Stranger Things 5 finale left much to be desired

What is the best way to end a story?

I don’t think there will ever be one good answer to this. It all depends on the story that we are telling: A plot-focused story must resolve all plot-points, maybe filling in a few plotholes as it does. A character-focused story must give a satisfying ending for all of its characters. Some stories are better left ambiguous, while some need hard conclusions that cannot be interpreted in one way or another by the audience.

Stranger Things, at its core, has always been a character-focused story. While the main plot circles these characters, ultimately, the characters themselves and their development have always been more important. The Duffer brothers have emphasized this in interviews. The show itself has emphasized this by time and time again being too afraid to kill any main characters off, or by having those brief character moments in the midst of final battles in order to show how much they care for one another.

Unfortunately, the problem arises when a show simply has too many characters. What started as a fairly normal sized cast in season one of Stranger Things quickly grew to a comically gigantic cast in season four. By season five, there were too many arcs to wrap up with care. When the finale arrived, my fear came true: Nothing was satisfying. Stranger Things, disappointingly, got too big for its britches. Where season one had been a cultural phenomenon about a boy going missing and his loved ones doing everything to find him, season five had become a CGI-filled, Marvel-movie-esque hollow echo of what the show once was.

Putting aside the issues with the resolution of various character arcs, the plot itself was not satisfying and left much to be desired. While the Duffer brothers and cast alike promised “big plot twists” in the series finale, the ending was shockingly predictable: The monster, which was an amalgamation of both the Mind Flayer and Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower), was defeated in ten minutes by flare guns and El’s (Millie Bobby Brown) and Will’s (Noah Schnapp) powers. It was similar to the final fight in season three, except this time, the set was a mixture of poor CGI and green-screening and the monster was bigger.

The so-called “final battle”, too, took place in a completely different dimension than what the audience was used to. While it was revealed that the Upside Down was a wormhole and not an “alternate dimension” at all, this ended up being completely irrelevant. Why it looked like Hawkins and was stuck on the day Will went missing back in season one was never addressed. Instead, the characters ended up climbing through a gate to this other dimension and having the entire final battle there. 

Not only did this aspect make everything feel very rushed and all of the lore shoehorned into the last few episodes, the set for this “alternate dimension” did not look adequately thought out at all. It was displeasing to the eye, obviously green-screened (where much of the Upside Down was built on practical sets), lit weirdly, and looked far more like something one would see in a cash-grab Marvel movie than a show like Stranger Things. What should have been an epic final battle turned into a boring walk through a planet that the audience knew next to nothing about. 

This was far from the only issue in season five, however. Characters that should have been offered larger roles—such as Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder), Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard), and Will Byers were all criminally sidelined in episode eight. Will used his powers to get into Henry Creel’s (Jamie Campbell Bower) head and try to convince him to fight off the Mind Flayer’s influence, but there was no payoff for it. Henry ended up succumbing to the Mind Flayer, claiming that “they were one”. Will’s speech to him did absolutely nothing. 

This was weird, considering Will had taken out three Demogorgons and was framed as a hero in episode four. Even weirder was the fact that Will’s big coming out scene in the prior episode had nothing to do with his arc with Henry. While Will came out because he was afraid Henry would use his secret against him, this never ended up happening, nor was Will’s sexuality ever addressed again in that context. The very least the writers could have done was show us the visions Henry gave to Will that pushed him to come out in the way he did—but we never got to see those, either. All of it felt very pointless.

The best the audience got was a scene between Mike and Will on the radio tower where Mike apologized for not being there for him. However, Noah Schnapp later confirmed that he suggested the scene be added in, and this was not something that the Duffer brothers originally wrote into the script. It raises the question—what was the point of having Will be gay and in love with Mike if there was going to be zero resolution or payoff for it?

Joyce also had almost no plot relevance whatsoever, even if the entire show started because of her. I’d gotten thirty minutes into the episode when I realized that she hadn’t said a word the entire time. Considering Winona Ryder is one of the most famous actors in the cast, this was very jarring. Her reactions to Will’s suffering were lackluster and nothing compared to her insistence on protecting her son in earlier seasons. Though she did get a moment to shine when she decapitated Vecna with her axe, it didn’t feel as rewarding as it should have since she had not done anything of note prior to that moment.

Probably one of the worst character assassinations this season, however, was Mike Wheeler’s. Back in seasons one and two, Mike was the impulsive, yet smart, Dungeon Master and leader of his party. Season one Mike Wheeler insisted upon looking for his best friend Will, and rescued a young girl along the way. Season two Mike Wheeler came up with the plan to burn the tunnels under Hawkins, save Will, and beat the Mind Flayer. By seasons three and four, however, Mike was unlikeable due to the way he treated El and Will. In season five he did almost nothing, despite his family getting massacred acting as a major plot point in volume one. 

At least in the first volume, he was making plans to help the group find the Demogorgon that took his little sister—but he also had no reactions to any high-stakes moments, and for the most part acted like a cardboard cutout of himself. Nothing that he did in season five re-contextualized his behavior in the previous seasons. For all intents and purposes, Mike was just mean to his friends and girlfriend for no reason. 

Worse, Mike was not even offered a proper ending after all of this. He watched El die and appeared to be grieving her the most out of everyone even though they interacted very little this season. At the end of the show, he seemed to be stuck mourning what could have been rather than embracing what he had. It was tragic, especially considering Mike had the potential to be a very interesting main character based on his relationships with other people around him. 

Post-finale, many of the audience’s questions were left unanswered. One of the most glaring for me was why Kali (Linnea Berthelsen) was brought back only to get shot and die. Her line “my story ends here” as she bled out in the Upside Down was especially insulting. For a show that claimed to be about outcasts, having one of the very few people of color in it, who was also abused for most of her life, die such a death was incredibly unjust.

It wasn’t just this, though. We never even figured out how Will vanished on that fateful night in 1983, even though that was the entire premise of the show. Why did the door latch open on its own? Why did El recognize Will back in season one, even if she had never met him? 

Going further into the series, what was the point of introducing the Russia plotline at all if it was never going to be addressed again? How did Hopper (David Harbour) survive and get sent to Russia? Why was the Upside Down stuck on November 6th, 1983? Where did the Demobats from season four go? Why were there no Demogorgons in the other dimension? Who was the man that Henry Creel met in the cave? 

What was the point of giving Karen Wheeler plot relevance if all she was going to do was destroy monsters she knew nothing about and then stay in the hospital for the rest of the season? What happened to Dr. Owens? What else was in Dr. Brenner’s notes about the exotic matter, and how did it come to be? What happened to the pregnant women in the military lab? Did Mike truly see El in the void, or was it just a hallucination since the radio waves would have blocked her powers?

And this only scratches the surface. There are still many things that we will probably never know about the mysteries of Stranger Things. The series ended on a bittersweet, yet very ambiguous note. Sure, the party all getting together to play one last game of DND was nostalgic, but it came with the resolution of virtually no character or story arcs. We as the audience don’t even know if Mike’s endings for his friends were real or imagined—what he told them was his own fantasy. 

Whether or not El was alive, Will ended up in a gay bar in the city, Lucas and Max stayed together, or Dustin was studying hard at college was all left up to audience interpretation. Maybe this could have been a good thing on some fronts, because it left the audience to write their own endings. But with the addition of all of the story’s glaring plotholes, it was not satisfying at all. It just felt lazy.

This was a massive shame. Stranger Things was a years-long cultural phenomenon that took the world by storm. The fact that the Duffer brothers could not successfully land the plane for it despite so much fan hype was disappointing. However, many things went into the show’s tanking: A ballooning budget, media CEOs wanting to make an extra buck, and the push for Stranger Things’s storylines to get bigger and more “cool-looking” were all factors. In the process, the show lost its way. In the end, it prioritized big stunts and fights rather than what it has always been about: The love that exists between family and friends, and some nerdy kids playing DND in their basement.

Do not mistake me, though. I still love Stranger Things. I will always love it. The impact that this show has had on me—and the world—cannot be understated. It was an anthem for the oddballs and those who always felt like they were on the outside looking in. Just because the final season could not tie all of this up into a neat bundle does not mean we can’t appreciate what the show was in the past. Regardless of its disappointing end, Stranger Things still existed, made many as happy as it did, and made its massive mark on pop culture as a whole. That is a beautiful thing, and I will miss it forever.

As we enter into this new era of television that is absent of Stranger Things, I cannot deny that I am eager to see how the landscape of the industry changes. Maybe enough people my age will be so upset with the ending that it results in far better, spitefully-written shows of the same genre. Maybe U.S. television will go downhill as it keeps prioritizing big-budget CGI stunts over smaller, more controlled narratives. 

Regardless, it is clear that the impact of Stranger Things will never truly leave us. It is just too bad that it could not manage to give a proper goodbye on its way out.

This article is the third and final part in a series that reviewed each volume of Stranger Things 5.

Stranger Things 5, Volume 1: An Episodic Review

Stranger Things 5, Volume 2: An Episodic Review