'Stranger Things' Finale: Surely No One Wants More of This

(spoilers for the Stranger Things finale)

Back in November, if someone had told me those first few episodes would prove to be the high point of Stranger Things’ final season, I would’ve insisted they were kidding. Despite the mediocre first set of episodes, also referred to as Volume 1, and what later turned out to be a legitimately bad Volume 2 (episodes five through seven, released on Christmas Day), part of me still believed that the Duffer Brothers would somehow figure out a way to land this ungainly Spruce Goose of a plane the show has become. What we got instead was a sputtering sparkler of a New Year’s Eve finale that fizzed its way through an eye-roll-inducing boss battle and a 40-minute-long epilogue.

It was freaking terrible.

To sort of summarize, now that The Gang has discovered that the Upside Down isn’t just a supernatural parallel of our own world (because that would have actually been cool) but a wormhole that leads to where the Mind Flayer, Demogorgon, and other creepy crawlies are actually from, another world known as the Abyss, they must try to stop Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) from smooshing the Abyss and Earth together like an overeager kid handling a s’more. It’s a Rube Goldberg machine of a plan, which includes entering the Abyss as it approaches Earth by using a radio tower—a silly plan but it doesn’t beat the hilarious mental image of Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) getting up there by hopping from one random floating island to another à la Super Mario—saving a group of abducted kids, killing Vecna, and destroying the Upside Down with an explosive device.

Padding out that 83 minutes are a bunch of monologues equipped with the emotional heft of your average fortune cookie, which is where most of my frustration lies, as the final D&D game between Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Will (Noah Schnapp), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), and Max (Sadie Sink) was the only time I felt the genuine weight of friendship and the bittersweetness that comes with the loss of childhood. I’ve decided to give up making sense of the show’s winding, flip flopping lore; I’ve been told the live theatre production that’s currently on Broadway, Stranger Things: The First Shadow, fills in a number of story gaps but seeing as how it’s not accessible to the average viewer I am relying solely on what is portrayed in the show to, well, judge the show. For what it’s worth, I also doubt it would help much anyway. I can even hand wave the numerous plot points and characters that the show abruptly drops once it can no longer be used to tap into viewers’ emotions—we never learn what happens to Dr. Owens’ (Paul Reiser) in last season’s military attack, for instance—but the paint-by-numbers interactions between the characters means there’s hardly anything to praise aside from the actors becoming free of their contractual obligation, presumably.

Because as confusing as keeping track of the difference between El’s mind, Henry’s mind, the Abyss, the Upside Down, and all the various ways to enter and exit each of them, nothing confused me as much as seeing legendary actor Linda Hamilton be given next to nothing to do aside from walk and talk menacingly. Hopefully, she got to hang out and shoot the breeze by craft services along with Winona Ryder, who’s mainly been given the thankless task of yelling “Will!” over and over again for the entire season. At least she didn’t lug around that axe for nothing (I’m sorry to both women, they deserved much better).

That’s saying nothing of the character Kali (Linnea Berthelsen), who was infamously cut out of the narrative entirely after season two without so much as a “Poochie died on the way back to his home planet,” only to be brought back in the final season for a much needed resolution only to be set aside once again, just with a bullet this time. Between the emotional deficiency in Kali and Eleven’s relationship and the iron-forged plot armor fitted on the remainder of the cast, she’s relegated to a taxing plot device. Out of the many ways this story could have rolled out, the Duffer Brothers somehow chose the dullest.

With a planned spin-off along with an animated film, there’s much more of the Stranger Things world to come. Aside from Netflix making more money, however, is it really worth going back to these tired waters? If the Upside Down had been left as a mysterious underworld that exists alongside ours, I could imagine any number of stories that could happen anywhere across the globe. But in trying to satisfy viewer curiosity, the Duffer Brothers only succeeded in choking off all that potential storytelling magic. Stranger Things will continue lumbering forward in one iteration or another, and viewers will almost certainly show up for it. But it’ll also never leave us in wide-eyed wonder again.

Kaleena Rivera is the TV Editor for Pajiba.