‘Stranger Things 5’ Finale Review: Duffer Brothers Achieve the Impossible With Epic Ending

Predictable? Anticlimactic? Unfair to its most iconic character?

These are among the complaints that can and are being voiced about the conclusion of “Stranger Things,” Netflix’s most popular series yet.

Terms I prefer to use, though, are thematically coherent, unerringly character-based and pretty damn gripping, even if all the exciting stuff was over 40 minutes before the final, two-hour episode ended.

Matt and Ross Duffer’s magnum opus came to a satisfying enough finish while leaving room for the countless millions who care deeply enough about it — itself quite the accomplishment in our atomized pop culture era — to nitpick the thing to death. The creators probably know that’s fun or cathartic, depending on how much the show meant to you.

But let’s not lose sight of this forest-sized accomplishment for some piles of dead leaves. What started out as a scary kids sci-fi adventure went all the way into epic coming-of-age allegory. Our core squad of adolescent geeks — Will (Noah Schnapp), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) and Mike (Finn Wolfhard) — all grew emotionally and philosophically at a pace almost equal to that which the kid actors portraying them became eligible to vote.

And in the show’s final sequence, when the guys and Sadie Sink’s Max all seemed to revert back to their Dungeons & Dragons fantasy game for comfort as grown-up life loomed, the Duffers turned regression into an expression of the kind of faith those who have lived and lost — decidedly not children — need to find to get by. The final shots involving Mike and his little sister Holly (Season 5 breakout star Nell Fisher) literally close the book on one chapter of life and open a new one for the next generation.

Just like in the real world.

Of course, the biggest deal here — more than the heroically staged, intensely intercut, visually delectable defeat of Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower), the group effort that destroyed the Mind Flayer and, um, preventing interdimensional catastrophe — is the fate of Eleven.

For years the Duffers have been reluctant to kill off a main character. Sacrificing Millie Bobby Brown’s super-powered experiment girl was both the most obvious and traumatizing choice; she’s suffered so much and garnered so much attention for this show! This is how you honor her?

But her decision to return to the Upside Down for its destruction also plays as the final step on a massive growth curve for the initially, barely human child who escaped from the Hawkins Lab. It may be true that the story a grieving Mike tells at the end undercuts this sad but probably necessary sacrifice, but the Duffers make sure to label it as speculative.

Whatever their literary shortcomings, you’ve got to admire writers who know how to bake a cake any segment of the audience can eat too.

“The Rightside Up,” as this final chapter is called, also performs minor and major formatting miracles with tropes that have grown pretty tired over five seasons.

All the dark magic, weird science, plans that fail and crawls that go nowhere, ever-evolving task groupings and the like got goosed pretty well this time around with urgent, final energy. Epiphanies landed, from turbo-warrior Nancy (Natalia Dyer) and Mike freeing Holly to Winona Ryder’s Joyce decapitating the freak that took her son to Hopper (David Harbour) coming to terms with all of his failed fathering fears.

A key goal for this finale was to pay off the often-controversial setups of Season 5, Volume 2 properly. Think there’ll be bitching about Chapter 8? Everyone seemed to find something to hate in those episodes.

I get why. There was too much exposition, repetition, in-frame character crowding, nightmare dimension expansion, murky FX, shipping disappointment, coming out speechifying obviously written by straight men (or, for the homophobes who incongruously care about a show that’s always championed the bullied, that sexuality was mentioned at all) … Name your poison, Vol. 2 had at least one to inject directly into your psyche.

But despite specific weaknesses, Episodes 5-7 (especially the latter two) were excellent examples of dramatic structuring. Most main characters had profound personal breakthroughs, giving them new strength to employ in the final battle against Vecna.

Will shared his greatest fear with all his allies. Dustin’s emotional breakdown repaired his friendship with Steve (Joe Keery). Jancy (Charlie Heaton’s Jonathan Byers is the J in that) enjoyed the most beautiful and empowering breakup in television history with a cool, sci-fi “Titanic” homage for goopy extra sauce. Steve had what seemed to be his only good idea. Holly got in touch with her courage. Max woke up. Robin (Maya Hawke) finally proved to Vickie (Amybeth McNulty) that she wasn’t ghosting her. And so forth.

Quibbles acknowledged, these were all powerful, emotionally intelligent scenes that also served overall plot functions.

And by setting up the most significant new relationship — let’s give it a number for a name, 811 — the Duffers both misdirected our expectations for how a suicide pact between El and her sister Hawkins Lab victim Kali/Eight (Linnea Berthelsen) would go and laid the groundwork for the finale’s most significant development. That’s writing, kids.

Most of the successes and failures that will be associated with how “Stranger Things” played out speak to the larger point of just what an absorbing cultural phenomenon the show was. Most viewers cared about the characters and their interactions as much as they did the world-threatening fantasy everyone faced. It’s a rare achievement when a genre TV show reaches that “Star Trek”/”X-Files” level of personal investment.

Influences-wise, the Duffers somehow managed to weave elements of Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft — polar opposites of horror writers, when you think about it — into something that stood apart from both, with direct references to “A Wrinkle in Time” and, duh, Dungeons & Dragons worked in for good measure.

That last influence was among dozens (or is it hundreds? Thousands?) of actual and virtual needle drops that made the 1980s-set show a nostalgia orgy for Gen X and the Duffer twins’ own Millennial cohort. Yet it also appealed to many members of their parents’ generation and much of their progeny. Though enmeshed in period culture, “Stranger Things’ felt fresh and immediate despite all the goofy hairdos.

Some of this season’s aspects — such as the way Kali’s shaved head combined with the design of the Upside Down Lab gave off CECOT torture prison vibes, or Vegna’s brainwashed brats lynch mobbing truth-teller Holly — feel like dispatches from 2025 news cycles.

And can anything compare to finally getting Kate Bush onto the top pop charts, nearly 40 years after the fact?

Most significant of all, the many personal breakthroughs I mentioned earlier are just part of the broader growth each young person in the story achieves through shock, torment and life-and-death struggle — you know, the things everyone nine-to-19 gets put through, or feels like they are. The Duffers always made battling demogorgons or getting vined-up in the flesh wall co-equal with dating difficulties and holding down entry-level mall jobs.

Even the fact that Brown, Wolfhard, Schnapp, Matarazzo and McLaughlin have aged beyond their roles helped sell the characters’ last steps toward maturity. It’s something very few, in fact maybe no other, long-running kids show has managed to exploit in such a way visually, let alone in how much more persuasively they came to know themselves, appreciate others and accept reality.

Of course, some will just think it looks stupid. And that’s fine, as is lamenting the outcome of your favorite ship name over all else (the terror, the thrills, the mythos …). That just means “Stranger Things” got to you on a level deeper than mere entertainment, to say nothing of Netflix’s disposable-by-design brand of churn content.

It was something worth caring about. Recognizing what is and isn’t that, by the way, is a key step in growing up.

“Stranger Things” is now streaming on Netflix.

The post ‘Stranger Things 5’ Finale Review: Duffer Brothers Achieve the Impossible With Epic Ending appeared first on TheWrap.