Stranger Things season 5 finale review: “Shows off both the best and the worst of Hawkins”

Be warned: this article contains full spoilers for the Stranger Things series finale, 'The Rightside Up.”'

There’s a lot of pressure on a finale to get things right. You can have multiple great seasons of a TV series, episodes that are considered some of the best hours ever produced, but if you whiff that ending, boy, folks will argue about it until the end of time. Whether it’s a head-scratching decision about who will become King of Westeros, or questions about whether they were dead the whole time (they were not), a bad finale can completely hobble the long-term impact of a series.

So, what about Stranger Things? Given an already divisive final season, and a belated run that compressed several short years of school into a decade of real time, and fan expectations through the absolute roof with theories going wild online about secret episodes and missing footage… Well, there was no way “The Rightside Up” could satisfy everyone. In fact, given the over two-hour length of the episode, it ends up hitting every note it possibly can in an effort to please everyone, showing off both the worst and the best of Hawkins.

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That might be a curious order to put things in, but the first hour and change of the finale is a shoddily filmed mess that is mostly deadly serious and turns our characters into action heroes far from the Hawkins kids we know and love. There’s a point halfway through where most of the group finds themselves in space, on another planet, after having traveled through the Upside Down, which turns out to be a dimensional wormhole between Earth and a place they call The Abyss, and the best they can muster is a dig at Neil Armstrong.

Yes, there should be a learning curve, and having the characters constantly be behind the ball is no fun either. But watching sequences of Mike (Finn Wolfhard), who has thus far never been in the Upside Down, reacting rather nonchalantly to the whole thing points to how far we’ve come from the series’ humble beginnings.

Into the Abyss

To take a small step back, a quick word about the plot: everyone heads into the Upside Down and/or The Abyss to stop Vecna/Henry Creel (Jamie Campbell Bower) from ramming The Abyss into Earth, and turning Earth into a Demogorgon’s playground. They succeed, kill Vecna, destroy the Upside Down, and in the process, Millie Bobby Brown’s Eleven (maybe) dies, and then the last 40 minutes of the episode are wrap-up as we find out what happened to most of the characters 18 months later.

The way the finale is structured, though, it’s one big wind-up that never quite connects, and then a slow walk back to the dugout just in time to give a line of handshakes to the opposing team. There’s some good stuff in the first hour and change, to be sure. Bower makes a sympathetic villain, particularly once we discover Henry’s full backstory and how he’s not quite in control of his destiny, in a plotline cribbed right from Return of the Jedi.

And watching him stalk a group of children while Holly (Nell Fisher), the youngest Wheeler kid, steps up to fight back, has a spark of the original kids-versus-monsters plot of the series that the rest of the finale is missing. Similarly, a trip through Eleven’s mind, then Henry’s, has some neat visuals, from the now-iconic wet, black space, to a scene set at a nightmare play Henry starred in back in high school.

We can be heroes

But the rest of the battle is set in an uncanny valley, almost literally, that looks like it would have been at home in 1960s Star Trek with a few more digital bells and whistles. A fight with a massive kaiju Mind Flayer is less terrifying than improbable… It recycles plot points from earlier, better seasons, and as competent as these kids have become – one episode ago, Nancy suddenly morphed into a combo of Ripley from the Alien movies and Rambo – it still strains credulity that they’d be able to stand up to a spider monster with legs as tall as skyscrapers.

At the same time, the final battle between Eleven and Vecna mostly involves them tossing each other around a sandy cave, and lacks the emotional resonance of a similarly staged battle in Season 4 that had the benefit of being fought inside a Hawkins Middle School dance.

Oh, and the less said about the gruesome end of Vecna, the better. Earlier in the episode, Hopper (David Harbour) gives a big speech to Eleven about breaking the cycle of violence they’ve been stuck in. Clearly, that doesn’t apply to Joyce Byers (Winona Byer) telling Vecna, “You fucked with the wrong family,” and then chopping his neck with an axe about a dozen times until his head falls off. It’s supposed to be satisfying, as we watch scenes of all the pain Vecna has caused, interspersed with axe chops. Instead, it’s sadistic.

Add on to that, we get the enormously frustrating “death” of Eleven, which is a level of unnecessary self-sacrifice that only comes with a series finale, where you can get away with that sort of thing. It also possibly gets undone by the end of the episode, which is frustrating in its own way – if she’s alive, why wouldn’t she come back to tell her friends, particularly since they already played this plot point in Season 2?

But part of the frustration is it’s tied to the subplot involving the US government trying to create more psychic super-soldiers, which is a major throughline of the show, but a bit of a comedown after the kaiju fight to have to face the evil Dr. Kay (Linda Hamilton), whose general motivation seems to be “when’s lunch?”

Party time! Excellent!

That’s the bad, the worst impulses of a show that was inspired by ‘80s action movies before turning into one. It’s the second part, the final 40 minutes wrapping up – that’s the best of Stranger Things. And it’s simply because the show settles down and remembers that a) we love these characters, and b) letting humans do human things is fun.

Every absent emotion that the plot-heavy first half fails to elicit isn’t necessarily redeemed by the second half, but that’s where the tears and laughs are saved for. Instead of the deadly serious Hopper of the first half, you get sly rolling of eyes at nerd references, an emotional pep talk to Mike, and an adorable proposal scene when he and Joyce finally get that meal at Enzo’s.

Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) gives a delightful speech at graduation, ending with the reveal of a “Hellfire Lives” shirt, a better tribute the the departed Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn) than Dustin and Steve (Joe Keery) yelling “For Eddie” while cutting open poorly CGI-ed egg sacs on the underside of a monster. A rooftop scene with the older “kids” is sweet and demands a spinoff. And the final scene of the “kid” characters playing D&D really does bring things full circle in an emotionally satisfying way.

So to bring this review full circle as well, the note Stranger Things leaves audiences on is satisfying, knowing these kids have changed – not too much, but enough so they can grow up to be happy, healthy adults despite everything they’ve been through.

“The Rightside Up” may or may not fall on the right side of history – only time will tell on that front, and there will be gripes and analysis and recriminations, and questions about what actually happened to Eleven. But the finale also left us with the best of Hawkins, even if it started with some of the worst. It’s not a perfect 20, to use D&D parlance, but when Dustin gives big ups to “Chaotic Good” in his graduation speech, it really brings what worked about this show home… Particularly with this final episode, it was indeed very chaotic. But sometimes, particularly towards the end? It was also very, very good.

Stranger Things season 5 volume 3 is streaming now on Netflix. If you need a recap before diving into the finale, dig into our spoiler-filled Stranger Things season 5 volume 2 finale ending explained.