This review contains spoilers for Season 5 of Stranger Things.
As Stranger Things concludes its fifth and final season, it’s worth reminding ourselves how powerful its first season really was. Stranger Things didn’t become a cultural phenomenon by accident. It was intimate. A small Indiana town, a tight ensemble, and a singular threat—one faceless, unknowable monster. Netflix hadn’t yet trained audiences to expect “event television,” and the Duffer Brothers (Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer) leaned into that limitation rather than fighting it. The show was built around containment, not escalation. It felt handmade.
Nearly a decade later, we’re still in Hawkins. But the town is militarized, the cast has ballooned, and very little has actually changed for most of the characters. The result is a finale that’s bigger, louder, and more expensive—yet curiously hollow.
The bloated cast has been a complaint since Season 3, but Season 5 finally makes the problem unavoidable. When a show has so many characters, it doesn’t just dilute the audience’s emotional investment—it drains each character of their narrative purpose. Characters without arcs are given busywork. Characters without growth become furniture.
Joyce Byers’ (Winona Ryder) arc, or lack thereof, exemplifies this. In Season 1, Ryder carried the show; Joyce’s grief was the emotional engine that made everything else in the show feel urgent and real. In Season 5, she does virtually nothing of consequence until beheading Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) in the finale—a moment that felt less earned than obligatory, as if the Duffer Brothers realized too late that Joyce deserved something meaningful to do. And this isn’t an isolated issue. With so many characters clamoring for screen time, few of them can be truly challenged, and even fewer are allowed to evolve.
This strain shows up most clearly in the dialogue. Every corny Marvel–style quip you can imagine makes an appearance, and every character uses “goddamn” like it’s a punctuation mark. Plans are constructed in an increasingly predictable rhythm: Someone proposes an idea using whatever objects are nearby, another character points out a flaw, the flaw is patched with a different prop, and the plan almost works flawlessly. Over time, the pattern becomes mechanical, flattening the show into a version of itself people already joke about.
Season 5 feels similarly mechanical in how conflict is built. Especially in Volume 1 (Episodes 1–4), a cycle emerges: As the show drags on, viewers wants more stuff to happen. When it does, it doesn’t quite make sense. So, the show explains it, which means more talking. That exposes the weak weak dialogue, making the audience want more to happen again. And the loop continues. Somehow, there is too much exposition and not enough clarity at the same time.
“The Upside Down” is now revealed as a kind of wormhole between dimensions, something the Duffer Brothers claim was planned from the beginning. However, that’s hard to fully buy—not just because the reveal feels retrofitted, but because it reframes earlier mysteries without deepening them. What once felt eerie and unknowable is now mapped out and categorized—and done so sloppily that it makes the earlier ambiguity feel preferable. Dimension X, the Mind Flayer’s origin, the hierarchy of creatures—it all technically makes sense if you dig hard enough. But the explanations add information without adding meaning.
By the finale, the cracks in the show’s plot widen. Individually, these are nitpicks, but collectively, they become structural problems:
- Where did the demobats from Season 4 go? Was their only purpose to kill Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn)?
- Where are the demogorgons and demodogs? Wasn’t Dimension X supposed to be their home?
- The “mind–land” escape is treated as monumental—until it happens off–screen.
- Holly Wheeler (Nell Fisher) is unconscious in her consciousness (don’t ask) one moment and wakes up the next.
- The military simply releases everyone after Eleven’s (Millie Bobby Brown) “sacrifice,” despite the trail of dead soldiers left behind by the very people they’re now allowing to walk free.
- James Hopper (David Harbour) repeatedly flirts with death across the series, yet after losing a daughter again, he decides life is worth living because of a thin speech from Eleven (and suddenly becomes chief of police again despite being presumed dead to Hawkins).
None of these problems alone sinks the ending, but together they create a sense that consequences are optional. The show is more interested in piling on new concepts than in reckoning with the implications of earlier ones.
To be fair, not everything collapses. The physical manifestation of the Mind Flayer looks phenomenal—as it should, given the season’s astronomical budget. Bower steals every scene he’s in. And the season’s emotional highlight comes from Dustin Henderson (Gaten Matarazzo) and Steve Harrington (Joe Keery); their conversations about Eddie in Volume 2 are grounded, restrained, and genuinely moving. They feel like real people processing loss, not vehicles whose only purpose is advancing the plot.
For what it’s worth, the finale is satisfactory. But that’s also the problem. The best finales—Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, The Sopranos—work because they balance unpredictability with inevitability. You don’t just want closure. You want revelation.
In Stranger Things, every outcome feels binary. The plan works or it doesn’t. The villain dies or lives. Everyone survives or some don’t. And the show consistently chooses the safest option. That isn’t inherently wrong—avoiding Game of Thrones–level nihilism was smart—but it does mean that the show takes very few real risks. No choice meaningfully reshapes the story in hindsight. Everything resolves too cleanly.
Meanwhile, fans online have spun theories that retroactively fix inconsistencies, use promotional material as clues, deepen the mythology, and introduce genuinely surprising ideas. When fan interpretations feel bolder—and more compelling—than the finished product, something has gone awry.
I walked away from Stranger Things thinking: It’s over, and it was fine.
Should new viewers still watch Season 1? Absolutely. Should they finish the show? Only if they have the time.
To paraphrase a fan on Twitter, it’s wild how many people care more about a story centered on a mother, a cop, and a group of kids searching for a missing boy than one about an evil, slimy tendril man teaming up with an interdimensional monster trying to turn Earth into a hellscape.
Stranger Things didn’t lose its audience because it got darker or bigger. It lost something when it abandoned the simplicity that made it so compelling in the first place. Bigger wasn’t better. It was just louder.
