It's been a couple of weeks and I think I can finally put into words what the Stranger Things ending felt like to me, but this is going to be a long extended metaphor — bear with me.
You are an experienced, decorated detective. You're well-known for being sharp-witted, brilliant, and you've always, always been able to solve your cases with a deadly accuracy.
But there's one case that you have never been able to solve, an inexplicable case that has been hanging for decades. You've come close, but somehow the criminal always gets away right under your nose, leaving nothing but cryptic hints and supernatural disappearances. This one case, you've never been able to understand. It's frustrating — but thrilling all the same.
One day, as you near your retirement, the same criminal begins dropping deliberate hints, all alluding to one thing: they are going to commit one last crime, one last crime that will explain everything. Decades of chasing, decades of searching, decades of defeat. One last crime, one last chance for you to set this right.
You get an anonymous tip that the criminal has been sighted for the first time in years at a nearby cafe. You rush in with your colleagues, preparing for a massacre, but you find the man you have been searching for for what feels like your entire life lounging on a plastic chair nursing a warm cup of coffee. Waiting.
He doesn't even flinch when you move to arrest him.
When you bring him back to the station and shove him inside an interrogation room, he is quiet, complacent. You begin to ask, to uncover. You think this will be the best experience of your life—finally, finally!—but it turns out to be utterly disappointing. When you ask why? he shrugs. When you ask how? he says something so absurdly ordinary that it doesn't add up. When you ask about all the clues he's left, all the trails, all the inexplicable occurrences in his wake, he says, earnestly, that he doesn't know. It was an accident, it seems. You explain to him your theories, your interpretations of his actions. He looks at you blankly. It hits you that he was never quite as clever or as astonishing as you'd thought.
At this point, you're in despair. You exit the interrogation room, to talk with your colleagues. To make sure you haven't made up everything, to make sure that all of your analyses, theories had been once been grounded in fact. Your colleagues nod — yes, of course, we'd come up with those together. Yes, of course, we'd witnessed that together.
When you return to the interrogation room, you find blood on the walls. A sharp gasp. The criminal is dead, gun still smoking in his hand. You're — shocked.
You call for help, you check the cameras, you check his pulse — he's dead. For real. Shot himself in the head.
It's over, just like that. Hundreds of answered questions. Hundreds of mysteries that have yet been uncovered. You've found the criminal, but he knows as little as you. You cannot settle with the fact that you will never receive the answers you've searched for, answers you've searched for years and years and years.
A quiet silence hangs over the meeting room. You and your colleagues settle around a round table: there's happiness, of course, that it's all over and that the criminal is dead (of course), but there's also an unsettling anger, an odd grief.
Even your colleagues with whom you have never agreed with, colleagues who have ridiculed you for your theories, for your predictions, for your assumptions sit with you, basking in that same silence.
"Maybe this isn't over," someone pipes up. "Maybe this is the final crime. Maybe we've been played."
There: the silence shatters. Everyone starts talking again, animatedly, a little hysterically. Yes, yes. It can't be over. There must be more. It can't be over: too many loose threads, too many equations unsolved. Of course this is another elaborate crime. Of course.
But you aren't so sure. But you hope, anyway.
