Game Over: ‘Stranger Things’ ends on (New Year’s) Eve of Destruction…

The end was not only nigh, but feature-length as a two-hour plus episode of Stranger Things attempted to tie-off or trim every major thread from its five season run. Did it do so successfully? Well, mostly. Was it perfect… no, but it was a success on a genre-packed, guilty-pleasure level that few shows actually achieve.

*spoilers*

After near-misses, near-hits and lots of things going horribly wrong, our heroes combined efforts save the day – mostly. You expected anything less? This is a finale that tries to appeal to everyone and that means there’s some hits and some misses. In what seems a Return of the Jedi moment, we get clarity on how Jamie Campbell Bower’s Henry became Vecna and he gets a chance to free himself as a puppet of the extra-dimensional Mind-Flayer, though, sadly, there’s no Darth Vader last-minute redemption as Henry feels it’s far too late to claw back his humanity. It takes everyone to defeat him on a physical and mental level, but they do so in fine form and in a scene that likely has the GDP  budget of a small European country. However, it’s far from over. Though it’s technically the second time it’s happened in the run, we get a singularly memorable F-bomb which, of course, goes to Winona Ryder’s Joyce who may have been reduced to a more of a supporting role this season but has – as a montage shows – been through hell and back with the loss of loved ones and near-death experiences over the run. (Seriously – go back and watch the first season and her slow breakdown after Will goes missing for just how good she can be, indeed… that first run is full to the brim of powerhouse moments for all the cast). ‘You fucked with the wrong family!‘ she defiantly announces, delivering the satisfying death blow and beheading to an already impaled Vecna, making sure he isn’t going to escape death once more.

The show itself had overtly embraced its homages so that it ultimately feels less like something unique in its own right and more a celebration of everything that inspired it… and the longer it continued, the harder it was always going to be to offer a fully-functional ending on its own terms. But  ‘The Rightside Up‘  finishes things off nicely, a little scrambled but far grander than the ambitions of the first season… yet with the same feeling that its true power comes from family…

The show has always boasted good VFX, but here the already impressive Upside Down had to exist in the shadow of further dimensions and the resulting set-pieces are outstanding, giving some big-screen feature films a challenge (and those who caught the finale at one of the sold-out simultaneous multiplex screenings of the finale certainly got value for money). With Vecna vanquished, the massive Mind-Flayer – the real bad-guy of the piece – strode across the rocky terrain like some huge spider-like entity and gave us what felt like a full-on boss-level ending to a video ‘game’ and the eventual destruction of the upside Down felt like a higher resolution of those old nuclear bomb destruction videos of old.  Suitable meta-level soundtracks often help period pieces – transporting the audience back on a sensory level and that’s true here. We’ve already had Kate Bush‘s Running up that Hill making a huge impact in Season Four and the Season Five’s trailer gave us Queen‘s Who Wants to Live Forever? theme from Highlander. There’d been mention that there’d be at least one song that had never been licensed for television before and in the end we get not one but two perfectly-appropriate tracks from Prince (When Doves Cry and Purple Rain).

There were plenty of rumours of major character deaths and every reason to believe that the show might feel the need for some significant casualties given the nature of ‘final battle’ mythologies.  There were gunshots, explosions, big monsters and sudden cuts to black that suggested unsurvivable threats, but most bullets missed their mark by such a degree that one wonders how many Stormtroopers were on day-player rates. (Though the under-used Kali – not the potential traitor we thought she might be – was felled early-on by army bullets). However, when all was said and done, this was less the Joss Whedon approach of having a true tragedy or fickle fate inform the eventual win, but more so the Steven Moffat approach of threatening a lot and setting up a string of heart-wrenching fatalities but having some plot device mean that the sharper edges were rounded off and, at most, things were delivered with a bittersweet wink that it was all going to be okay. There’s that moment when the story appears to be over and the heroes have won and you look at the clock and realise that there’s still forty-five minutes of the Rightside Up to go. Uh-oh. That can only mean that there’s a chance defeat will be snatched from the jaws of victory. The pesky Army, led by Linda Hamilton’s Doctor Kay, arrive just after the nick of time and screw things up. Eleven, who had apparently decided to stay alive – despite Kali’s observations that they need to sacrifice themselves otherwise Kay’s forces will never leave them alone and could once again create monster – makes sure everyone else is safe before apparently deciding Kali was actually right and she stays at the edge of the portal and is wiped from existence along with the Upside Down. Or was she?

At the very end of the episode, Mike, as Storyteller, suggests some inconsistencies in what they experienced and suggests that with her dying breath, Kali spun some of her magic to allow Eleven to only appear to die, enabling her to disappear and removing the threat of pursuit. It’s a nice way to reassure the audience that maybe things were okay after all. (At the risk of being Grinchy, while Mike is right that the power-dampeners/inhibitors should have stopped Eleven from using her powers in those final seconds, she also shouldn’t have been able to reach into his mind for one last goodbye and surely Kali was dead long before the main stand-off?  However, like the cast and Fox Mulder, ‘I want to believe…‘).

Packed as it was – the Duffer Brothers have a tendency to introduce lots of new characters without losing the old – some characters still felt a little surplus to requirements. Though they have their parts to play in how events play out, both Linnea Berthelsen’s Kali and Linda Hamilton’s Doctor Kay feel underwritten, often barely there for entire episodes or reduced to a few lines until they had to do one prescribed action. Honestly, Hamilton in particular feels like indulgent stunt casting in a role that anyone could have played. She’s never quite the real threat she could have been and after the denouement she’s basically discarded with no real resolution.

Leaked photos had shown some of our characters appearing several years later, with some suggesting time-travel might be a focus of the finale. In the end, it was actually just the almost-standard-episode-length epilogue (move over Lord of the Rings) which was set eighteen months later as some of the characters graduated Hawkins High School and the older kids meet up to discuss what they’re now doing and reminisce their stories of survival. Dustin suggested to the audience that the awful things Hawkins had endured did, at least, break down barriers and united everyone be they geek, jock, friend or adolescent foe. he also flicked the physical and metaphorical finger at the establishment, celebrating Eddie with a Hellfire t-shirt which gets a resounding cheer from the students and watching television audience. For a series that has favoured homages to the forces of the Eighties, it does feel more than a little John Hughes and I can’t have been the only person wondering for a second if the graduation would go the way of Buffy’s Sunnydale ceremony. Max is all mended, and together with Lucas, Nancy is stretching her wings, Jonathan is off to make films and Steve is a… sex-ed teacher? Now, that’s stranger. But on another anticipated note, Hopper (David Harbour) finally proposes to Joyce (Winona Ryder) – she says ‘yes‘ of course -and tells her that he’s considering taking a job as a police chief in Montauk, Long Island. That’s a slightly deeper dive into the history of Stranger Things as the Duffer Brothers’ original pitch for the show was located there until a last-minute switch to Hawkins and Indiana.

At the very end, it was only right that we finished Stranger Things by going full circle. Mike, Max, Dustin and Will are seen finishing a game of Dungeons and Dragons and then it’s handed off to a new generation that includes Holly and Derek. In many ways, this was always going to be the kind of final scene the show would provide. If the final battle with the Mind-Flayer felt like the climax of IT (but dialed up to 11), then the very final minutes are pure Stand By Me – even depicting Finn Wolfhard as a writer looking back on what’s happened. It honestly felt a little too tied up, a little too safe, pedestrian even twee for a show that’s always embraced the power of magic and grown darker by the turning of its seasons. Personally, I think we needed the brave sacrifices of more characters and there to be a little more consequence. We should celebrate the survivors, but not feel like it’s all been a bad dream and now they’re off to face the world. The laughter and camaraderie is welcome, and people process trauma in different ways, but come just a little too easily, like the finale of a much lighter-toned sit-com. So, no, it’s not a perfect sign-off for the ages, but a solid enough one to enjoy…and, truth be known, the multitude of threads and collective high expectations meant it was never likely to satisfy completely. The show itself had overtly embraced its homages so that it ultimately feels less like something unique in its own right and more a celebration of everything that inspired it… and the longer it continued, the harder it was always going to be to offer a fully-functional ending on its own terms. But The Rightside Up finishes things off nicely, a little scrambled but far grander than the ambitions of the first season… yet with the same feeling that its true power comes from family. Both may demand a rewatch.

Everything else is the roll of a dice…