‘One last adventure’
Winter Moritz, Senior Staff Writer
Queue “Forever Young” by Alphaville. Then, “Stranger Things” composer Kyle Dixon’s “Kids” and “Eulogy.” Track them, if you will, to this portal-opening review of the series finale, and those disturbingly irresistible TikTok edits — including the Byler ones — that keep me up at night.
It’s clear that the jury is still out on the fifth and final season of “Stranger Things.” I’ll admit, there are some falterings — take those abhorrent “Will nosebleed” fancams or cringey dialogue choices as an example. However, the Duffer Brothers, creators of Netflix’s golden child, understand that bookends and goodbyes are never easy. I’m looking at it from the trees: The overall trajectory of this show conquers any criticism of its final chapter. Hold my hand as I take you on a trip upside down memory lane. Watch out for the demogorgons. Oh, and are you playing those songs on your Walkman? Good.
Ornamented by Eggos, walkie-talkies, and Christmas lights, “Stranger Things” as a series spoke to the blaring red conviction that we fearlessly bore as children and the blue contemplation of friends that we lost along the way. Plus, of course, it was all unforgettably soundtracked by the best of the ‘80s. As our favorite Dungeons & Dragons players made friends, lost some, and battled monsters both supernatural and fascist, so did we. After all, that’s what made the series so special and the ending, however strange, so striking. We grew up with these kids. Those “Heroes”-backed final credits alone evoke painful nostalgia and wonderment at the character-based iconography that decorated our rooms, TVs, and Halloween costumes for 10 whole years.
Season 5 was a complicated conclusion to an inarguably powerful constant in our lives. We’re leaving those younger versions of them — and ourselves — behind. Now, it’s up to us to continue balancing the group’s final “I believe” statement about remaining hopeful, which cycled us so easily through our childhood neighborhoods.
Don’t be a Henry Creel looking back at “Stranger Things 5.” Instead, get out there. Go commemorate this chapter closing and the portal opening ahead. Jump through before it’s too late.
And “Kids,” bzzzt: Over and out.
‘Friends don’t lie’
Gabbi Basa, A&E Editor
Watching Season 5 unfold merely confirmed for me what the Duffer brothers were a decade too late to salvage: the overcooked culmination of a show I fell in love with in middle school, arriving exactly where it had been heading for years.
Their fatal mistake was never Vecna — but you killed it, Jamie Campbell Bower — the Season 3 Soviet Mind Flayer tag team, nor even the cursed release delays. It was always excess amid the pressure to expand. The cast ballooned past the point of narrative care, until we had nearly 20 people standing in a radio station nodding their heads heroically at the words “Operation: Beanstalk.”
By the final chapter, the Upside Down was less of a battlefield of real casualties and more so of character assassinations. To give everyone their neat one-twentieth share of the “happy ending,” the entire cast is shrunk into miniature, pliable straw men. In doing so, the whole is shamefully dwarfed by the undeserved, unasked-for sum of its parts. Relationships forged and altered in trauma are cast to the wayside, and then still expected to be fawned and cried over by its devoted fanbase.
Will Byers is perhaps the most painful casualty, yet the most inevitable. Once characterized by silent sensitivity and artistic depth, Season 5 strips “Will the Wise” down to his queerness alone, which the screenplay gestures toward endlessly and ties up with a tacky Byler bow.
What ultimately disappoints in Season 5 is not just who it massacres, but all that it no longer dares to confront. The CIA-coded machinery of Hawkins Lab, deliberately inspired by the MKUltra program, grounded early seasons in a landscape disturbingly close to home where women are drugged, children are experimented on, and dissenters are erased under the cover of espionage. Whether by storytelling failure or external pressure, the Duffer brothers retreated from probing this lineage, instead distracting us with burgeoning lore, shiny new characters, and, of course, evil Russian spies. Not even a cameo of original sci-fi heroine Linda Hamilton herself could salvage this farce of our country’s very real history.
As much as Season 5 feels like a betrayal of the soul of “Stranger Things,” it was a long time coming. In trying to be everything, the show abandoned the darkness, restraint, and institutional horror that once made it worth loving.
And as a final note, I have been a Robin Buckley hater since her materialization in 2019.
