Five Thoughts on the End of Stranger Things
- I could not tell you why, but watching the final season, and especially the final episode, I kept thinking to myself Avengers: Endgame has ruined pop culture. Again, I am not entirely sure where this thought came from other than how exhausting the whole thing felt, and how familiar that was to the way I felt about Endgame — and perhaps also the way that both narratives went from a cliffhanger of “this is an unbeatable, existential threat” to “if we just hit these bad guys with sticks, everything will be solved” in a way that felt utterly unearned — but I’m standing by it.
- My God, but the final season of Stranger Things was a slog to get through. It’s a good thing it was on Netflix, because that allowed me to continually walk away from episodes and return to them when I’d regained the strength to go on. It took me three days to watch the finale, all told, including watching three full other movies in between. (Each of which was more entertaining.)
- Why, exactly, was Linda Hamilton there, aside from the paycheck? What purpose did her character serve? (For that matter, what was her character’s motivation? That was never explained, beyond other character’s guesses. Isn’t that kind of thing important?) I think back to her giving interviews where she’d say things like, “I’d more or less retired, but Stranger Things made me believe in acting again,” and all I can imagine is that she’s being polite about an experience that feels like it must have been someone saying, “Can you frown again, but do so while looking in this direction?” and then she went back to her trailer and looked up her bank balance again.
- If you told me that the writers room knew what they wanted the last hour of the show to be, and basically went, “Eh, we’ll wing it until we get there,” I’d believe you; the epilogue/last half of the finale felt more concrete than any of the eight-or-so hours that preceded it.
- I wanted to walk away from this show before this final season, having lost interest in it… somewhere at the start of the fourth season, maybe? Perhaps not, I remember getting to the cliffhanger and going, I wonder how they’ll pull this off. But I stuck with the entire final season out of a sense of obligation because it was so big culturally that it felt like work, and in part because I was hate-watching by the second half. All things considered, I should have listened to that initial impulse and stayed away; there wasn’t anything here worth the investment in time, and I feel like I could have done so much better with those hours even if I’d just laid on the couch and did nothing. A lesson to bear in mind throughout 2026, perhaps.
This isn’t a Pessimistic House
It struck me the other day that we were collectively at the 10 year mark of ending a year/starting a new one by going, “Well, the last 12 months have been fucking rough, here’s hoping the next year is going to be better.”
By that, I don’t mean that everything has been getting progressively worse since 2016 — thankfully not; just imagine! — but that, by the time the end of the year eventually rolled around each and every year for the last decade, I found myself thinking what so many people in my social circle were saying out loud: the last year has felt like it’s been trying to grind me into paste, and I just want the next year to be a little easier.
It felt like everything was on a downhill slope from, what, 2016 through 2020, 2021, perhaps…? Perhaps that whole “global pandemic that up-ends life as we knew it” was enough of a downer to leave us in such a space that almost anything would have seemed like an improvement, but sure enough, 2022 felt a little better than what came before, and every year since then has had highlights as well as crushing disappointments and difficult moments. (Those last two have seemed to be a permanent fixture for the past decade, at least.; maybe it’s getting older, maybe it’s just that things really did seem to turn to shit at some point.)
That said, 2025 felt like one of the rougher years I’ve had for awhile, and I found myself glad to leave it when January 1 rolled around, as much as I continually tell myself that New Year doesn’t really mean anything and it’s all entirely arbitrary. The placebo effect of thinking I could package that period away in my memory as “another of the shit ones” and move on is a permanently attractive one even if I know better, and I’ll grab onto any straws in the hopes of things turning around soon.
All of which is to say: 2026, I might be asking a lot, but let’s try to not metaphorically kick me in the balls as much as 2025 did. I know that history and experience haven’t particularly demonstrated such a request will be successful, but if there’s one thing the last 10 years of new years have taught us, it’s that hope springs eternal. After all, what’s the alternative?