Some thoughts from my experience watching the ST documentary -
Hopping on the bus one last time as a long time listener first time poster. It's been so fun reading everyone's theories!! Thought i'd chime in with a few of my own.
First of all… the documentary is REALLY funny.
From the getgo, I was going into it thinking this was going to end with the reveal, and the first hour only served to confirm my suspicions. Not only with the DB’s stuff, although that definitely played a significant part in tipping me off - the moment they said “The whole episode is building toward Eleven killing herself” I started to cackle. This is how they were going to play it. The stuff with Kali’s outfit and the conversation about how hard it is to work while you have kids did read exactly like a scene out of The Office, complete with the exasperated/confused/concerned reactions of everyone around them.
One of the most obviously satirical moments for me, though, was not spoken by the Duffers. Close to the beginning, I believe it’s Shawn Levy that says “Before Stranger Things, nobody had ever thought to combine horror and coming-of-age before.” And, to add the cherry on top, almost immediately after this cited Stephen King as one of The Duffers’ biggest influences. (For anyone not in the know, Stephen King pretty much revolutionized coming of age horror with too many stories to count, most notably IT.)
I was glad to see the documentary praising the work of everybody behind the scenes - they deserve it 1000% and I adore seeing so much practical work on such a giant, popular show. The artistry and the teamwork it takes to put such a huge production together is admirable, and this is exactly the type of show that I would drop everything to be on the team for. In fact, Stranger Things was one of the reasons I got into horror as a genre back when season 2 was just coming out. It proved that horror was more than cheap thrills - more than anything else, it is about the characters' journey in overcoming their fear. This is a sentiment that’s mirrored in what the Duffers say is most important to them at the beginning of the doc. At the end of the day, people care most about the characters.
But the documentary also all but confirmed another theory I’ve had running in my head for a while - the one that made me realize this might all actually happen in the first place. There’s a lot of theorizing out there about the audience getting Vecna’d, and the show failing being our worst fear come to life. I’ve also seen people make the connection that the world Henry is talking about finding and wanting to travel to is OUR world, the real world, and that hints of Jamie actually being “taken over” by the character are all throughout 1) the documentary and 2) the countdown with the Jimmy Fallon show. But something that I feel is necessary in order to understand the purpose of the documentary (outside of the most meta level in which it is a critique of the current state of the entertainment industry and is begging for people to recognize true human creativity over something ‘palatable’ and maybe even not created by humans at all) is that the “evil” has already made its way into our world. And the documentary DOCUMENTS that evil spreading from the duffers to everyone else by the end, much like what happened in season 3.
Crew members casually mention forgetting what the beginning of filming looked like. I believe (though I cannot find the proof that this was true) that they lost about 100 filming days, from 300+ down to 237 mentioned in the doc. (And 237 is also a Stephen King reference!!) There’s an eerie scene in the middle where one of the Duffers sits at a table, and the whiteboard behind him reads “Haven’t washed my car in a month” alongside a bunch of other cryptic things that aren’t related to season 5 at all. The crew members and actors who seem done with the Duffers’ BS at the beginning are fully sobbing at the end. Everybody in the cast and crew starts sobbing when Jamie is about to be “killed” by Joyce, including Winona herself, who states in that same conversation that they’ve never had a scene together before. There’s an insane number of hugs between the cast members, which is very cute but also starts to feel like something is spreading, especially in conjunction with the rest of the doc. There’s a scene at the end where, just outside the door to the final shoot day, one of the crew members is hugged by someone else and then immediately starts crying and seems somewhat confused about it - and uses the phrase “it just got me” to the Duffers, before clarifying that the other crew member hugging her made everything suddenly feel more real and emotional. There’s a line somewhere in the doc about the show spreading - from one person, or two twins, to ten, to one hundred, to a thousand, to thousands of people. They’ve all been taken under its control (Although, unless I’m mistaken, Millie is nowhere to be found on that final shoot day).
So, I was unnerved when there was no “pull the rug out from under your feet” moment at the end of the documentary, because I was so sure that this would be the thing that ultimately reveals that the Duffers and everyone else were under its control. The interviews with the documentary director, Martina Radwan, all said that “the Duffers are a hivemind” with those words, and I think that was said very intentionally. But this? The culmination of everything and the Duffers’ inevitable downfall - we as the audience aren’t the only ones being “Vecna’d.” The Duffers are too.
This is their worst nightmare - becoming the very thing that they swore they never wanted to be. And it’s come true.
They wanted their ending to stay true to the show and the characters. It didn’t. They didn’t want an ending fiasco like “Game of Thrones.” It happened. They’re being seen as people who didn’t care about their cast and crew, rushed them by starting shooting without a fully written finale episode, made intentionally horrible decisions about the finale despite having better ideas earlier, and even implied that they used ChatGPT and Reddit in the writing of this final episode. This is 100% the Duffers’ worst fear come to life.
The most impactful scene in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is a conversation between Heather Langenkamp (playing herself) and Wes Craven himself, discussing how Freddy has made it into the real world.
Wes begins, handing Heather a cup of tea. “Well, it can be captured sometimes.”
“By storytellers, of all things. Every so often they imagine a story good enough to sort of catch its essence, and then, for a while it’s held prisoner in the story.”
“Like the genie in the bottle.”
“But the problem comes when the story dies. And that could happen in a lot of ways, it can get too familiar to people or somebody waters it down to make it an easier sell, you know, or, maybe it’s so upsetting to society that it’s banned outright.”
“However it happens, when the story dies, the evil is set free.”
This works on multiple levels. I found it interesting that “storyteller” is the word he uses here - Mike has become the storyteller rather than the paladin by the end of the series. But in a very real world sense, it’s all starting to sound startlingly familiar.
At the end of the day, the documentary is what’s proven to me that SOMETHING is going to happen. I can only hope that it won’t drag on for too much longer, lest the message of all of this becomes tainted by leading people on for such a long time. My best guess is January 14th, one long week from the 7th. And god, the week is so, so long.
