Over the course of the 2025 holiday season, Netflix-darling “Stranger Things” released its long awaited fifth and final season. The episodes came out in sets, with the first four airing on Thanksgiving, another three airing on Christmas day, and the finale airing on New Year’s Eve. Fans of the series had been waiting almost a decade for the show to reach its conclusion. As the release date for the first set of episodes approached, the buzz from fans was palpable even to those outside of the space. Yet, come New Year’s Eve, reactions to the now-completed season were luke-warm at best. It is typical for a show’s finale to garner polarizing reception from its audience, as sticking a landing is never easy, especially for a series with such a substantial run-time. However, the ending of “Stranger Things”’s was received with practically unanimous negativity. This was shocking to see for a show as beloved as “Stranger Things”, which was so critically renowned during its early years. So what happened?
When looking at the show as a whole, it becomes apparent that the shabbiness of its ending was actually written in the stars. There had been a steady decline in the quality of the show’s writing with each new season, and the further it distanced itself from the simplistic, relatively subdued plot of its first season, the more it lost its grip on the things that made it truly amazing. Unfortunately, the ending was a mere culmination of this decline in quality.
“Stranger Things” began as a story mostly about mystery, and throughout its early days it was well renowned for its eerie and grotesque storyline. The first season centered around the story of the disappearance of 12-year-old Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) and followed his family and three friends as they searched for him throughout both the real world and the Upside Down—the super-natural counterpart to the real world. The story was poignant, easy to follow, and its characters were all extremely compelling. Additionally, there was an extensive mystery set up in the first season surrounding the show’s super-natural elements, and this mystery was what initially drew people into the show. That, and of course, 1980s-icon Winona Ryder being cast as one of the leads.
Yet, problems began to arise as the show continued past its first couple of seasons. The writers began to overexplain the mysterious elements of the plot—to the point where it seemed as though there was no longer any mystery at all. While not impossible to follow, this choice began to strip the show of the mysterious charm that was once the heart of its narrative. The writers attempted to combat this by adding more and more new and seemingly unexplainable elements to the story until, eventually, the show was unrecognizable. The sheer difference between the first and last season of the show is extremely jarring.
Increasing the scope of a story is not necessarily a bad thing; There are many, many cases where this has been done remarkably well. However, where “Stranger Things” falters is that in expanding its story, it sacrificed the things that made it truly great. Suddenly the eeriness was gone, and the emotional weight of its characters was thrown aside in favor of more cheesy one-liners and condensed action sequences. Moreover, many of the plot points that were added later on in the story were done so without much thought having been put into them. Many of them lack any logical basis whatsoever, and ended up leaving more questions than answers; How did the U.S. military build a base in the Upside Down without interception from any of the monsters? What happened to Dr. Kay and the military? If Will is part of the hivemind, how was he able to survive when the Mind Flayer and Vecna were killed? The list goes on. Unanswered questions are not inherently bad, but considering the sheer amount of them, and the amount of disbelief that was needed to be suspended, these plot points only serve as a detriment to the narrative as a whole.
Another thing that began to drag the show down was the decline in the quality of its characters. The characters have always been at the heart of what made “Stranger Things” so great, and the show is arguably at its best when it is focused on the interpersonal bonds and conflicts amongst its main cast. In spite of that, characters who were once beautifully complex and vital to the story, like Jonathan Byers (Charlie Heaton), Robin Buckley (Maya Hawke), and Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard) were sidelined, or stripped down to one defining character trait and became insufferably boring to watch. It’s as if the writers got bored of certain characters as soon as the plot got what it needed out of them.
The Byers family is perhaps the most egregious example of a set of characters being completely sidelined. The focus on the Byers in the first and second seasons was vital in making apparent the show’s themes and messaging about being an outcast. The family consists of a struggling single mother and two boys, both of whom exist outside of any social circles and are actively bullied in school. Additionally, the youngest son, Will Byers, is gay. This was extremely taboo during the ‘80s and contributed greatly to his rejection from society. The focus on the Byers mostly fades after the second session and, in season five, the plot is absorbed more so by the Wheeler family. The Wheelers serve as an active foil to the Byers in that they live up to nearly every standard for families upheld in the 1980s: they bring in a high-income, the parents are still married, they have three healthy kids, etc. This is not to say that the Wheelers are inherently uninteresting or that there is no conflict within the family, however as they are the epitome of the ideal nuclear family, they do not fit within the themes of the show well enough to be worth focusing on for an entire season.
Another huge factor in the show losing its grip on its characters was the marginal oversaturation of the show’s cast. As more and more side characters were introduced through the seasons, pre-existing characters were dumbed down so as to not emotionally overload the audience with handfuls upon handfuls of overly complex characters. Characters such as Eddie Munson in season four, and the twelve kids introduced in season five actively detract from the story as they soak up valuable emotional weight that would have been better spent on the main cast. Moreover, the writers seem to be allergic to killing off their characters. This was understandable in the early days of the show, as it was much more risky to kill off a beloved character and risk losing a section of the viewer-base who watched solely for said character. However, this is a problem that should have been completely irrelevant during the show’s final season, as in the final stretch all bets should be off; and yet, still, nothing happens in this regard. It only serves to exacerbate a problem that could be easily avoided if the writers weren’t too scared to kill off a couple characters. Any weight or suspense that could be gathered from the life-or-death scenes in the show is dissipated by the assurance that nothing deadly ever seems to happen to these characters.
Though all of these issues are glaring and definitely affected my viewing experience, my biggest complaint regarding the finale of “Stranger Things” lies in the storylines given to its queer characters. The show has long prided itself on its LGBTQ+ representation through the characters of Robin Buckley and Will Byers. However, these characters are failures in queer writing and should by no means be upheld as the beautiful tokens of representation Netflix likes to pretend that they are. Robin, who was widely beloved by the fanbase immediately following her introduction in season three for her complexity and cool-girl attitude, was reduced to the most basic of basic lesbian stereotypes in the fourth and fifth seasons, and Will was made to suffer for the sake of the heterosexual relationship between Mike Wheeler and Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown). These sorts of writing failures are unfortunately tales as old as time. Again and again queer characters are reduced to nothing but their sexualities, and are used as points of conflict in the story of a central straight couple. Oftentimes the suffering of these queer characters is never resolved with anything past an ending of self-acceptance, which is exactly what happened in “Stranger Things”. Both Robin and Will end the series alone, while each of the straight couples–save for Mike and Eleven–end the show with a happily ever after.
There is a lot to be said about the way the show handled Will’s story-arc. While Will was not explicitly stated to have been gay until the second to last episode of the series, there is innumerable subtext hidden throughout the show hinting towards his queerness and subsequent crush on his best friend, Mike Wheeler, which led many queer viewers to deeply resonate with his character. Problems arose, however, when the writers began to use Will’s crush on Mike as fuel for Mike’s relationship with Eleven. They had Will give Mike beautifully profound monologues and professions of love under the disguise of them having been Eleven’s feelings, and ultimately, it is Will’s words and descriptions of Eleven’s love that Mike falls in love with. And yet, nothing is ever done with this idea. They do not go into any depth regarding these incidents after they happen. It was an extremely odd choice to make if Mike and Eleven were meant to be portrayed as the favorable relationship in this love-triangle, and it seems as if Will’s queerness is only a part of his character identity to make him struggle and to bolster the proximal straight relationship.
There are many beautiful concepts and ideas that can be drawn from the arcs of Will and Mike, and the “Stranger Things” community has certainly taken these concepts and ran with them, creating their own fan stories where these ideas are actually handled with care. Nevertheless, it is frankly exhausting to have to rely on the enjoyment of concepts rather than execution when it comes to gay characters in popular media. These characters deserve to have their character and romantic arcs handled with just as much care and respect as their straight cast-mates. Not only did the choices made within “Stranger Things” provide an extremely hollow perspective on queer love, they also depicted the unhealthy relationship between Mike and Eleven as ideal, which was a terrible message to send.
There are some extremely misogynistic undertones and hollow perspectives on abused children that can be seen through the handling of Eleven’s character, especially regarding her relationship with Mike. Her entire purpose in the story is to suffer, and to be an agent of change for the male characters around her in spite of herself. Throughout the show, it is shown over and over that Mike is not a healthy person for Eleven to be partnered with. At no point in the show does Mike ever truly understand her, and he actively looks at and speaks about her as though she is some sort of monster on multiple occasions. This sort of dynamic was the last thing that Eleven needed given her already extremely difficult life and personal struggles. Despite this, there was no further exploration on how Mike’s shortcomings in their relationship affected her. Instead, these plot points were used as mere ways to push Mike’s development, all while Eleven continued to be shoved around and stayed virtually static. There was no reason for them to have kept Eleven in this relationship for so long if they never intended on having Mike overcome his failings and become a better partner to her. In doing so, this choice only serves to push a harmful, hollow narrative about abused children seeking solace in and forming a codependency on unhealthy romantic relationships. Especially in a show with a majority male cast, reducing one of the women down to a plot device whose only purpose is to spark development in the men around her is extremely odd, which is a point that is only further exacerbated by the decision to kill Eleven off at the end of the show.
The clear disregard for the more complex elements of the plot and characters only becomes more and more apparent as the show progresses. Many viewers were so heavily disappointed by the final episode that they began to hypothesize that there would be a secret ninth episode in the season that would air on Jan. 7, 2026. Fans dubbed this conspiracy “Conformity-Gate”. However, to the unearned surprise of many, Jan. 7 came and went, and there were no new additions to the fifth season, affirming the reality that the show just simply did not stick its landing. It was sad to see, and it only begs the question: what caused the writers to lose their footing this badly?
Since the airing of the finale, there have been a plethora of different accusations floating around directed at the writers in vain attempts to find the real reason that the show’s quality dropped off so suddenly. Some netizens blamed the divorce between Ross Duffer and his ex-wife, Leigh Janaik, who some claim acted as a sort of ghost writer for the script of the early seasons. Others simply believe that the script was AI-generated, due to an image of the Duffers’ computer with several Chat GPT tabs open, seen in the “One Last Adventure: the Making of Stranger Things 5” documentary. It must be noted that there is no direct evidence behind either of these claims.
There has been a recent trend in shows, especially on popular streaming sites like Netflix, dumbing themselves down in order to be more accessible to viewers who are only half paying attention. This trend has been one of the biggest contributors to the decline in “Stranger Things”’s quality. The strengths of the show’s first season were repeatedly watered down, with the final season being the culmination of lazy writing and blundered messaging about what it means to be an outcast. Any meaningful themes or statements that the show could have left its viewers with has ultimately been undermined by this fact, and it has been extremely disappointing to see.
