# Stranger Things - Final Season
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stranger-things-final-season/1020926
**Category:** Cafe Society
**Tags:** tv-shows-scripted, netflix
**Created:** [July 16, 2025, 5:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stranger-things-final-season/1020926 "2025-07-16T17:13:16Z")
**Posts on this page:** 7
**Page:** 12
### Author:  [@hogarth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hogarth)
#### Post date: [February 2, 2026, 11:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stranger-things-final-season/1020926/221 "2026-02-02T23:18:24Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#):
>
> Or…we got what they’d always planned. They just have too big of a cast.
I call it “Ensemble Cast Syndrome” (where each episode has to get split among more and more characters).
---
### Author:  [@Push\_You\_Down](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Push_You_Down)
#### Post date: [February 3, 2026, 12:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stranger-things-final-season/1020926/222 "2026-02-03T00:50:41Z")
I was kind of hoping they’d “blood bath” it a little about halfway through. Not necessarily kill some of them but sideline them completey (like Mike’s mom).
---
### Author:  [@zbuzz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/zbuzz)
#### Post date: [February 3, 2026, 4:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stranger-things-final-season/1020926/223 "2026-02-03T04:18:24Z")
> [@Push\_You\_Down](#):
>
> The denouement worked pretty well, but although Dustin’s speech was…real weird. Like was the principal really even a character we should rail against?
I think that was Dustin’s way of honoring Eddie. Eddie had said that when he graduated he would flip off the principal, so Dustin did. He echoed some of what Eddie said about that year being their year. His speech was about nonconformity, which is what Eddie was all about. The Hellfire Lives shirt reveal. Plus, a final nod to 80s teen movies where the principal is the bad guy. The Hawkins principal even looks a bit like the principal from The Breakfast Club.
So it was more about Eddie, with the principal I think just standing in for the antithesis of Eddie.
---
### Author:  [@Mahaloth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mahaloth)
#### Post date: [February 3, 2026, 2:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stranger-things-final-season/1020926/224 "2026-02-03T14:36:28Z")
> [@zbuzz](#):
>
> So it was more about Eddie, with the principal I think just standing in for the antithesis of Eddie.
Thanks. I also found Dustin’s behavior to be really weird. I didn’t remember Eddie had said he would do that.
---
### Author:  [@Push\_You\_Down](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Push_You_Down)
#### Post date: [February 3, 2026, 7:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stranger-things-final-season/1020926/225 "2026-02-03T19:37:38Z")
Oh thank you. I did not remember that at all.
---
### Author:  [@by-tor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/by-tor)
#### Post date: [September 7, 2026, 12:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stranger-things-final-season/1020926/226 "2026-09-07T12:12:09Z")
Got around to watching season 5.
I thought is was pretty good but it has been forever since I watched the past seasons. I wonder how it holds up watching all the seasons in one go.
One thing I found disconcerting, was how fast they scaled that cliff in the final battle scene against the Mind Flayer. Perhaps Olympic rock climbers could scale cliffs that fast, but not a bunch of non-athletes. Even if those cliffs had stairs, I do not think they would have made it to the top in time.
I liked the use of illusions. In D&D, illusions can be very effective.
At first, I thought El had survived, but rewatching Kali’s scene, where she is on the floor shot, it does look like she is dead at the end of it. That scene was well before the “alternate reality-wishful version” where Kali says El does not have to die.
Even if Kali was not dead and just looked it, she was bleeding out very fast. I do not believe that she could have lasted for more than a minute or two (unconscious).
Overall, I think they did a good job with this final season of holding interest and wrapping things up.
---
### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [September 7, 2026, 1:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stranger-things-final-season/1020926/227 "2026-09-07T13:02:03Z")
I finished a week or so ago, and started my own thread, that didn’t get much traction:
> [@Missed opportunities in Stranger Things](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/missed-opportunities-in-stranger-things/1032781/1):
>
> I recently finished watching Stranger Things, and there are a lot of things that I expected to see that I didn’t.
>
> - Kali was dreadfully underused in the fight against Vecna. When your environment is a memoryscape, illusion control is, effectively, reality control. Instead, she just grabs a kitchen knife? That was the big plan? Max, or anyone, could have done that.
> - They never used the “kryptonite projectors” against Vecna. Nobody ever even suggested using them. When you’re fighting a Kryptonian, you use kryptonite.
> - Kali’s big point was that, even if Dr. Kay was killed, someone would replace her, just like she replaced Dr. Brenner. But she missed the obvious way to break the cycle: By being the people who replace Kay.
> - And that’s relevant, because what they did didn’t break the cycle. The meteor or whatever it was that Henry found as a boy came from somewhere. Where did it come from, and how? Are there any more of those mindflayer-rocks around anywhere? Or that same original one, for that matter? Could more show up?
> - Not to mention, the Russians have rift-generation tech. They were only able to get it to work in Hawkins, within the bounds of the original Upside-Down, but what’s to say they couldn’t refine it to produce them anywhere? And they didn’t need Henry’s blood to do it, either.
> - In short, once you’ve established that crazy shit can happen, you need to be prepared for the possibility that more crazy shit might happen.
> - And speaking of the Russians, we don’t see anything more from the two Russians who helped out in Season 4. You’d think you’d want everyone who’s been able to fight the monsters before on your side. They even threw out one proposed plan because they didn’t have anyone in The Party who can fly a helicopter.
> - When they tracked the Demogorgon, it led them right to the [Wall](https://gatherer.wizards.com/ME4/en-us/212/living-wall) (and you know that was the inspiration for it). Now that we know that the Demogorgons weren’t going beyond the Wall, where were they going? Climbing up the Wall to the Abyss? Then they should still have been trackable.
> - The jocks beating up Dusty at the beginning of the season were never followed up on. What happened to resolve that, and if they weren’t going to resolve it, why even include it? Did Steve clear things up with them? Or maybe explain to them that Dusty was part of the team that was fighting the demons that killed their friends (remember, they saw one of Vecna’s killings: They know there’s something supernatural going on).
> - Speaking of knowing that there’s something going on: The colonel said, in the previous season, that the reason why he was hunting Eleven was because he thought it was more plausible that she was behind the trouble than that it was due to some extradimensional monster. But then he saw the extradimensional monster slaughter his troops. He really ought to have had a face turn after that.
> - And speaking of face-turns, I was also expecting to see one from Derek. He turned for a while, but the last decision he made was to chicken out after Vecna showed him visions of his family, dead. He really needed to redeem himself somehow after that.
>
> On another note, Netflix queued me straight into an animated spinoff of the show. Is that worth watching? I’m guessing no, but I haven’t tried any of it yet.
Back to this thread, Will being gay was actually alluded to way back in Season 1. When Joyce is trying to convince Hopper to take the case seriously, there’s mention that “Lonnie [Will and Jonathan’s father] thinks that Will is a queer”, and to reinforce Hopper’s assholishness, he asks “Well is he?”.
And I could buy most of the actors aging (it looked really incongruous at the start of each season, and when they did a flashback, but within a couple of episodes that was just what they look like), it was really jarring with Holly. She went from being a barely-verbal toddler who had to be convinced to eat her mashed potatoes, to Holly the Heroic. Though they did stick a lampshade on it, with Mrs. Wheeler asking Mr. Wheeler “She’s not five any more. Do you even know how old she is now?”.
[Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stranger-things-final-season/1020926.md?page=11)