Review: Stranger Things’ frustrating finale didn’t quite stick the landing

Summary

Unlike the exposition of Brenner and Vecna in S4, we get zero insight into Kay’s motivations or goals in S5 other than the paper-thin and seemingly self-defeating aim of creating more numbered children. It’s unclear what Kay understands about the current situation in Hawkins and why she doesn’t care about it. As someone who is trying to restart Brenner’s work, she seems to be unaware of what the Upside Down is—a wormhole, it turns out, linking Hawkins to a distant world dubbed the Abyss—and the extreme existential threat it enables. She merely spends her time ruthlessly barking orders and poking at hivemind vines—a mindless plot and a waste of Hamilton’s talents. Meanwhile, Dustin easily stumbles upon the CliffsNotes version, aka Brenner’s notes, which are just sitting out in the Upside Down Hawkins National Lab, which Kay had access to for 18 months. A fractured mythology This all ties into a Broadway spin-off play, Stranger Things: The First Shadow, which was written amid S4 and explores One’s and Brenner’s origins more. In the play’s prologue, it’s revealed that the military accidentally transported a military ship to the Abyss in 1943 while trying to make the ship invisible. The captain and sole survivor of the ship was Brenner’s father, who returned with altered blood. A young Henry Creel, meanwhile, stumbles upon a government scientist in a cave who was carrying a Mind Flayer fragment tied to that military mishap, which is how Henry gains his powers and becomes One/Vecna. The problem is that the percentage of Stranger Things fans who actually saw the play, or even read the Wikipedia summary, is small compared to the total viewership—so many people tuned in for the New Year’s Eve finale, in fact, that it crashed the site, and that’s not counting the more than 1 million who opted to watch in theaters. Thus far, the Duffer brothers have really nailed building up the show’s mythology, particularly the revelations of S4 with the spooky Creel House legend and its co...