"If you haven’t been living under a rock like me, you’ll probably know that the Stranger Things finale came out recently. As someone who has never watched a single Stranger Things episode, I was obviously the perfect person to write an article about this… right?" --Alice Stewart, 7th grade
MAJOR SPOILER WARNINGS FOR THE STRANGER THINGS FINALE AHEAD!
If you haven’t been living under a rock like me, you’ll probably know that the Stranger Things finale came out recently (it was released on New Year’s Eve). As someone who has never watched a single Stranger Things episode, I was obviously the perfect person to write an article about this… right? Instead of the obvious way to educate myself, by watching Stranger Things, I decided to read reviews and interview people about it. I got very mixed reactions.
If you search up “Stranger Things finale review” on Google, you will get incredibly negative results. This opinion seems to be mostly echoed by online newspapers, with Forbes’ review quite literally being titled “The ‘Stranger Things’ Series Finale Is A Crushing Disappointment.” I, in fact, quite genuinely had to search up “Stranger Things finale positive review” to find one. However, I also interviewed some of my friends, as well as my parents.
This is kind of depressing, but my parents were the only people I interviewed who liked the finale. Rachel Stewart, my mom, said that she “liked the emotional conclusions of all the stories and [didn’t] really care if the monsters make sense or not,” although she also said that a lot of people disliked it because “it’s too hard to wrap up so many seasons of mysteries all at once, which is also what people said about Lost and [The] X-Files, which are my other favorite TV shows.”
On the opposite end of the opinion spectrum, we have Literary Arts 7th grader Leo Pyskacek, who DEFINITELY didn’t like the finale. When I asked him what he knew about the finale, his immediate response was “That the developers didn’t have the [guts] to kill anybody. When Eleven died, they said ‘It’s up to your interpretation!’ Like, no. She’s dead. She got blown up by the Upside Down. Even [the most] delusional fans know she’s dead. She’s not alive.”
Like many other Stranger Things fans, Pyskacek is also upset that Byler didn’t happen. For those of you who don’t know, Byler is a Stranger Things ship between Will and Mike, two of the main characters. (Yes, I Googled this). The ship is called Byler because Will’s last name is Byers and Mike’s is Wheeler. Why is it their last names? I have NO IDEA. There’s certainly not as good of a reason as Everlark. (For those who don’t mind me going on a random tangent, Everlark is the ship between Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark. Take a couple seconds to consider what would happen if we combined their first names.)
Going back to my mom’s quote, we see another big problem fans had with the finale: WHERE DID ALL THE MONSTERS GO IN THE ABYSS? Unfortunately, to explain this I am going to have to go on another really long tangent.
So basically, the Upside Down is where most of Stranger Things takes place. It was believed to be an alternate dimension. It is revealed in Season 5, however, that the Upside Down is actually a wormhole connecting Earth to another planet called the Abyss. With me so far? Good.
In the finale, the main characters travel to the Abyss to defeat the main monster of the series, the Mind Flayer. However, once they get there, the Abyss is more or less empty (except for the Mind Flayer). This was very confusing for lots of fans, especially since all the monsters in the Upside Down came from the Abyss. Which begs the question: Where are all the other monsters?
Apparently, this was a big complaint about the finale, so the Duffer Brothers (Stranger Things’ main producers) addressed this in the making-of documentary, One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things 5. This included the extremely memorable line “demo-fatigue.” (For context, the most famous monsters in the series are called “demogorgon(s)”. More or less, the Duffer Brothers were worried people would be tired of the monsters they’d been seeing all show– but that was obviously not the case.
Besides the lack of Byler, any actual character deaths, and demogorgons in the Abyss, there were a few other problems fans had with the finale. Actually, more than a few (you can check out this article for a full list of 100). So, SPEED ROUND!
- Even though the military are some of the big bads, they just sort of… disappeared. They didn’t get arrested or anything. Just poofed.
- One of the characters, Hopper, was apparently believed to have died, but then he can reappear and nobody is like “I thought you were dead, what?”
- During the final battle, the characters somehow go EXTREMELY fast from the ground to the top of some really tall cliffs.
- Also during the final battle, a bunch of characters are using guns even though it was very quickly established that the monsters are only weak to fire (that we know of), and some of the characters have flamethrowers, so… why not give one to everyone?
- Will is linked to the hive mind that all the monsters are a part of, but then during the final battle he’s just… fine. He didn’t take any damage.
- Vecna (the main villain) can apparently go into people’s minds, but he still got surprised by the characters attacking him in the Abyss. Couldn’t he have seen that they were going to do that?
This isn’t even close to all of the little plotholes, but almost all of these were restated in other articles. I interviewed my dad, Daniel Stewart, about this, and he had a couple opinions about these extremely nitpicky tiny plotholes. He did agree with Point 1, saying that “There's a big boss villain in the military in Season 5 and they did not deal with her at all; they just did a time cut, so that was disappointing.” However, he also said that “People have very high expectations that the writers are going to close up every single little thread, and [it’s] not good storytelling to have little scenic asides about random people who died in Season 2.”
While my dad didn’t like how much people were fixating on plotholes, Literary Arts 6th grader Evie Ahlers disagrees, saying that “it had many plot holes and was not well written.” Ahlers also said that “I think the queer characters didn't get good endings. Will is in a bar with a guy, being reduced to his sexuality and not his career and art, Robin didn't have specification if she was with Vickie still, and she didn't get to say anything about her life in the ending…Also El, the kid who was traumatized and abused her whole life has to choose between either dying or living the rest of her life alone. LIKE HELLO, THAT ISN'T A GOOD MESSAGE!!”
While some people have very aggressive opinions on the Stranger Things finale, I’m not the only one who hasn’t watched the show. I also interviewed some of my fellow non-fans, and I found lots of people who know more or less nothing about the show. For instance, Literary Arts 6th grader Violet Hirsch said that “[t]he only thing I know about the Stranger Things finale is that a lot of people were not satisfied with it.” Similarly, Lit Arts 6th grader Charlie McCasland said that he knew “[n]ext to nothing” about Stranger Things except that the finale was “VERY controversial.” Lit Arts 6th grader Adela Orozco, too, said that “From what I’ve heard, the Season 5 finale was not [very] good.”
Along with all of the other questions, I also asked everyone I interviewed whether they thought I should watch Stranger Things. Most of the middle schoolers I asked said something along the lines of Pyskacek’s response of “Yes, you should definitely watch Stranger Things, it’s a goated show.” One notable exception was Literary Arts 7th grader Violet Regilio’s response. When I asked her if I should watch it (through a Google Form), her response was “NO. DON'T GIVE IN, DON'T GIVE IN ALICE!!!!!! I BELIEVE YOU HAVE THE WILL POWER. DON'T GIVE INNNNNNNNN. NO MATTER HOW GOOD IT SOUNDS!!!!! WE NEED AN OUTSIDERS PERSPECTIVE OF STRANGER THINGS [for the] ARTICLE!!!!! (if that even makes sense)”.
I also asked my parents. My mom said that “You should only watch it if you watch Lost with me first and it’s not too scary,” while my dad said “No, it’s pretty gross. If you like gross things then you should watch it because it’s a good story.” And though researching this article made me want to learn more about Stranger Things, my parents definitely know my gore tolerance better than my classmates, so I’ll have to skip on watching Stranger Things for now.
