I have been watching Stranger Things since 2018, and been a loyal fan for eight years, watching every season in real time, and how the public responded to each one. But never in the eight years I have been a fan of Stranger Things have I ever seen a season get as negative of a response as season five, the final season. And never have I ever agreed with the negativity. Stranger Things went from being a dark, suspenseful, comedic, jaw-dropping small town mystery series to spiraling into an inaccurate, overkill sci-fi series with confirmed lazy writing, and an ending so bad, the entire fanbase thought it was a cover-up for a better, more thought-out ending to make up for the inaccuracies and out-of-character reactions.
Stranger Things is a series about outcasts finding comfort in each other, and for ten years, it has been a very important portrayal of friendship, found family, and being unapologetically yourself. The show started off very strong, with an almost horror-like element that drew their fanbase in. The dark, suspenseful, twisted small-town supernatural mystery was close to perfect in the first season. The writing was strong and the attention to detail was exquisite. However, with the recent season, that energy has disappeared. A major plot point for the final season was Vecna kidnapping twelve children to merge worlds. But why twelve? This led fans to speculate the importance of the number, given that in season four, Vecna used a grandfather clock as a warning before attacking each of his victims. Some fans even suspected that Vecna would travel back in time. However, when the Duffers were asked directly why Vecna snatched twelve kids, astoundingly, Ross Duffer replied that there’s “no specific reason other than he realized how much power he could exert over Will, and to do something of this scale of moving the planet, I don’t know exactly how we did that math.” Another major plot point was Max traveling through Henry Creel’s memories, going as far back as Hawkins High School, where it was revealed that Henry Creel had gone to school with the parents of our party, including Steve’s father, Danny Harrington, and Bob Newby, Joyce’s boyfriend in season two. In a recent interview with Variety, the Duffers were asked if there was ever a scene where Joyce and Hopper realize they went to school with Henry Creel, given in volume 1, teen Joyce hands out flyers for a play she directed, starring Henry Creel as the lead. Ross Duffer replied, almost annoyingly, with, “Yeah, I’m sure there was,” before saying they did not want “to frustrate fans” with too many play references, given in the play Stranger Things: The First Shadow, they go into detail of Henry’s time in high school. The Duffers explained that they thought the scene “would have been confusing for people that haven’t seen the play.” But how could a plot-defining scene where Joyce and Hopper discover they knew Vecna all along be “confusing” if it was clearly teased in volume 1 and stuck out as a major plot point for many fans? Watching the final season I began to wonder, how did the writing get this bad? How did it snowball into a clump of inaccuracies and laziness? The theory majority of the fanbase came up with is Ross Duffer divorcing from his director wife, Leigh Janiak, in February 2024, while production was beginning on the fifth season of Stranger Things. Duffer and Janiak married in December of 2015, seven months before the release of Stranger Things season one. Leigh Janiak, director of the Fear Street trilogy, was no doubt a ghost writer for her husband and brother-in-law’s hit show. And fans spotted a pattern when the writing for the show went downhill after she filed for divorce.
Overall, watching the final season of the show left me unsatisfied and extremely confused, leading me to almost believe the fanbase when they created the conformity gate theory. In all my years of waiting for a new Stranger Things season, this final season was my worst experience. The writing was lazy and the plot was all over the place. While I still hold a special place in my heart for the show, and will always love it no matter what, this last season was especially disappointing.
