“Stranger Things,” the record-breaking, genre-defying, global phenomenon, premiered its final episode this month. Presumably you knew that already, since if your social media, friends and family are anything like mine, you’ve been thinking and talking about the show nonstop since the season five teaser came out in July. Through a masterful choice to release the last season in three chunks on three holidays — Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Eve — Netflix ensured that anticipation for the show was as high as possible, and the “Stranger Things” hype commingled with excitement for family, gifts and travel. The recurring interaction ran thusly, with maximum enthusiasm: “What are you doing for Christmas? Who do you think the Duffer Brothers will kill off?” But when I returned to school in January, the mood of the conversation was dampened. People still wanted to talk about the show, but did so in subdued tones, like they were discussing something shameful.
If anyone thinks the finale of “Stranger Things” was a masterpiece, I’ve yet to hear from them. Disappointment and frustration have been the prevailing tone. This is a shame, because it wasn’t inevitable, unlike, say, “Lost,” which I love and which has an unsatisfying ending — but “Lost” was doomed from the beginning to be a show which no ending could truly wrap up. “Stranger Things” isn’t this way. It was endable, everyone agrees. So what went wrong?
Rewatch an episode or two from the first couple seasons of “Stranger Things,” and it’ll feel like it’s from a different show entirely. People (even kids) die and stay dead, people get hurt. The show is fun right from the start, charming, filled with potty-mouthed children and 80s’ nostalgia, but it’s undeniably scary. The story and its stakes are small and specific — there’s one monster, one mystery, one missing child. As the show continues, the level of fun increases and so do the sci-fi elements largely in the background of the first few seasons: more monsters, more mystery, more characters. This is not necessarily a problem, but it does change how the show feels.
Season three: the mall, the Russians and new characters Robin, Erika and Susie. It’s the first time in the show that some of the danger feels more for fun than for real. This change altered the flavor of “Stranger Things” permanently, but season three navigates the balance well enough that its scary is truly scary (hospital, old woman/fertilizer, goopy human remains) and its fun is delightful (“Never Ending Story,” the Russian spy interrogation). Compare the competent and eccentric Robin of season three with the flat, bumbling caricature of her in season five, and compare her well-written, intimate coming out scene with Will’s plastic one (I don’t buy that Will’s queerness is a shallow DEI move, and I think the timing and motivation of the scene work, but in all other ways, the conversation is so stilted as to be a disservice to five previous seasons of Will.)
Season four gets increasingly fun, but it’s also markedly darker. With the introduction of Vecna, the show’s danger for the first time has a voice — and he is menacing. Season four has some of the show’s most memorable frights and some of its nastiest deaths (Jason? Chrissy? The Creel family?). It ends on a cliffhanger that echoes “Avengers: Infinity War” in terms of oh-hey-they’re-screwed.
Enter season five. Though it continues in the pattern of ramping up the fun, season five gets sillier without actually ramping up the dark and danger. Actually, it drastically descales it. Sure, the stakes increase — planet crashing into planet, a life-or-death situation every time you turn around — but they’re meaningless. How many plot-armored narrow escapes does it take to convince me you’re completely unwilling to kill off a character? There’s stuff in season five that works, absolutely, but it’s the exception. It flashes at me, a glimmer of “oh, hey, there’s ‘Stranger Things,’” obfuscated by a pile of bastardized characters, unnatural dialogue and a final battle I can’t say enough bad things about (with the exception of Joyce decapitating Vecna, which was a nice touch).
How did this happen? The show forgot why it worked in the first place.
The first few seasons of “Stranger Things” are intimate. The stakes are individual lives; the danger is most threatening when it is most personal. It is set entirely, or almost entirely, in Hawkins, Indiana and amongst its people. It’s a small story, a sort of small town rumor, the kind of thing most communities say has happened but that no one quite believes (season four taps into this brilliantly by introducing the long-standing Hawkins myth about the Creel murders). Something is lost when half the cast ends up in California, when Russians come to Hawkins, when Hawkinsians go to Russia, when the stakes are the whole entire world.
This sort of stakes-expanding sprawl is reminiscent of the Marvel problem. Once all the small, personal origin stories have happened, once all the superheroes know each other, then what? The stakes have to be the whole world, and once the Avengers have saved the world, they then must save the universe. And then what? The MCU has backed itself into a corner where a multiverse of infinite dimensions is the only thing big enough to justify our heroes getting involved.
Stakes getting higher is not necessarily a problem. “Avengers: Endgame” works because even though the stakes are enormous (trillions of lives), the story is still personal: it’s centered around characters who remain well-written and who have personal stakes in the conflict and who may well die in the fight ahead. But “Stranger Things” doesn’t do this. The stakes are enormous, although vague, (is it just me or do you also have no idea what Vecna’s actual goal was?) but they’re also not supported by meaningful characters or by the kind of intimate, personal danger that made “Stranger Things” compelling for a decade.
It became commercial, the kind of merchandising machine Netflix won’t jeopardize by killing characters who’d make a really great action figure sometime in the future. The record-breaking budget of season five went towards launching the first piece of an extended, interconnected universe à la Marvel or “Star Wars” rather than finishing a beloved story well.
And I’ve nothing against a complicated, ever-expanding web of content. I’m optimistic about Marvel’s future, and I’m heavily invested in “Star Wars,” the original extended galaxy. The issue is when the goal becomes churning out content rather than art or fidelity to story.
“Stranger Things” didn’t go bad because it got big. It didn’t go bad because the budget was enormous. It didn’t go bad because it was about to launch a hefty pile of spin-offs.
It went bad because its creators stopped asking, “how do we tell this story well?”
Look at “Andor,” the first critically acclaimed piece of “Star Wars” media in years. It’s an outlier in the franchise. It’s surprising. It doesn’t even feel like “Star Wars” sometimes. And it’s compelling, clever, devastating and dialogue-inducing, and it made a few choices that divided the internet. It also cut itself off after two seasons because there was no more story to tell, a gutsy move in today’s streaming service, story-for-profit, attention-competing landscape.
Good storytelling is surprising, it’s often controversial. Had the Duffer Brothers killed a string of beloved characters, had they made their danger dangerous, there would be inevitable outcry. But better arguments about whether choices served the story than universal agreement that your show became bland, corporate and altogether risk-less.
