The long awaited Stranger Things finale streamed on Netflix on the night of the New Year, with fans of the series squirming to finally close off the decade long Stranger Things chapter of television.
Season 5 of Netflix’s original series Stranger Things was released periodically throughout holiday breaks spanning from Thanksgiving day to New Year’s day and with the release of each episode, criticism from fans and critics alike soon followed. Criticisms that’d begun with pointing out confusing story flow, blatant flanderization of the main characters and inconsistency in the set design, a small nitpick that would become the catalyst for the fanatic mania and theories that’d accumulate in the fanbase throughout the season.
The long anticipated season had been heavily marketed and promoted by the Stranger Things main cast and show creators, Matt and Ross Duffer. With the press tour and appearances on talk shows and podcasts giving fans high expectations for the season, only for it to all lead to the mass disappointment upon the full release of the season.
Season 5 built up to be overall lackluster and boring, with a robotic and cringeworthy script and an overarching story that disregards storylines and plot points made in previous seasons. Unsurprisingly, the finale wasn’t any different.
The fifth season mainly revolves around expediting the main conflict, Mike Wheeler’s (Finn Wolfhard) younger sister Holly Wheeler (Nell Fisher) is taken by Vecna, alongside a small group of her classmates to use as vessels for the eradication of Earth. Holly Wheeler faces trying to escape Camazotz–the comatose reality the kids are brought into after being abducted–with the help of Max Mayfield (Sadie Sink), who is also trapped in Camazotz from her coma.
Holly’s storyline in season 5 isn’t exactly terrible, but feels out of place for being in the final season. The show introduces new characters and reintroduces previous characters to all join the main cast…the majority of which add nothing to the plot at all except in minor ways.
The final episode, “Chapter Eight: The Rightside Up”, continues off of the discovery Dustin Henderson found that the Upside Down dimension is really a world separating reality from the Abyss–or the ‘Right Side Up’ –which is also the resting place of the previously defeated Mind Flayer and Vecna. The characters all theorize Vecna is planning to merge the Rightside Up with their dimension, destroying it in that process. This plan that will occur on the upcoming anniversary of the abduction of Will Byers. The characters plan to travel into the Abyss as Vecna is merging into Earth and fight the Mind Flayer and Vecna once and for all! This epic final battle would be action packed and last a total of 5 ish minutes with every main character coming out of the battle unscathed and alive.
A major complaint for the finale was low stakes. There was no major character death although the end of the show being the perfect time to do so–even the deaths that did occur like Eleven’s (Millie Bobby Brown) were left ambiguous and unconfirmed–and the rampant mischaracterization of every character, all of them being reduced to shells of themselves and only used for when it was convenient for the already boring plotline.
Enter Conformity-Gate. The theory that explains the emptiness and low quality writing of season 5 as whole, the theory that the finale wasn’t real..Instead, it was all orchestrated by Vecna and what we see in the season is Vecna’s reality. Every mischaracterization is just how Vecna knows them, and for who he doesn’t know–was changed entirely to fit his narrative or just sidelined entirely–, every error and plot hole is just how Vecna remembered Hawkins!
Most importantly, the season finale was really a fake out and there will be a secret 9th episode released that’ll reveal everything and prove Conformity-Gate right on January 7th.
Come January 7th, thousands of fans anticipate the true end of Stranger Things, the episode that’ll make up for the horrible previous episodes. Only for the alleged 9th episode to never be released, confirming that “Chapter 8: The Rightside Up” was the real and only finale for Stranger Things.
Following the show’s end, Netflix would release a documentary following the Duffer Brothers and the creation behind the 5th season, would reveal major revelations about the reason for the season’s low quality production, the Duffer Brothers would admit that they began filming and production without even having a finalized script for the final episode. Throughout the duration of the documentary, starring actors appear to be confused about the script and unhappy about their character endings. One notable clip from the documentary shows Maya Hawke, who plays Robin Buckley, reminding the crew that her character isn’t open about her relationship with her girlfriend in the show, Vickie (Amybeth McNulty), and choosing to change the way the scene being filmed is played to fit that fact. The fact that this detail was seemingly going to be ignored shows how careless and lazy the writers were being.
The documentary also showed a short snippet shot of the Duffer Brothers laptop showing a google document with the script on display. Fans had also pointed out the tabs the laptop had open, with 2 particular tabs being speculated to be Reddit and ChatGPT, leading to the suspicion that the season’s script was written with the assistance of generative AI–explaining the cringe-worthy dialogue and inconsistencies.
Another explanation for the shows decrease in quality since the 1st season is Netflix’s second screen rule–a rule that requires shows to be dumbed down and easier to accommodate for viewers that put content on as background noise or while absent mindedly on their phone instead. Judging by how Stranger Things ended, the show was most likely a victim of this rule.
Overall, the end of Stranger Things has proved the laziness of both the Duffer Brothers and Netflix, closing the show off as just another rushed cash grab.
