Increasingly Familiar and Annoying Things

“We’re all a bunch of slop hogs for Stranger Things” is how my girlfriend put it after ranting and raving about the mediocre ending to the long, drawn-out final season. And she’s not wrong. I’ve loved the show since it dropped back in 2016 and have waited on tenterhooks for each season. But the final one was rough.

We waited 40 months for that?

Stranger Things didn’t end like a story. It concluded like a quarterly report. Long episodes manufactured cheap tension, safe character outcomes preserved future IP, and a two-hour finale unfolded with nothing meaningful at stake. After Seasons 1-4  never dipped below 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, the audience score dropped from the 70s to 56%. The finale cratered because fans could smell the focus group at work. Stranger Things didn’t want to hurt its audience. It wanted to comfort them. That’s fine for a bedtime story. It’s lame for streaming drama.

The problem wasn’t just that the ending was bad. It’s that Stranger Things stopped trusting the things that made it great: momentum, restraint, and just enough calculated genre risk. Every scene of this final season felt padded. Every emotion was explained multiple times, usually capped with a hug. Every character felt protected from consequence like an IP asset instead of a person in danger. You could feel the future movie being planted and watered.

Take the finale itself. (Spoilers coming)

The last episode was touted as a two-hour extravaganza, but Vecna — the villain we’ve been building toward for five seasons — gets dispatched in a ten-minute fight where he puts up as much resistance as a wet noodle. Joyce Byers cuts off his head and that’s it. No main characters died. Murray came and went as background color. The basement scene carried real emotional weight, letting us see the characters walk away into their futures, but then we got Dustin and Lucas horny in the driveway and the older kids drinking beers on a roof, talking about how they’ll never see one another again. The point had already landed. These weren’t story beats — they were IP preservation masquerading as fan service.

Production choices told the same story. The overlighting and obvious green screen made $300 million look cheap, with every scene bleeding that flat Netflix house style where nothing feels dangerous because nothing looks real. If we’re going to lean into 1980s flick adoration one last time, this season missed the mark visually. It looked like we were trapped in a video game.

The first season used practical effects. This one looked like content, not art, and that’s not a subtle distinction. Everything felt manufactured, unlike the first season and to a degree, the second, which kept you in that magical place of “I’m losing myself within this story.” The video thing all felt so artificial as if it were one big green screen shot. One of the things we loved about those early Stranger Things seasons were their lived-in feel, a throw back to those 80s action, horror, and sci-fi classics with their sense of spirit and cluttered visual elements: fake blood and mess, not generated effects and some weird white room that melts like a candle.

Do we really need more CGI? I’m so tired of everything looking fake, all the time. At no point of the finale did I forget that this was a television show or feel like this was relatable. What made those early seasons work wasn’t nostalgia cosplay, but restraint — the confidence to let texture, shadow, and imperfection do the heavy lifting. When everything is smoothed, rendered, and digitally lit to death, the stakes vanish, because you’re never afraid for characters who look like they’re standing on a soundstage.

Even moments that should have mattered felt calculated. Max’s extended heart-to-heart to Holly in episode seven after spending two years in a coma? Girl, you’re on your own. I’m running up that hill. She’s been trying to get out of Vecna’s dream world for the last twenty four months and now you’re taking a whole beat to explain everything, how it works when you do see your window back into reality? Couldn’t this have been covered earlier on?

Will’s coming-out scene took 24 hours to shoot across two days, and for what? The vehicle was that Will wasn’t afraid Vecna would use it against him, and Vecna didn’t. Will gaining Vecna’s powers was cool—it was nice to see the weakest character finally get some love — but the scene itself felt pointless, a box checked rather than a story told.

The Duffer Brothers were clearly out of directorial gas but, with all their Netflix resources, surely they could have called in some ringers to help flesh out better storylines. Eleven didn’t even feel central to the plot by this season. Linda Hamilton felt more like stunt casting than necessity. Stranger Things has had a cultural chokehold on us for ten years, and the way it went out felt rushed, even though the show had all the time in the world to get this ending right. Watching it limp over the finish line was sad, especially when seasons three and four were so strong.

But once again, we watched anyway. We waited forty months to see Eleven use her powers one last time. We took what we were given. Because yeah, we’re slop hogs. Oink oink. Pass The Clash tape.