Season 5 Finale, In Summary
Patty Newby wasn't important at all to the plot, I guess.
They made Will empathize with his abuser.
The painting lie was never addressed.
They gave Byler one solo scene where Mike gave a short apology and emphasized their super cool BEST FRIENDSHIP before they just moved the fuck on. It was never unpacked further one way or the other.
They couldn't even let Mike say he loved his girlfriend in the final moments they shared together, yet full-sent Mileven 'endgame' just to immediately kill her.
They have Eleven say Mike was the only person who understood her ever, as if that's not provably false by canon. They have written their darling main pairing into the ground so aggressively that Mike can't even express his love for her and hasn't kissed her once prior to her goodbye scene and we're supposed to believe this is the peak depiction of romance.
Eleven killed herself and Kali was left to bleed out slowly in the Upside Down, and we're supposed to think that's a huge win for abuse survivor rep.
They spent 45 minutes on an epilogue.
What the fuck happened to Suzie?
Not even the depressing epilogue boyfriend ending for Will was canon. We somehow got Mike's little daydream about a hypothetical epilogue boyfriend, all the while Rovickie is still found dead in a ditch.
They set up Will going to Robin asking for signs of romantic reciprocation, showed Mike doing those same things on several occasions, then just... left it there. Gave us the coming out scene and called Mike his Tammy then called it a day.
The only sapphic characters in the show were used as a vehicle for the gay boy protagonist just for neither of them to have explicit endgames in ANY capacity.
And Will's genuine feelings for his best friend were used as a plot device to further the main straight pairing. It was a human centipede of using queer stories as tools to further the story instead of genuine representation. And the ship they were helping further ended up half dead anyway so what was the fucking point in any of it.
November 6th was never mentioned in the finale.
The Melvald's inconsistency is literally never addressed once. The grocery store just sells milkshakes now.
The pregnant women just... died? Is that what happened?
While we're on that topic, what the fuck happened to the military? Did they evaporate? Weren't they holding everyone at gunpoint at the end? That's just never resolved?
Will genuinely said he loved getting lost in the woods during his coming out scene, as if that isn't how he got taken in S1? What am I smoking?
How old was Will when he went missing? 11 or 12? Make up your fucking minds.
Max just has absolutely no lasting injuries from getting Vecna'd? She's just back to tekdek-ing?
In the same vein, Karen literally had her throat slashed by that Demogorgon. We're expected to believe that in a year she recovered and had NO visible scarring?
Hopper lost both of his daughters and that's meant to be a fulfilling ending for his character.
Mind you, Hopper and El were made to parallel Joel and Ellie from the Last of Us. Joel Miller would never.
They contradict their characters own birthdays.
We were constantly told to 'pay attention to the details' only for the things we noticed to be genuine continuity errors left and right and not some grand plot with any sort of payoff.
The hivemind is only relevant to Will when the vibes require it. How the fuck did he not feel his mother beheading Vecna? He felt Henry having a panic attack.
They hyped up the final boss fight as this grand thing to look forward to and it took genuinely 5 minutes of screentime.
What was the 'most gorey death in the show' about? Was that supposed to be Vecna's death? That was what they were hyping up?
Max just never reacts to the fact that Hopper is alive somehow.
Nobody does. He has his old job back. Nobody bats an eye that a LEGALLY DEAD MAN is now the chief of police.
Mike is doomed to a life of searching for his long lost girlfriend he has convinced himself could've survived her suicide. That was his ending. After everything, that was what he was reduced to.
Even if Mike was right about Kali helping El escape and El being alive, that means they just left Kali alone in the Upside Down slowly bleeding out. All she has ever known is having her agency and community ripped from her. She is constantly retraumatized by her abusers and had to watch the only family besides El she's ever known be quartered and shot in front of her before being subjected to what is, by her own admission, her worst nightmare. And her ending was bleeding out alone in the Upside Down at the hands of her abusers. Abandoned. Left for fucking dead. They brought her back for that.
Do people... not care about Hellfire anymore... Dustin flashed his Hellfire Lives shirt in front of the whole crowd and flipped off the principal and no one had an issue with it? A pretty girl invited him to a PARTY even???
No resolution to what Dimension X even was or what it wanted, which was... the whole main plot.
No one had a fully satisfying ending. Some had it worse than others, but... we're supposed to be happy with this? This is the finale Shawn Levy said would go down as the 'greatest finale in television history'? Abuse survivors never escape the cycle, gay people don't get explicit happy endings and the 'details' they kept hammering into our heads to pay attention to were just stupid fucking mistakes?
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