By Jack Egan
Photo by Jack Egan
For a decade, we followed Hawkins’ battle against aliens on Stranger Things with mouths for faces and an ancient being with destruction as its only goal. But after all that, the show did not end with a bang but a diploma, nostalgia bait, and almost an hour of epilogue. The show’s final season was a disappointment full of clunky dialogue and a half-baked plot compared to its earlier seasons.
The dialogue this season felt corny and repetitive, almost like it was generated by AI (which after watching One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things 5, isn’t totally out of the question). Every scene where a character came up with a plan was almost the exact same: the character would see or hear something and come up with a plan all of a sudden. The character would then explain it using props like action figures for instance.
Willow senior E’mya Hill felt the same, saying, “It was very bland, and it felt like a Disney Channel sitcom at times. Dialogue in previous seasons seemed to have a lot more substance and made a lot more sense. You could feel the characters’ emotions more based on their words compared to this season.”
Holly, Derek, and some other children were introduced to the show this season as part of Vecna’s masterplan to crash the Abyss and the real world together. Now, I am all for new characters, but this new group was given so much time in the limelight that the main party we know and love felt pretty static. Characters like Joyce, who is played by the incredibly talented Winona Ryder, got only one or two moments to shine, and Mike seemed to be reduced to his love triangle with Eleven and Will.
Along with them, Robin (even though she did have a longer screen time this season) felt like a reinvented character in comparison to previous seasons, like the Robin we knew was changed into a plot exposition device.
On top of ignored characters, the finale included about half an hour of an epilogue, including a graduation and a game of Dungeons and Dragons to close out the series. Before I get to my harsher opinion, I liked the D&D scene and felt it was a heartwarming closing to a beloved series. However, when the two-hour runtime for the finale was announced, many others, including myself, expected an extensive final battle full of stakes and sacrifice. Instead, half of the episode was filled with nostalgia bait and a very short, almost zero-stakes final battle.
“The Graduation and D&D sequence were both good,” sophomore Lisette Toledo agreed, “but the epilogue was way too long. Honestly, they could’ve used 20 minutes to make a better fight ending.”
On the topic of low stakes, the most aggravating of all the issues this season was the absence of risk of injury or death. Just to preface, a show does not have to include a death to be emotionally compelling, nor does there need to be any risk of harm. But this series has relied on it throughout its run, so viewers expect it here.
The final battle involved a spider monster version of the Mind Flayer (the big bad throughout the five seasons of the show) that looked to be the size of a 10-story building. The party did not bring a rocket launcher, tank, or anything that might’ve done a great deal of damage to this monster but merely one gun with everyone else having spears and shields, with Mike being the heaviest hitter using a flare gun. Adding these factors together, in my opinion, one wouldn’t be wrong to assume that some risk of harm is necessary to pull off a logical fight!
“How come in past seasons it took so much just to kill a Demo Dog, but in this season, they killed the big boss fight with just one gun?” Hill wondered. It was as if the show had become a different show.
One could argue that Eleven was a sufficient sacrifice to end the series, but they didn’t fully kill her. They merely did the same as they did with Hopper in season three and four, leaving it up to viewers by throwing in a scene of Eleven hiking in the countryside. Stranger Things definitely ended not with a bang but a quiet walk.
