emotion besides disappointment was during Eleven’s last conversation with Mike, right before she went to sacrifice herself. The emotion: hysteria. Mike’s reaction to Eleven’s looming sacrifice was so badly acted (which I want to say was on purpose, since I’ve seen Finn Wolfhard act beautifully before) that I almost burst out laughing. The awkward hand placement (think that one clip of Adrien and Marinette from Miraculous Ladybug on a motorcycle), the painful lack of chemistry (that kiss was…interesting), Mike still being unable to say he loves Eleven (which was quite literally his plot in season four), and the hooting and hollering done by Mike (it was just too much, and felt performative)—all of these made the scene shamefully corny instead of exquisitely emotional.
Besides the actual content of the finale, the lack of content—that is to say, plot holes—were even more concerning. The Duffer Brothers claimed that the final season would tie up all the loose ends from previous seasons and that it wouldn’t end ambiguously; clearly, they lied, because I ended the final episode with more questions than answers, and an ambiguous ending. A few of the plotholes I found included: why did the military let everyone go scott-free after Eleven died (the group, especially Nancy and Hopper, literally killed a good chunk of the military men), how did Hopper become Chief of police again (he “died” during season three), why did Will not die or get hurt when Vecna died (he was shown feeling Vecna’s pain just a few scenes earlier), and where were all the demobats and demogorgons in the Abyss? Just like after the release of the second volume, fans theorized that the finale was also bad on purpose (Conformitygate!!), and that the epilogue was either a false, conformed world that all the characters were trapped in—or just a false world that Mike was trapped in (due to the absolute assasination of his character after volume one).
I later found out—after watching clips of the documentary—that the finale was filmed without finalized scripts, and that much of it was done on the fly; which makes the outrageous amount of plot holes (find more here), the obvious ending (I think almost everyone expected Eleven to die), and the cringey lines (“not friends…best friends!”) make a lot more sense.
Adrien and Marinette on the Motorcycle:
Mike and Eleven during their last ever conversation (they are supposed to be in love, apparently):
