Some Thoughts About The End of Stranger Things
Been a while since I posted here, but I figured this is as good a time as any to bring back the blog.
Watching a show from start to finish over its entire run is a funny thing. You get invested in the characters, you begin recognizing the actors as they take on other projects, and you wonder how the show's going to end. When we all watched Season 4 back in 2022, we couldn't wait for that next season and the presumed end of the show.
What we got instead was a Game of Thrones-esque disaster that will undoubtedly cripple the Duffer Brothers' careers and result in some significant changes in how Netflix approaches their productions from now on.
First, though, came the initial Volume of episodes. I watched them with a friend, and I immediately noticed a pretty severe red flag: an 18-month time jump that casually paves over the giant gaping X in the middle of Hawkins as if it was merely a mild inconvenience and not a massive portal to another dimension. I was expecting something more akin to an SCP operation with esoteric devices and advanced spec ops teams having to defend every scrap of land they could salvage while a swarm of democreatures batter themselves against them.
Instead, we get a replacement for Dr. Brenner who might as well be goose-stepping and speaking German and the revelation that the military just has a base in the Upside Down now. The main cast are all now grizzled veterans who have perfected a way around the military but have no idea what they're doing other than wandering around looking for Vecna. And on top of all of this, we get the first-ever appearance of a wall surrounding the UD version of Hawkins.
After a fun little romp where the entire cast commits several crimes of varying severity, the gang end up trying to save the kids of Hawkins (of which there are only 12, I guess) from being kidnapped by Vecna. Vecna then promptly wipes the floor with literally everyone, kidnaps all the children, and then walks right back out. Oh yeah, and Will has powers now.
Going into Volume 2, people were starting to get a bit nervous where things were headed. These fears are somewhat justified when it is further revealed that the Upside Down is actually a wormhole that connects Earth to the Mind Flayer's home dimension/world and that said wormhole is held together by a floating ball of invisible exotic matter. Now, I'm no quantum mechanics expert (and neither is Dr. Brenner, who supposedly had this made), but I would assume that if a giant source of quantum power was just sitting right out in the open Vecna would likely not need to go through all the hoops he ends up going through just to achieve his plan. Also, despite this thing being incredibly unstable, it has somehow managed to stay around for at least 4 years, surviving the various incursions by both democreatures and the military (who do appear to have tried messing with it only to get melted for their troubles).
I could go into the various other issues with the show's writing and character development (like the various hints that Will is being puppetted by Vecna going nowhere or Mike using the D&D term "sorcerer" several years before its official inclusion in the RPG [and the fact that it's not even an accurate use of it, since Will's powers are more akin to a warlock than a sorcerer]), but instead we should just address the elephant in the room: the military, despite the extreme danger posed by the Upside Down and the creatures emerging from it, are treating this all as another day at the office. Dr. Kay continuously acts as though she has a handle on the situation despite a rapidly climbing death count amongst her soldiers and seems only interested in copy-pasting Brenner's work instead of, y'know, trying to close the portals. This severe lack of urgency and focus leads to the military's inclusion feeling like an afterthought, a plot device to explain the appearance of Kali after 8 years so they can tie up that loose end.
Speaking of Kali (and the awkward height disparity between her and El), her presence serves only to allow the Duffers to pursue the dumb, inane, and completely stupid ending of El's character: "you have to die because the military will always hunt you and your friends down otherwise". Never mind the numerous crimes everyone in the show commits in this season alone, no, El has to die so that everyone else can get their """happy""" ending free of prison.
Max gets free of Vecna and manages to tell the gang that Vecna plans to use the mind power of the kids he captured to merge Dimension X (the Mind Flayer's home) and Earth together via the Upside Down. The plan is finalized: they'll interrupt him in the middle of this using El and Kali's mind powers (with Max guiding them), climb from the UD version of the radio tower they're using as a base into one of the portals to Dimension X, then kill Vecna there. Then they'll set a time bomb next to the exotic matter and leave just before it blows up and collapses the Upside Down, severing the connection between the two worlds for good.
The finale is a disappointment. The gang enter the Upside Down, El and Kali stop Vecna halfway through his attempt to merge Dimension X and Earth together, and then everyone else fights a giant kaiju while El finally defeats Vecna via impaling him on a giant spike (with Will's help). Joyce finishes him off with her axe, and everyone goes home just in time for the military to show up not to help but to kidnap El. Kali's already dead by this point (shot by the military guy with the most screen-time this season), so it's down to El. The military deploy an LRAD-type device that disables the powers of those like El and Kali (not used against Vecna, by the way) multiple times this season, and their final appearance has them using about half a dozen all at once.
Fortunately, El has retreated to the safety of the Upside Down, where she promptly drags Mike into her mindscape for a final conversation before getting sucked out into the void with the rest of the Upside Down when the bomb goes off. Did I say fortunately? I meant stupidly. Very, very stupidly.
But wait! There's still about 50 minutes left in this episode! How are they gonna- oh it's just an over-glorified "Where Are They Now" epilogue. No mention of the military, no prison time for anyone despite the numerous kills and crimes committed by the gang during the season, and the sort of awkward feeling of "is this it? Is this really it?" By the time Mike closes the basement door for the last time, you're left wondering: what went wrong?
By the time the finale aired, people had gone into full-blown madness over the ending of the show. A combination of overclocked pattern recognition, sunk cost fallacy, and a dash of wanting to expect the best from people led to the infamous ConformityGate: a conspiracy theory that Episode 8 isn't the real ending but instead a red herring, a way to whip up the public into a frenzy before the actual finale was released on the 7th 11th 12th as part of the documentary being released about the making of the final season. The "evidence" ranged from background props appearing in the show and publicity stills posted to social media to certain "hints" uttered by the cast as they made the rounds on the late-night circuit and various other media appearances. It would all, sadly, be for nought.
The task of ending one of the most popular TV shows of all time is one that has been infamously fumbled before by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who botched the ending of Game of Thrones despite having a blank check budget and the full support of HBO, George R.R. Martin, and a vibrant fanbase. We may never know the true reasons behind them causing this legendary catastrophe, but it is widely acknowledged by everyone that it was, in fact, a catastrophe. The duo disappeared into making mediocre slop for Netflix to pad out their offerings, and have similarly disappeared from the public eye. If they have any real regrets over it all, we may not hear about them until some bombshell retrospective on it comes out in the next couple of years.
The Duffers, of course, have been compared heavily to the "D&D" duo as the end of the series approached, either as a contrast to them or, as the behind-the-scenes tumult starting leaking out to the public, as an unflattering comparison. One interesting (but not unusual) connection between the two duos is the release of a very awkward documentary about the production of the final season after it aired.
One Last Adventure is a hit-piece created by Netflix to once and for all wash their hands of the Duffer Brothers by embarrassing them in front of the entire industry before blackballing them. Alternatively, One Last Adventure is a poorly-conceived behind-the-scenes look at how the Duffer Brothers botched what should have been a home-run success into, at best, a contested single. In either case, the Duffers come off as exhausted, shattered, and generally just done with working on the show. The camera accidentally catches them using both Reddit and ChatGPT at one point, and the actors have to remind them of basic character knowledge (Maya Hawke having to point out that Lucas doesn't know that Robin and Vicki are dating, and that she should probably whisper her lines instead of basically outing both of them to Lucas). Matt Duffer even vents to the crew at one point that he wants to go home to his wife and kids to spend more time with them. Ross Duffer, of course, does not have that problem because he divorced his wife Leigh Janiak during production of the season.
This brings us to DivorceGate: the alternative to ConformityGate that posits that Janiak was the true mastermind behind the show's writing, and that her divorce from Ross Duffer is what caused the season to suck so bad compared to the rest of the series. Those involved with the show have started letting slip that Janiak was way more important to the show's running than the official credits would have you believe, and the documentary even has the temerity to show off a husband-wife creative duo called in to guest-direct one of the episodes as a sort of jab at Ross (intentional or otherwise). What either the Duffers or Janiak have to say about this will likely have to wait until a bombshell retrospective article some years from now unveils the true nightmare behind the scenes.
And that's the end of it. I can already hear the furious typing of video essayists wanting to convert their opinions on the show into a feature-length dissertation on how the Duffers are objectively the worst or something, but I think the true response worth looking at is what the film industry is going to say about all of this. Publicly, of course, they'll probably talk up how great the show is and how important it is to the industry, but I think that, as time moves past the end and everyone moves on to other projects, more and more of their true feeling will begin to slip out. As the Duffers begin to slide into the same position Benioff and Weiss ended up in, maybe everyone else will decide it's best to just move on.