Stranger Things has finally come to an end and left us with some big complicated feels about how it all went down. Both of us (Jennifer and Beth) are bona fide fans who have seen prior seasons multiple times, and we had remarkably similar reactions to the fifth season, especially the series finale. So we decided to co-write a review, discussing everything we liked about it as well as kvetching about the things we definitely didn’t like—a shared “airing of grievances.”
(WARNING: Many, many spoilers below in the interest of a thorough analysis.)
Season 4 ended with Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) opening the fourth gate that allowed the Upside Down to leak into Hawkins. We got an 18-month time jump for S5, Vol. 1, but in a way, we came full circle, since those events coincided with the third anniversary of Will’s (Noah Schnapp) original disappearance in S1.
Hawkins was now under military occupation, and Vecna was targeting a new group of young children in his human form under the pseudonym “Mr. Whatsit” (a nod to A Wrinkle in Time). He kidnapped Holly Wheeler (Nell Fisher) and took her body to another dimension (the Abyss), while her consciousness was trapped in Vecna’s mind. There she found an ally in Max (Sadie Sink), still in a coma in Hawkins, but also trapped in Vecna’s mind, hiding in one of his old memories. Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) was struggling to process his grief over losing Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn) in S4, causing a rift with Steve (Joe Keery). The rest of the gang was devoted to stockpiling supplies and helping Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and Hopper (David Harbour) track down Vecna in the Upside Down. They found Kali/Eight (Linnea Berthelsen), Eleven’s psychic “sister,” instead, being held captive in a military laboratory.
Things came to a head at the military base when Vecna’s demogorgons attacked to take more children (he needed 12), wiping out most of the soldiers in record time. The big reveal was that, as a result of being kidnapped by Vecna in S1, Will has his own supernatural powers. He can tap into Vecna’s hive mind and manipulate those powers for his own purposes. He used his newfound powers to save his friends from the demogorgons. It was a bit of a deus ex machina move but one that previously had been foreshadowed, so we’ll allow it. But Vecna successfully took the children for his master plan of using their weak child minds to “reshape the world.”
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