Stranger Things 5 Series Finale Review: A Good Close to a Book With Rocky Chapters

So we’re here. We finally made it to the finale, and I have thoughts. Lots of them. I’m guessing you do too.

Let me get the basics out of the way first: I enjoyed this. I enjoyed this a lot. My problem is that if the season had been stronger, this would have landed as arguably one of the greatest, most satisfying series finales of all time. Instead it arrives on the heels of some really rocky storytelling, a few rushed plot devices, and a lean into circumstances we weren’t expecting.

And I still found it satisfying.

I know that sounds incongruous. Dueling disappointment and satisfaction. Go with me on it, because that’s the honest read.

Full spoilers from here. If you haven’t seen my review of Parts 1 and 2, that’s the context I’m working from, because I’m coming at this in shorthand.

The Penultimate Episode Did Its Job

Anybody who watches this channel knows I believe penultimate episodes have a job to do. Either the climax happens there and the finale handles resolution, or the penultimate sets up the giant action piece at the end. Sometimes it pulls double duty. This one pulled double duty, and it did it well.

The funny part is what that leaves the finale holding. This is a two-hour episode, and it splits itself in half. The main story we came for gets resolved in the first hour. Absolutely resolved. Then the second hour is picking up the pieces, showing us where everybody landed, and explaining certain things away.

That’s why I keep saying this should have been nine episodes. What we got as hour one is the real penultimate chapter. What we got as hour two is the resolution episode that never got its own slot.

The Cave Scene Everybody Asked Me About

Several people messaged me confused about the cave. The young Boy Scout kid, the man in the lab coat, the MacGuffin object, all of it.

That’s from the stage play.

I’ll be honest, I had barely held onto the fact that the stage play existed. I remember wondering at the time what in the world it could even be. Were they rehashing the series? It turned out to be an origin story for Vecna. Henry’s origin story. That scene is plucked directly out of it. If it felt like it came from somewhere else, that’s because it did.

Hour One: Everything Tightens at Once

Out the gate, they get to the kids and rescue them. Then the stakes have to go up, so the military tracks the crew down. Remember, somebody opened the gate at the end of the last episode and the team plowed straight through into the Upside Down. Linda Hamilton’s character is chasing exactly that. She notices the radio station box, fuses the call letters together in her head, and now she’s pinning everybody down. They hit the church, they grab the professor, they grab Vicki and Max at the radio station.

The whole plan hinges on Eleven and Kali going into Max’s mind and then into Vecna’s, so the kids can escape while everybody else climbs the radio tower.

That tower sequence gives you one last button: a final Will and Mike scene that solidifies them as best friends. I found out afterward that Noah Schnapp really pushed for that scene to stay in. I don’t have a problem with it. I just feel like on the heels of the Will coming out scene, it played clunky. That’s the fairest word I’ve got for it. It communicates what it needs to communicate and it gets us where we’re going.

I was sure Steve was done for. I think we all were. The abyss is slamming into the tower, Steve looks like he’s about to go over, and I was shouting at my screen. Baby Know-It-All started about fifteen minutes behind me from Florida and was already texting me to ask if I’d finished. That’s how the night went.

Then they climb up and out and I thought: so they’re interdimensional travelers now. And sure enough, the show goes there.

Does this officially make us space travelers? Interdimensional space travelers. Suck it, Armstrong.

That was fun, and it was also a genuinely eye-opening moment for me. These characters have come this far. The Upside Down used to be the scary thing, and now they’re standing in a desert. Another planet? Another dimension? Another Earth? You don’t know. And up front, let me set your expectations: you are not going to get many answers to the questions you’re about to have.

The Mind Heist Goes Sideways

Kali and Eleven get pulled into Max’s mind, Max leads them through the path of Vecna’s, and they reach the house. Kali uses her illusion powers to convince the kids they’re gone. Eleven kicks Vecna out of his own house, he gets up furious, and the actress does a wonderful job of looking angry all the time. He lifts Eleven up, the kids finally get to see him be openly evil, and that’s all they needed. They run.

Now he’s chasing them toward the cave, and this is where the military arrives and the whole thing detonates. Vecna leaves his own mind, goes after Hopper, and reveals the plan Eleven and Kali made: to end themselves once this was over, because as long as either of them lives, the military can keep trying to manufacture more kids like Henry or like Eleven. Henry terrifies Hopper into shooting, makes it look like the shot went through Eleven, and gets Hopper to pull her out early.

Then the military rolls in and does what the military always does in this show: catches everybody. Max, Vicki, all of them. They hit the lab in the Upside Down, and Eleven and Kali get stopped by the sound wave devices coming off a helicopter. Murray, upstairs with the bomb gear, decides they can spare a charge and throws it at the helicopter. The team gets clear. Kali seemingly takes a bullet.

Hold onto that.

The D&D Campaign Come to Life

Back in the desert, we get the castle tree creature, and we learn there is an entity out beyond Vecna. Something outside Henry that enticed him into everything he’s done.

The kids are outside it, and Dustin (yes, Dustin, I called him Justin by accident last episode, verbal slip, my apologies) immediately assesses this enormous thing and starts talking strategy.

Only way to damage anything of that scale. We spread out, flank it on all sides, just chip away at its points. Hit points? What are you talking about, hit points?

All my D&D players, all my tabletop RPG people, you feel me on this. I immediately went: oh, okay, this is a role playing game. Literally.

And then they run the encounter. Holly becomes the bait to draw the creature in. Eleven runs straight at it and goes into its mouth to fight from the inside. One guy’s up top with a flamethrower while Harrington and Dustin are underneath with spears, stabbing at the underbelly. Outside damage, inside damage, a tank pulling aggro. It’s a campaign come to life, and it was a wonderful fight scene.

Eleven’s inside trying to drive the thing into one of the giant stalactite teeth structures, and then an arm moves and you cut back and see Will. Will has taken over Vecna’s body. He’s the one who had the come-to-Jesus conversation where Vecna admitted everything and, when Will told him he could still turn, said no. He chose this.

And at the very end of it, Joyce arrives. You hear everything she has lived through because of this monster, and he’s gurgling and dying, and all she can think to do is take an axe to his neck. Each hit lands with somebody’s memory of a tragedy or a suffering this thing caused.

I didn’t know I would be that satisfied watching her get that. I really was. As a character she has had to carry so much.

The Gate, and the End of the First Hour

They come back through, set the bombs, and the second they cross the gate the military is on them. Spike strips on the ground, everybody pulled out of the vehicles, Eleven yanked out of the truck with the rest.

Then Linda Hamilton is walking around asking where she is. And we look, and Eleven is at the gate on the other side. Will clocks the sound generators messing with her head and knows something’s wrong. The explosion goes. The gate comes down. She gets swept away in the debris.

Of everybody, Eleven is the one who goes. That’s a harsh moment, and that’s the end, quote unquote. That’s the hour mark. Then there’s another forty-five minutes.

Eighteen Months Later

The town is rebuilt. Robin gets a quick cameo on the radio. It’s Hawkins High graduation, class of ‘89.

Dustin is valedictorian, and he handles it exactly the way Eddie once described handling the graduation he never got. Every single thing Eddie said he was going to do, Dustin does. It’s wonderfully inspiring and I loved it.

Hopper talks Mike into showing up at all, because Mike wasn’t going to go after losing Eleven. Hopper basically tells him: I’ve gone down that road, and she would want better for you than that. He’s speaking from what happened with his own daughter, and Mike hears it.

Then the older group meets on the roof of the radio station and we see where everybody landed. Nancy is a journalist. Robin is living her life in another town. Steve is the baseball coach and the PE teacher, which of course means he’s also teaching sex ed, and naturally everybody loves him. Jonathan is an aspiring filmmaker who wants to make a movie about capitalism.

The Last Game

The final scene is the kids playing Dungeons and Dragons. Mike, Will, Dustin, Max, the whole group.

They lose. Will tells them that’s it, that’s the end. And Max refuses to accept it.

Okay, so now what? That’s it. Nothing. What do you mean, nothing? We lost. So after all of that, Straw von Douchebag just wins?

It almost feels like lampshading, because they have to know that at this point everyone’s asking what’s left and why this got milked. Max sounded exactly like all of us talking about the first two parts.

Then Will remembers they can summon a particular magic user to come rescue them. She shows up, she saves them, everybody’s thrilled, and Max immediately calls it out.

Wait, wait, hold on. That’s it? Comfort and happiness? Could you be more trite? I thought you were some kind of master storyteller.

So he tells them a story instead. And while he’s describing a fictitious character, he’s describing what he believes actually happened to Eleven.

She was tapped out. Nothing left in the tank, and the audio inhibitor devices would have kept her from using her powers anyway. So the theory goes: Kali knew she couldn’t come with them, because she’d be inside the inhibitor’s range. She uses her power from a distance. When Eleven gets dragged out of that truck, that’s the moment Kali makes her disappear. Eleven slips into the building and waits it out. The Eleven we see standing at the gate is a projection. Will half-remembers seeing her hand go a little blurry at the edges, the way Kali’s illusions always did, right before she was just gone.

Nothing was going to change if she stayed. She had to go. But going didn’t have to mean dying. So she survives, and she finds somewhere remote and out of the world’s way, and she gets some semblance of the peaceful life she always wanted.

Max asks him point blank: is it true?

He says we don’t know, but I choose to believe it’s true. And one by one, each of them says they believe it too.

Then the game ends. They each pick up their character binder and put it on the shelf with finality, and everybody’s carrying a different emotion out of the room. It’s a raw scene. Of everything I’ve watched in this show, I believe that scene is the closest we get to how the actors themselves are feeling, not just the characters. It was genuine.

And as Mike is about to leave, Holly and her friends come bulldozing down and sit at the table, because another generation is going to play this game and have their own adventures. Mike looks back at it and you can see him register that this is his childhood closing.

Earlier, Hopper asks Joyce to marry him and mentions there’s a sheriff opening in a town called Montauk. Now: the show was originally pitched as Montauk, and that name is tied to an urban legend about MK-Ultra era experiments on children. The original story leans more toward time travel than telekinesis. So if that’s the direction of whatever comes next, I’d love it. There’s a version of that series that plays with time travel, lets characters reference the nonsense going on over in Hawkins, and quietly cleans up some of the fast-and-loose history here. When you take real life events, urban legend or not, and play with them that way, you can have a lot of fun. I think that’s a great concept.

Now you know. And as long as you have the battle, you’re halfway to being a know-it-all yourself.

The Holes, and Baby Know-It-All’s Rebuttal

There are problems. The internet already has its list, and I intend to go through them properly on Nerd Fights and on the Monday live stream. But the short version:

We hear nothing about the military afterward. Apparently everybody’s fine with Hopper and the crew indiscriminately shooting soldiers, and nobody has a problem with it. Linda Hamilton is the most underutilized piece in the whole thing. They gave her the wig and none of the Matthew Modine energy. The military ends up being a MacGuffin that exists to create tension and provide opposition, and there is a universe where you don’t go that route at all.

Then there’s the speed of the Vecna and Henry lore. I don’t think we gave enough weight to the fact that this is an interdimensional creature trying to force its way into our universe. From a science fiction standpoint, I want to know so much more about those pieces, and we’re never getting those answers.

Baby Know-It-All had thoughts of her own, and I let her have the floor:

My issue is that I was really content until they threw that stupid theory in. If they’d just taken the theory out, I would have been fine. The theory took away from everything they did. It made more sense to kill El off and let it be set in stone. And you literally saw Kali bleeding out on the floor, and then she survives an extra forty minutes and pulls off a whole scene? That was so dumb. And you don’t see Vicki again. We don’t hear about Murray at all. They rushed Volume 2 so they could have forty minutes of happiness at the end. They kept making it out to be dark and gruesome. You could have killed Steve. You had chances to kill Nancy and Jonathan in Volume 2, and another chance at Nancy, and you didn’t. And they only brought Kali back to kill her.

She was mad. I can’t fault her.

The Verdict

Wherever you land on this, nobody can deny that Stranger Things has been a cultural touchstone for us. Whether the kids look too old by the end is irrelevant. We felt this show.

I enjoyed the ending. I would have enjoyed it more if the season hadn’t fallen apart in the places where I think it did. This was an excellent way to show us certain things, to keep certain characters in our minds, and to close the book well even though some of the chapters in between were rocky. I’m okay with that. I know a lot of people aren’t.

This wasn’t Game of Thrones, whatever the rage-baiters end up saying, and I think the Duffers have a good future ahead of them. Was it as good as it could have been? Absolutely not. Had the season been more solid, this could have been the greatest ending of all time. It wasn’t that. It was serviceable, it was good, and I’m satisfied and happy, and in this kind of scenario that’s all you can ask.

So the finale, and really the series as a whole through the lens of the finale, gets a rock solid 7 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.

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Your turn. What’s your score? What worked, what didn’t, and did that final theory land for you or wreck the ending the way it wrecked it for Baby Know-It-All? The conversation lives in the comments on the video above, and I’ll be digging into the alleged plot holes on Nerd Fights Friday and on Monday’s live stream.