The Cutprice Guignol

I always suspected that the end of Stranger Things was going to be, for want of a better term, a bit of a mess.

Not because I particularly dislike the Duffer Brothers’ iconic horror or anything – in fact, I’ve generally quite enjoyed it, even just as proof of concept of what blockbuster horror on TV can look like. It doesn’t always entirely work, God knows, but it usually hangs together in what’s generally a pretty entertaining fantasy-horror-action series. But because the sheer weight of pressure on The Biggest Show on Earth to succeed is so enormous that it’s crushed plenty of previous victims (see also: Game of Thrones), and, for a show as high-concept as this one, the further you get into the weeds, the harder it is to hold things together.

But that all said, I was still interested in how it was going to close out its iconic near-decade-long run. Eight episodes released in three batches across the course of just over a month, this final season has been pretty much inescapable after a three-year wait to finally get here. So, with it finally finished – how did this last season actually fare?

While I appreciate the attempt to make the finale feel like a real piece of event television by broadcasting it separate from the preceding two volumes, the strange bifurcation of the story only really served to underline just how fucking slow this season was. The first volume skates by despite the bloated runtimes, but the second volume is a trudge to pretty much the same conclusion that the first came to, aside from a few minor plot details. The script is downright painful at times, with characters repeating themselves ad nauseum in between bouts of holding up random objects to try and explain a very simple analogy. Throw in some egregious examples of telling and not showing (like Will’s reference to visions that happened off-screen that served as a huge motivator for his eventual character arc), and it’s hard to believe this took three years to put together, you know? The storytelling stinks of catering to second screen watchers, constantly re-stating of the point just in case you missed it while you were watching an AI cat video on TikTok.

On top of that, the characters regularly seem as though they can’t stand to be around each other; I get that the stakes are high, but this is the Friendship is Magic horror show, you know? These relationships are part of what made the show so iconic in the first place, and most of them feel as though they’ve been boiled down to overlapping bellowing for about 60% of their screentime. Of course, it doesn’t help that the central cast expands by about twelve people every episode, leaving virtually no time for the people who were once at the centre of the show. Returning characters, like Kali (Linnea Berthelsen), are stuck hanging out in the background of group shots between ridiculously expository monologues, while new additions like Linda Hamilton as Dr Kay feel more like an attempt to cash in on genre movie cred than to develop a genuinely compelling new antagonist.

The absurd plot armour on all of the main cast strips most of the tension from scenes that should have me on the edge of my seat, with the central group having gone from “kids and teenagers with a believable and explicable amount of skill and intelligence” to “Nancy annihilating a base full of highly-trained military operatives from a makeshift turret”. Speaking of, the Duffer brothers and company clearly embraced 80s morals in this final season too, with the good guys cutting down swathes of staff members unlucky enough to have been on shift when they turned up, but don’t worry about it, because…well, they took a job as a nightshift guard at a laboratory, what did they expect but to die in a haze of bullets?

That said, there are a few decent moments scattered through these episodes, even if they’re few and far between. Will’s coming out scene was handled relatively well, even if it has been the source of much hand-wringing for both homophobes and viewers who had clung to the hope of Mike and Will ending up together. The notion of coming out to strip the fear of rejection of its sting was an interesting one, and, while there are far too many people present in the room for the moment itself, it’s appropriately teenage and bumbling, if rather idealized for the time period. Johnathan and Nancy’s relationship gets a genuinely great send-off as they acknowledge their attachment to each other via their trauma bond and why it’s felt so overwhelming, choosing to part as friends rather than lovers. And Lucas and Max remain by far the best couple in the show, by which I mean, the only one with any actual chemistry.

And, look, I have to talk a bit about the acting, because the Stranger Things child cast…well, let’s just say there’s a mixed bag of talent now that they’ve reached adulthood. Noah Schnapp was genuinely shocking in a lot of his scenes, so devoid of conviction it seemed like he was just trying to remember his lines for long enough to make it through shooting, and Millie Bobby Brown had the same facial expression for a frankly unlikely amount of her screentime. Finn Wolfhard is featured so little that it’s hard to tell if he’s any good or not, while Brett Gelman is so unbearably, insufferably irritating that I felt my eyebrows enter orbit every time he appeared on screen. With the screentime stretched so thin over such a huge main cast as it is, when the performances for some of our central characters were so dodgy, it’s hard not to get pulled out of the story as a whole.

And the story as a whole is…alright, I guess. It’s big, it’s bombastic, it’s dense, and it’s also doomed in the way so many genre shows that survive past their original intentions turn out to be – which is to say, stuck with trying to explain stuff that would have been far more compelling left ambiguous. I think the Duffer Brothers and company sort-of hold it together provided you don’t look too closely, but it inevitably feels somewhat like throwing shit at the wall to give sense to a world that was never really meant to be explained beyond that first season.

Speaking of retconning things into relevance – I really enjoy Vecna as a villain (and especially Jamie Campbell Bower’s performance in the role), but his ending was ultimately unsatisfactory to me. The emotion beats hit as they’re meant to, but there’s so much about his past (like his relationship with Joyce and Hopper, along with the actual details of his transformation) that’s still seemingly deliberately untapped. And, oh, look at that, wouldn’t you know it – there’s a play in theatres now that covers most of those unanswered questions that viewers can purchase tickets to if they were left unsatisfied by the deliberate punch-pulling subtle hints dropped in these last few episodes. A lucky coincidence, no doubt, and not an attempt to further cash-in on one of the most profitable pieces of media of the century so far even after the final credits roll.

The finale manages to land most of its emotional beats, even if it then goes on to hit them another dozen times apiece in an insufferably bloated epilogue that ends with some smug back-patting for the Duffer brothers about the power of storytelling and their role in bringing this one to life. Of course, that doesn’t really stand up to much scrutiny when you bother to glance in the direction of the show’s internal logic (why does a town that was ready to murder Eddie over his involvement in an alleged death cult cheering the Hellfire club at graduation? Where did the military go after the show’s climax? Did all those pregnant women just die horribly in the upside-down? How much do the residents of Hawkins actually know about what happened, anyway? Why is nobody bothered that Hopper has, for all intents and purposes, come back from the dead after he was said to have died in season three?), but hey, look at us, right? Try not to think too hard about the fact that the characters who died this season were the ones who suffered unimaginable abuse as children who were never given a chance to overcome it as adults. Johnathan’s making a movie, guys! It’s all going to be okay!

Fundamentally, that’s my issue with this season, and with Stranger Things as a whole: that the show has never topped, or even come close, to the small-town, character-driven storytelling of its first series. There’s been plenty to enjoy in the seasons that came since, but each of them have moved further and further away from that central premise that exploded Stranger Things into the mainstream in the first place. Frankly, this could have been the most pitch-perfect ending of all time, and I’d still think that Stranger Things should have finished after season one – a gorgeous standalone horror drama whose mysteries remained, for the most part, mysterious.

But it wasn’t a pitch-perfect ending; it was rough, frequently badly-written and poorly-acted, and shot through with more plot holes than whoever ended up on the wrong side of Nancy’s shotgun this season. It’s a shame to see the show go out on such a flat note, but, with all that said (and my God, did I have a lot to say, it seems), I’d love to know what you thought of it and the show as a whole. Jump into the Upside-Down of my comments section and let’s talk!

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(header image via The Wrap)