Many people have followed the Netflix original series, Stranger Things, throughout its 10-year run. The finale season had the most successful opening week on Netflix, but left many long-time fans, including me, disappointed.
While I haven’t been obsessed with the show since middle school, I still watched all of the seasons and enjoyed it. However, I was very underwhelmed with the ending. Many shows with that kind of popularity will run the show into the ground and squeeze every possible plot dry, so I appreciated that they knew when to close the story. I did not appreciate much else about it.
The show started as a mysterious sci-fi noir, and the ending looked like it was a Marvel movie. It lost all of its darker small town mystery vibe, and that took me completely out of it.
This season spent an unnecessary amount of time on side characters like Holly, Derek, and Kali. Meanwhile, the core characters I was connected to, like Mike and Jonathan, felt paper-thin.
Will was my favorite character, who went through so much: abduction, extreme trauma, loss of autonomy, bullying, and abuse, all while navigating being a gay teen in the 1980s. They had so much to work with, but instead of being portrayed as someone with complex unresolved trauma, many viewers felt like he was minimized into a crybaby.
Another thing I will never understand is why they spent so much time developing the plotline of Will being in love with Mike if they were not going to give viewers any real resolution. They dragged his character through hell, then seemed to think giving him powers and an unrealistic, cringey coming-out scene was sufficient closure.
I was so disappointed in his character development. I did think that his powers were a really cool addition that led to the best fight scene in the season at the end of part one. Though it did not have many competing scenes, because in the final episode, the world-bending, seemingly indestructible antagonist was killed in a measly 10-minute fight scene with no casualties suffered by the party. The plot armor was ridiculous. There were also barely any Demodogs, Demogorgons, and zero Demobats?
I really believed the Duffer brothers, creators of the show, were going to create an ending that blew me away. They even told fans to pay attention to everything, yet they did not close basically any storylines that were alluded to as having importance.
I loved the first two seasons when I was younger, and loved returning to it as new seasons came out. Yet my memory of the show will forever be tainted by this lackluster finale that forgot what made it special in the first place.