Well…Stranger Things. What a show for the new generation and mine. It had a good run for 10 years and was full of life and energy. It has five seasons now in total, but this new season was the one to close off a great adventure story spanning to a decade to wait and watch. It was highly anticipated, becoming must watch TV during Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Yet many felt it was lackluster.
The season as a whole wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t as great as it could’ve been. However, perhaps the most divided that the fans of the show have ever been divided on is the big wrap-up itself and how the finale ended.
Stranger Things is a Netflix superhit that runs on nostalgia of the ’80s, all in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana. A group of young teenagers, who are avid Dungeons and Dragons players, get caught up in their own quests as the secret government blends with mysticism and supernatural battles.
First of all, I did not ever get into the show initially. I overheard my classmates and friends talking about the first season as far back as my final few grade school years and even continued to my high school years up to now. The show took off and had everyone interested in what was going to happen in each seasons last episode.
It appeared that over the decade, each season had gained quite a bit of interests from the audience, never failing to keep everyone entertained. But then came the last season finale…and had the viewers and fans split-with some being satisfied enough with the finale of wrapping all stories with the characters to a conclusion nicely, when some thought “that was it?”
For me, I personally found the finale of the show to be lackluster and could’ve done a whole lot better had it used all of the cards that it put on the table. But what does that mean? I mean that as in it felt like the finale simply didn’t live up to its potential and close not only the season, but the show as strongly as fans wanted to.
In other words, I am on the side of “That was it?” because it seemed like they forgot about a few characters whereabouts and certain enemies as a whole. Although they have as it was built up a final fight against the main villains known as “Vecna” and “The Mind Flayer,” it goes pretty quick for the final fight as a whole, being roughly around 10 minutes in an about two-hour episode for a finale. Yikes!
Shockingly enough, it was also stated in a recent documentary One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things that the brothers who wrote the show, The Duffer brothers (Matt and Ross) had used ChatGPT to assist them in writing the final not only finale, but season as a whole. Immediately, that made everyone realize how it checks out that they rushed their product for the hype of the show and possibly wanted to “just get it over with.” The director of the show denied seeing AI usage and said that tabs being open on a computer is the same an iPhone being open. It’s just a tool.
But for me and many others, they shouldn’t have been as lighthearted on the fans as they were with such an episode. And for their biggest crime of all…they didn’t kill anyone besides the villains themselves. Or so implied. Who knows about that ending implication of one of our favorite heroes.
I know that not every project needs to kill the hero or someone to be more engaging, but does every character deserves a happy ending right? I will be honest, each character getting a happy ending felt deserved and I for one am not a guy that necessarily likes when they kill too many characters off, but the Duffer Brothers have been known throughout the show to not touch a single main character and only killed off side characters. Therefore, for when we had to watch this episode, another reason as to why it felt like it got cut short was because it didn’t feel like it had enough stakes. If the main villain Vecna had at least killed someone in the fight or even before the last time they saw him, it would’ve added more to the tension, danger, drama, and emotion that the fight needed to be more engaging for its audience.
As for Eleven’s fate, does she let herself die within the storm that destroys “The Upside Down and Dimension X” or the dark dimensions where our main antagonists fought and died in. But later on towards the end of the episode, her now ex-boyfriend and other main character Mike proposes to the rest of their group a theory as to how Eleven may have survived and they all say that they believe him, serving as a choice to the fans as to whether you want to believe that she survived or not. To me and a lot of other fans, I still see this as a cop out, like they couldn’t even go through with the only death in the episode being their main character. Look, I love that each of them still had a happy ending, but it felt quite lackluster as to how they would refuse to raise stakes, show difficulty in beating the built up antagonists, and even forgot about some side characters for the groups graduation in the aftermath.
Her fate is open to interpretation. As is your opinion on the end of a show. It’s hard to make an ending that works everyone. But in the world of the upside down, Hawkins is what you make of it.
