\u201cSomething is coming,\u201d a young boy whispers to his assembled friends. \u201cSomething hungry for blood.\u201d It\u2019s 1983 \u2013 or 2016 \u2013 and you\u2019re in Hawkins, Indiana \u2013 or on your sofa \u2013 playing Dungeons & Dragons… or watching Netflix<\/a>\u2019s Stranger Things<\/a>. Over the decade since we first encountered the youthful protagonists, the show, created by the Duffer Brothers, has become an international sensation, launching careers and spawning an empire of video games, novelisations, podcasts and a stage play. Now, it ends where it began, with one last roll of the dice for our intrepid players.<\/p>\n With the entire world imperilled by the conquest of Vecna (Jamie Campbell-Bower), the gang execute their final, desperate plan. Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) will head into the Abyss, team up with Max (Sadie Sink) and attempt to inveigle Vecna\u2019s vessels \u2013 the kidnapped children, including Holly Wheeler (Nell Fisher) \u2013 out of his psychic prison. If they can do this, they might be able to set up a final showdown with Upside Down\u2019s dark overlord \u2013 one where El will need all the help she can get. \u201cOne last fight,\u201d Mike tells his compadres, \u201cand this whole nightmare, it\u2019ll be over.\u201d And so off they trot, on a patience-testing feature-length finale that will take them into the belly of the beast \u2013 and viewers into the bowels of befuddlement.<\/p>\n This final season of Stranger Things, arriving after a three-year hiatus, has felt burdened with a lot of responsibilities. The actors have (largely) moved on to other projects and aged out of their roles, and it\u2019s clear that the protracted story needed wrapping up. But the show is still Netflix\u2019s most important original IP, and its conclusion a chance to distract from a disappointing year (creatively). Yet the final season has received a mixed response, as the tangle of narrative threads starts to obscure the show\u2019s famously zingy chemistry. \u201cWe\u2019re like Dorothy in Oz,\u201d Max laments, \u201cexcept there\u2019s no Yellow Brick Road.\u201d And even with the end in sight, the show is perilously confusing. What exactly is the Upside Down? How does the Abyss function? Why is Vecna using these stolen children? What is the relationship between Henry Creel, the Mind Flayer, Dr Brenner and Eleven? And why did the show cast Linda Hamilton and then only give her about five minutes of screen time? <\/p>\n The plot of this series has left me \u2013 like many of the show\u2019s fans, according to the internet \u2013 baffled. But then again, the great success of Stranger Things has always been its casting, not its writing. Winona Ryder\u2019s Joyce was a superb anchor for the show\u2019s emotions, yet she has been sidelined this season, with the writers apparently unsure how to integrate her into a more action-based narrative. David Harbour, similarly, was an inspired booking: gruff, broken, but ultimately likeable. And in its young cast, Netflix has picked a few stars: Finn Wolfhard has grown into a charismatic screen presence, Dustin Matarazzo has natural comic timing, and Sink is now a legitimate dramatic actor. (It is hard to avoid the feeling that Netflix is grooming its new young star, Fisher, for a possible spin-off.) In Joe Keery and Maya Hawke (Steve Harrington and Robin Buckley, respectively), it unearthed two plausible A-listers, and perhaps the best piece of later casting was Campbell-Bower \u2013 best known for turns in Sweeney Todd and Harry Potter \u2013 in the dual role of Vecna and Creel. His performance, in particular, elevates this finale.<\/p>\n It feels a shame, then, that this fifth and final season has deviated so far from the show\u2019s established character work, and become just another CGI rock\u2019em sock\u2019em adventure. From normal kids, they\u2019ve become \u201cinterdimensional space travellers\u201d. Dustin has gone from a smart lad to a literal astrophysicist; Nancy, from a surprisingly tough prom queen to an Ellen Ripley-esque badass. Some of this is character development, but much of it is a consequence of the stakes being raised higher and higher, the threat becoming greater and greater. \u201cThey had a lot more to overcome than just puberty,\u201d Hopper tells Joyce. No s***. They\u2019re now action heroes who can take on kaijus and make the United States military look like Darth Vader\u2019s stormtroopers.<\/p>\n In the end, the Duffer Brothers just about manage to right the ship in the final act. There\u2019s a degree of fan service to this (Will\u2019s coming out scene, in the penultimate episode, was a particularly clunky moment where the discourse seemed to collide with the narrative), but it ensures that each of our central characters \u2013 El, Mike, Will, Dustin, Lucas, Max, Nancy, Jonathan, Steve, Robin, Joyce and Hop \u2013 are given a send-off that rounds out their arc. This helps to offset the show\u2019s Upside Down denouement, which is interminable, anticlimactic and so confusing that it\u2019s hard not to give up on the exposition.<\/p>\n Wormholes, parallel worlds, hive minds, dimensions, portals and rifts. Don\u2019t let all this pseudoscientific guff distract from the fact that Stranger Things is, in the end, a show about growing up in a boring town in the middle of nowhere. Matt and Ross Duffer \u2013 inspired by The Goonies and ET \u2013 have created a coming-of-age saga for the present day. It might have lost its way in a maze of sci-fi bunkum, but it will still influence a generation of viewers in much the same way that, a couple of decades ago, the works of Steven Spielberg inspired two young brothers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":485374,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[171,173,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-485373","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-tv","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115821431835455156","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485373\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/485374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Eleven](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Screenshot-2025-12-31-at-10-46-45.png\")
Eleven in the \u2018Stranger Things\u2019 finale (Netflix)<\/p>\n