Yes. I think the ultimate sacrifice is the best ending, and that’s what I was hoping would happen from Season 4. It really felt like that’s the way it was headed for me, and I was hoping the Duffers wouldn’t chicken out by letting her live. But, then again, I tend not to like tidy, happy endings. The ending was happy enough for me. I actually was hoping to see a few more characters dead, but it was an homage to the 80s, and movies typically ended on a high note there.
The is allegedly a spin off to come.
Maybe some of the cover up gets addressed there. Reducing El ambiguity might occur. I’d hope not.
It seemed to me that the new kids are set up to carry on adventures but who knows?
Indeed. Leave it open to interpretation. We can choose whichever ending we want to believe. Like I said; I choose to believe she’s dead. If she’s not, I’ll feel cheated and jerked around. And those who believe she’s alive can feel satisfied everybody got a good ending. We can argue which ending is better (I think that depends on your personality and what you like in a story), but don’t ever tell us.
I don’t see it as chickening out - her dying is as big a cliche as her surviving, if not bigger. Good writing is seeing Option B (El living happily ever after) and Option B (El making the ultimate sacrifice), and finding a way to Option C.
To me, there’s nothing brave about a tragic ending. Tragedy is, after all, the oldest and most tired form of drama. But I don’t see you agreeing with me.
Likely not. I feel her heroically living is much more cliche. I don’t see it as “as big a cliche as her surviving” at all. But, yeah, I do prefer tragic endings. I polled my 9 and 11 year old what they thought, and they thought El was dead, and that was how they wanted it to end, so I guess it runs in my family. (To be fair, they also told me they were hoping for six characters to die in Season 5, so maybe my daughters have a little bloodlust.)I was also irritated by that Jonathan-saves-Steve fakeout where they showed his hand losing grip and him falling, only to be “PSYCH!” and then show Jonathan actually saving him. I hate those types of ploys.
Of all the things, this bothered me most. I also graduated high school in 1989, and for as much as I played D&D (and other RPGs) in middle and high school, I played even more in college.
All the players live, if not in the same dorm, then on the same campus, and there’s nobody to tell you to break at 1am, so the only consequence of playing all night is sleeping through your Lit final.
It’s different friends (as the older kids discuss), but they’re is so much new. Dustin will discover the Sun or SGI lab on campus, and get them all on the same MUD, and before long they’ll all be posting on usenet, and get kicked off rec.hawkins.general and then start posting on alt.conspiracy.hawkins.
I’m almost 50 and play D&D a hell of a lot more than I did as a kid.
That’s not childhood though. That’s another phase of life. Them being 11 years old and playing in Mike’s moms basement is now over. Riding bikes with each other before dinner is over. Nobody is saying that he’ll never talk to them again, or that they can’t ever play D&D again. Yes they are going to find new and exciting things, individually, as they move into college years and begin adulthood, but those years of their childhood are over. I thought that was well done and clear what they were going for there. It felt like I was saying good bye to my 80s childhood again too. Yes I had fun experiences in college and throughout my life to this point, but I’m not sure how that’s relevant to my childhood being over when I grew up.
Strangest Things.
That episode that featured a sitcomy large family (not seen before or since, IIRC) always seemed like it was trying to be a backdoor pilot.
The spinoff isn’t a rumor, the Duffer Brothers confirmed it.
Actually, two of them. The first is an animated flashback series, “Tales from '85”, that will have the original characters of the show with different voice actors. It takes place between Seasons 2 and 3.
Then there is the live action spinoff that we have less information about. Though they did say this much:
Either way, we will get an answer to the briefcase rock in the spinoff show, although we’re very light on the details. The Duffer brothers are working on it as we speak, and described it as a “clean slate.”
“Completely new characters, new town, new world, new mythology,” Matt Duffer said, adding: “No common characters.”
To me, it was more like The Big Chill.
That sounds like a new, unrelated show, not a spinoff.
Except it’s tied in to the rock with the Mind Flayer essence. Maybe even a prequel. It takes place in the same universe.
My first credit card was a Discover card, because for very young adults back then with little to no credit history, Discover was sort of the only game in town, being looser with their requirements than Visa / Mastercard (no idea how anybody qualified for a first credit card before Discover existed).
So in a way, the Discover card commercial works as 80s nostalgia just as much as the show itself!
Yeah, until it says Capital One instead of Sears.
Discover was also my first credit card that I had where my parents weren’t cosigners. It is a bit more clever of nostalgia marketing than just using some random character who is popular today.
I binged it in a week since I was at family’s house with Netflix.
Observations- Did Finn Wolfhard and Millie Bobby Brown piss off the duffers because they seemed to be pretty secondary this season. Mike had very little to actually DO most of the season–like not even a leadership spot in most of the “teams” and Ele I guess had an arc but was mostly just “girl with powers.” Max and Mike’s sister both ended up with more screentime than either of them.
….I’m sure someone has done this but what is the soldier body count in this season? And then how many are killed by Vecna and the Demogorgons and the rest by our heroes. I honestly got uncomfortable with how Hopper and Nancy and a lot of the crew were just straight up gunning down soliders. My mom, who only watched the finale, actually commented after a scene of Hopper shooting a bunch of soldiers, “He’s not actually killing them, right?” I had to break the news.
Also, did they ever address what happened to Dereks family?
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 like Mike’s coping story for what happened to Ele….
Nice reference to Hopper moving to Montauk–for those that don’t know the series was originally called “Montauk” and took place there (look up The Montauk Experiment, as to why they wanted to set it there). Netflix made them change it to a more middle-America setting
I’m not sure about Finn but David Harbour appears to have been a problem on set and particularly towards Millie Bobby Brown. (Given that he was caught lying to his wife about an affair and was put into a psychiatric hold in December, and has said that he’s been diagnosed as Bipolar, I think we can trust that it’s not a “he said/she said” situation, here.)
Maybe they talked about rewriting the whole ending season from their original plan to try and keep the two actors separate and decided that it didn’t work? (E.g. it might not have produced as good of a story or the only alternative, say, had him paired up with Winona Rider and maybe that would cause even more problems…) But so, if you want to reduce his screen time, you ultimately reduce her screen time as well.
Or…we got what they’d always planned. They just have too big of a cast.
It’s impossible to know what’s really going on behind the scenes in Hollywood, but as best as I can tell, the rumors about Harbour bullying and harassing Brown are, at best, overblown and, at worst, completely fabricated. They have appeared together many times to promote the final season, and she has publicly stated that she felt safe on set, and that she was “excited” to re-unite with Harbour for Season 5 after not filming much together in 4. It’s worth noting that the original claims were published by noted purveyors of truth (/s) The Daily Mail.
More in this article:
I avoided this thread until I could finish watching the season, so I have missed all the commentary. I’ll go back and read it, and I’m sure there is a lot of complaining about the series, but my verdict is:
I loved it. I found it to be one of the most satisfying conclusions to a TV series I’ve ever watched. Was it perfect? No. Could I generate a list of nitpicks that I would have done differently? Yes. But overall, I thought it was an epic, emotionally satisfying payoff. I loved the ambiguity of the ending - my wife and I disagree about whether El died or not, but we both still enjoyed it.
Ending a series like this is extremely, extremely difficult to do well, so I was surprised and delighted by how much I enjoyed it. I was expecting disappointment, to be honest. Looking forward to what The Duffer Brothers do next!
When you do get around to reading others’ posts, you’ll find a pretty strong consensus agreeing with everything you said here. 