Warning: The following story contains spoilers for all five seasons of the hit Netflix series “Stranger Things.”
Nearly a decade ago, Netflix debuted a TV show that unbeknownst to them at the time would take the country by storm. The show was nostalgic and simple, following three pre-teen boys as they search for their missing friend, but instead end up uncovering another dimension hidden beneath the small town of Hawkins, Indiana. Taking place in 1983, the first season of “Stranger Things” was nearly perfect, with beautifully fleshed-out characters and an intriguing plot. Of course, like any other show, people had their critiques, but it’s undeniable that “Stranger Things” started off as an excellent and immensely entertaining TV show. However, that was in 2016. Ten years and four seasons later, the fan favorite has finally drawn to a close. When the final episode released on Dec. 31, 2025, it caused a wide variety of opinions and emotions amongst its supporters.
Earlier Seasons
“Stranger Things” gained popularity straight out of the gate, with a near record-breaking viewership of 14 million in the first 35 days after its release. The show was vastly unlike many of the other Netflix Originals of the time, with no cheap jokes, little cheesy dialogue and minimal romance. The show instead followed a group of middle schoolers around the seemingly quaint town of Hawkins, Indiana. Throughout the show, the main characters Lucas, Mike, Will, Dustin and Eleven fought countless monsters, played Dungeons and Dragons and uncovered alternate dimensions, all while still acting like children.
Season two was much the same when it came to quality. The stakes were still just as high, the characters just as memorable and the season just as good. Season three was a fan favorite, leaning heavily into the flashy colors and neon lights of the 1980s. The brunt of the season took place in the Starcourt Mall, with its ice cream parlors, movie theaters and food courts all straight out of the 80s.
The cinematography mirrored that of an 80s slasher film: bold costumes, corny jokes and an incredibly gory final fight. In this season, the main villain, the Mind Flayer, is ultimately taken out with fireworks, intensifying the already playful, explosive nature of the season.
However, while season three leaned heavily into a nostalgic and peppy Halloween horror, the fourth season took a drastic turn and became much darker and morbid. With the rise of what eventually became the show’s final villain, Vecna, and his brutal ways of killing his victims, “Stranger Things” as a whole was all of a sudden much more of a horror show then the coming of age story we’d known it to be.
Rather than continuing the pattern of adding a new villain every season — season one had the demogorgon, season two had will possessed by the mind Flayer, three had the rat monster and four had Vecna — season five continued to expand Vecna’s storyline. At the end of the previous season, despite Vecna having been considerably weakened, the Upside Down began to leak its toxic air and red smoke into the town of Hawkins through fissures in the ground, causing a town-wide quarantine which spans nearly all of season five.
Despite the group’s efforts, Vecna’s survival allows him to continue developing his plan. At the start of the fifth season, he captures a group of children — including Holly, Mike’s little sister — in order to manipulate and use them to completely take over Hawkins and the rest of the world. The group must work to defeat him along with the Mind Flayer and rescue the children which will in turn save their town, Holly and the universe as they know it.
And that brings us to the final episode.
The Finale and the Backlash
The show’s finale, released on Dec. 31, 2025, should have ended the year as well as the entirety of “Stranger Things” with a bang. Because of how strong every aspect of the show had been up to that point, the expectations for the finale were through the roof. So, instead of partying with friends, thousands of people spent New Year’s Eve on the couch with a bowl of popcorn expecting to be wowed. Instead, we were faced with an ending that was mediocre at best, with countless plotholes, questions left unanswered and loads of unexpected and unappreciated tackiness.
Lots of Summit students who consider themselves avid fans of the show are beyond disappointed with how it ended.
“I thought their acting was really, really terrible, specifically Eleven’s,” said sophomore Sienna Cochrane.
In the final episode of the show, the group crosses over into an entirely new dimension called the Abyss. It’s revealed that the whole entire time the Upside Down has really just been a wormhole into this other universe, which is slowly becoming one with the real world. Vecna, who up until this point has been the primary villain, the leader of the hive mind, the so-called “Big Bad,” is defeated with ease in a battle taking place in the new dimension. This whole fight takes up barely more than ten minutes of the finale, with the rest of the episode being used as either preparation for the final battle, the epilogue afterwards or the complex explanations that didn’t have any effect on the actual plot.
Summit junior Luke Shirtcliff has mixed opinions on the structure of the final episode.
“I think the epilogue really did conclude a lot of the stuff that was left on the table,” he said, explaining that while he felt that the epilogue was needed, he didn’t feel the same about the time spent on exposition and worldbuilding when it could have been included earlier in the show. “I do think the actual hour-long part beforehand that was supposed to be the final episode was not very good.”
Plotholes, Cheesiness and Everything Wrong With the Finale
But how much of this hate is really rooted in reality? Was the finale of Stranger Things truly bad, or just not living up to the high expectations set by the previous seasons?
Long before the release of the finale, the show’s directors Matt and Ross Duffer promised that although it would still feel rewarding, many of the fan-favorite characters we have loved since the beginning will end up meeting their demise before the show is through. Because of this promise, fans concocted elaborate theories about which one of their favorites would die and spent months preparing to have their hearts broken. Rather than killing anyone, though, the show’s directors took the safe approach, with nearly everyone surviving and leaving the death of Eleven, the single character they killed off, incredibly open-ended.
“This sounds kind of bad, but I wish they’d killed more characters,” said Cochrane.
However, the characters still make sacrifices, including Eleven when she sacrificed herself by staying behind in the Upside Down while it was destroyed, in order to prevent the possibility of any future experiments on kids like her. However, the show didn’t allow us to believe she was dead for long before Mike raised the idea that she actually faked her death by instead only killing a hologram of herself.
A scene at the end of the episode then showed her hiking through a field, having escaped to somewhere far from Hawkins, theorized to be Iceland, to avoid capture by the government. While some may have seen this as sweet, with Mike not giving up hope that his girlfriend may still be alive, others saw it as nothing more than the writer’s being scared to kill off even a single character.
“El kind of died, kind of didn’t. I think if there was a resolution to that [it] would have been better,” Cochrane explained.
Though they may have slightly spared their fans the heartbreak, the Duffer brothers’ inability to kill their characters resulted in the stakes for the final episode seeming incredibly low and the outcome underwhelming.
Along with this, there were plenty of other aspects the writers could have improved when it came to ending the show. Lots of people found that while the main five characters were still prevalent, they spent lots of the fifth season majorly sidelined, the show instead focusing on Holly and her friends.
Sure, Will had his struggles with his sexuality and Mike and Eleven still had cute moments despite their overall lack of chemistry, but the five of them seldom spent time together other than at the very end. This show has such a wide variety of new memorable characters, but when it came down to it, fans really wanted to see interactions between the ones who’d had their hearts from the very beginning of season one.
Conspiracy Theories and Coping Mechanisms
In order to cope with the show’s slightly abysmal last episode, many fans assumed a state of denial. Rumors circulated on the internet that episode eight of season five was a fake-out ending and the real one was still yet to be released.
Because of how out-of-place the long epilogue and the neatly tied-up endings for each character seemed in a show titled “Stranger Things,” people had a very hard time believing the writers would end such a popular show so predictably, especially while advertising a huge plot twist.
Instead, a complex internet theory was born over the span of a few days. Known as the “Conformity Gate” theory, it claimed that the ending we all saw was really just Mike trapped in Vecna’s mind, much like how Holly and Max were at the beginning of the season. Lots of evidence was given to back up this point, such as people sitting in the back of the graduation scene at the end of the show holding signs with nothing on them, props changing colors and the entire epilogue just seeming very cliche.
However, because of different social media posts made by the Netflix account and clues found in the show, fans predicted this final episode to release first on Jan. 7, 2026, and then on Jan. 12 when nothing happened on the seventh, and so on. Nothing has been released other than a documentary on the making of season five, proving that, while creative, this theory was ultimately false.
So there we have it. Other than perhaps some branch-off shows, the series we have known and loved for nearly a decade really has come to an end. Though we can all agree that the finale to “Stranger Things” had its faults and could have been a lot stronger, it is still important to remember how beautifully crafted the earlier seasons of the show were and recognise the difficulties that accompany creating a five season long series. With such complex world building and multifaceted characters and storylines, the show was bound to have imperfections. Season five is still the same “Stranger Things” fans have loved since 2016, with the same beloved characters, only now ten years older, a million times cornier and containing an obscenely wide variety of plot holes.
