Stranger Things 5: The Finale
2025
🎯 Verdict
✍️ Full Review
Review for the entirety of Season 5Apart from the paranoid critique clouded by the cataract-laden lenses of many by misguidedly considering this as some form of agitprop for queer social contagion which is insane just for me to even write those words, I think this final season was pretty good. I tried to hold off as long as I could given all the negative reviews when it got released but I found no such misgivings. I'm glad I finally watched it. Even with some of its flaws, Stranger Things still tried to tie all the strings into a cohesive premise while maintaining a blast of a swan song. Season 5 goes back to the drawing board multiple times and characters get separate and regroup in a quintessential manner reminding us in the form of call backs to the season 1 which is still the best in the entire series. The season also maintains every major character's side quests and how they are woven into the larger scheme of things doing their part. Some small, some formidable. The show pivots sometimes, works on hunches and coincidences. What did people expect!! It's a show for teenagers and grownups alike based on a composite of children's board game. It has a video game like structure. Not your jam, then go watch From. Even that show has some wacky supernatural wild choices. Granted this season didn't handle the slow transition phase well like other seasons when it used to gradually build up suspense by taking its sweet time like the first act of a horror movie until something crazy gets revealed. It felt as though there was a deadline set and the natural ways of story progression were obstructed and forced into a fast paced narrative. But, still for the most part, it has everything. Spectacle, action, horror, amazing single take shots, comedy banter, memories, catharsis, nostalgia, full circle moments, guest appearances, backstory, experiments, theories, nods to classic novels, 80s' props. And Linda Hamilton. Everything. It's not perfect like the first season. But, then, just a few handful of rare shows historically have succeeded at that. It's not perfect but it's not mediocre middling crap either. I have seen worse finales. Surely didn't need a 45-minute-long denouement. As far as the absence of packs of demogorgons in the final episode, it was a poor but strategically practical choice I think given the sheer power and force of those things against the teenage muscles and minds. But, still it requires quite a bit of convenient suspension of disbelief. But, all in all that alone couldn't dim the excitement and so much of commotion and happenings packed inside one single episode. In decades to come, Stranger Things will live on rent free especially inside the minds of board games and comic books loving nerds and Sci-Fi horror genre nuts. And of course, the fans of The Goonies.