Stranger Things Started as a Triumph of Trauma Bonding. It Ended as a Casualty of the Franchise Machine

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This article discusses plot points from Stranger Things Season 5, Part 2.

Think back to the summer of 2016. Britain had just voted to leave the European Union, and the world was reeling. Barack Obama was still president, and Donald Trump hadn’t yet been elected. Most experts predicted a Hillary Clinton win, even with a tense election filled with heated arguments and constant news about her emails – a win that was expected to maintain the usual standards of democracy. Twitter was still known as Twitter, and the idea that people could be radicalized through platforms like Facebook and YouTube seemed unlikely. Tragically, on July 14th, a terrorist attack during a Bastille Day celebration in Nice left 86 people dead.

On the day a military coup was attempted in Turkey, Netflix released Stranger Things. Created by the Duffer brothers, a pair of relatively unknown twins, and starring Winona Ryder – whose past roles in films like Beetlejuice, Heathers, and Mermaids appealed to Gen X viewers – the show felt like a fun, family-friendly trip back to the 1980s, complete with a great soundtrack. It debuted at a time when many people were looking for an escape from what felt like increasingly chaotic events, and before streaming TV had become the norm. The ability to watch an entire season at once was still exciting, and the show’s mix of charming kids, a nostalgic setting, scary creatures, and references to classic horror and sci-fi filmmakers like Stephen King, John Carpenter, and Steven Spielberg quickly made Stranger Things Netflix’s first big hit. However, almost ten years later, as the series nears its end, it’s difficult to remember the show as anything other than the overextended franchise it has become.

Even though it’s hard to recapture the initial excitement of watching it back in the summer of 2016, rewatching the first episode of Stranger Things reminded me why I loved it. At just over 45 minutes (without credits), it’s a surprisingly well-paced and engaging introduction to the story. The episode begins with Will Byers, a sensitive middle schooler played by Noah Schnapp, being kidnapped by a mysterious creature after a long Dungeons & Dragons game with his close friends. It ends with them meeting Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), a girl with special powers who has escaped from a nearby research facility. But what really stands out, even now, is everything that happens in between. Over roughly 24 hours in November 1983, the creators skillfully establish the world of Hawkins, Indiana—a seemingly normal town that hides a terrifying connection to another dimension.

The show immediately transports us to a nostalgic past with its warm, grainy visuals and unsettling flickering lights. We’re quickly introduced to a large group of characters and learn about their lives in the town of Hawkins – their connections to each other and how the community views them. The boys face bullying – Dustin because of his stutter and Lucas due to his race. Will’s mother, Joyce, and brother, Jonathan, struggle with the judgment that comes with being a single-parent, working-class family in a town where most families are well-off. Through Mike’s sister, Nancy, we get a look inside Hawkins High. She’s a driven student whose focus has been disrupted by a relationship with the popular, but arrogant, Steve. As Joyce reports Will missing, we meet Chief Hopper, a divorced and grieving police officer, and sense a complex connection between them. Brief glimpses of Hawkins National Laboratory, overseen by the cold Dr. Brenner, hint at something dangerous and otherworldly. When a runaway girl named Eleven arrives at a diner – a striking image of her bald head and hospital gown as she devours fries – Brenner’s team pretends to be social workers, kills the diner owner, but fails to recapture her.

Everyone recognized that Stranger Things wasn’t inventing a completely new story, but it felt surprisingly new and exciting. The creators, the Duffer brothers, clearly drew inspiration from classic films and shows – like E.T., Tim Burton’s gothic teen stories, the horror of John Carpenter and Stephen King, and the teen dramas of John Hughes and Freaks and Geeks. While the characters fit familiar molds, the show gave them enough unique emotional depth – like Will’s gentle nature, Eleven’s joy in simple things, and Joyce’s unwavering love for her son – to make viewers truly care about them. The story itself was straightforward: Will’s disappearance and Eleven’s arrival lead the group into a terrifying alternate dimension called the Upside Down, and they ultimately rescue him with Eleven’s psychic powers. The show’s eight episodes, each around an hour long, were the ideal length for a captivating binge-watch that updated classic monster stories by making the town of Hawkins a fun, albeit spooky, place to spend time.

The charm of Stranger Things faded as it transformed into a full-blown franchise – a crucial move for Netflix as it competed with new streaming services like Disney+ and HBO Max, which already had huge libraries of popular content from Marvel, DC, Star Wars, and more. The show spawned numerous spin-offs, including aftershows, podcasts, video games, and even a Broadway prequel, plus a ton of merchandise. (An animated series, Stranger Things: Tales From ’85, is coming next year.) Sadly, the storytelling suffered. The show abandoned the focused approach of its first season, instead stretching out characters, plot points, and settings to create as much marketable content as possible. When the creators, the Duffer brothers, originally planned a second season for what was meant to be a short, self-contained story, Netflix pushed them to expand it into five seasons total, and it shows.

Season 2, released around Halloween 2017, felt like a bigger, more lavish version of the first season. It included an unnecessary episode featuring Eleven’s trip to Chicago and introduced many new characters, making it obvious the show was testing the waters for a potential spin-off. Season 3 stood out with its setting in a 1980s mall, though this also meant a lot of obvious product placement. While the show expanded, not all changes were negative. As the young actors matured and their initial charm wasn’t enough to mask weaker performances, Stranger Things brought in more talented actors like Sadie Sink and Maya Hawke.

Season 4 of Stranger Things, released in 2022—almost three years after the Starcourt Mall’s destruction—represented a noticeable drop in quality. As streaming services battled for viewers during and after pandemic lockdowns, Netflix split the season, releasing the first seven episodes in May and the final two in July. Episode lengths, which had been gradually increasing since the first season, doubled, leading to a particularly slow, two-and-a-half-hour finale that was difficult to watch all at once. The story split the characters apart, with the Byers family and Eleven moving to California and Hopper stuck in a strangely out-of-place Soviet prison. This felt like a departure from what fans loved about the show—its focus on the town of Hawkins. Combined with repetitive dialogue and unnecessarily drawn-out scenes, the season felt bloated and self-indulgent, yet lacked a clear direction. While the season did introduce a new audience to Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill,” even that highlight became overplayed after thirteen hours of viewing, mirroring the feeling of the storylines themselves.

Season 5 feels like what Season 4 should have been, had Netflix not stretched a story that had already gone on far too long. After another three-year break – during which the young actors grew up, got married, had children, and even made movies – the new season was released in frustrating parts: four episodes before Thanksgiving, three at Christmas, and a two-hour finale scheduled for New Year’s Eve. Now, everyone is back in a broken Hawkins, which is occupied by the military and dangerously open to the terrifying Upside Down. They’re preparing for a final battle against Vecna, the villain from last season who survived and is now even more powerful. As usual, the fate of the world rests on the shoulders of this determined group.

The final season’s first seven episodes really highlight problems that have been building for years. The episodes feel overly long and lack focus, and the monster fights become predictable. With so many characters, it’s hard to keep track of everyone, especially since they’ve all moved far away from the familiar settings where we first met them. Most of the characters spend their time making small steps toward saving the world, constantly explaining and re-explaining their plans – not just to each other, but also to the audience, as if we need everything spelled out. It feels like watching a video game where you spend five minutes reading instructions for every one minute of gameplay. Like many huge franchises, Stranger Things is now burdened by catering to fans and an overwhelming amount of backstory.

It’s easy to imagine a monster show losing its spark after a while, but watching the fifth season of Stranger Things got me thinking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which managed to stay engaging for an incredible 144 episodes. Both shows use supernatural threats as a way to explore the challenges of growing up, but Buffy really excelled at creating memorable characters and letting us see them evolve through their experiences. What struck me is how Stranger Things, like so many franchises, seems to keep its characters deliberately surface-level – almost like they’re afraid of making them too specific or risking alienating viewers. The way they handled Will’s coming out felt particularly strange. After years of hinting, the show finally addressed it, but even then, it was phrased as ‘I don’t like girls’ instead of simply ‘I like boys.’ Honestly, after five seasons, what have we really learned about Will, Mike, Lucas, or Dustin that wasn’t already apparent in the very first season? They feel…stuck.

Both Buffy and Stranger Things build their seasons toward a final showdown with a major villain – a concept Buffy famously named the ‘big bad.’ However, Buffy also took time to explore its imaginative world with unique episodes like silent installments and musicals, and wasn’t afraid to show the emotional toll of its conflicts. Stranger Things, especially after its strong first season, has become a predictable and somewhat lifeless series. Once a show becomes a franchise, it seems to prioritize consistently delivering what fans expect over taking creative risks or striving for quality. It just needs to keep the content coming at a steady pace to maintain audience interest.

Okay, so this couple, Jonathan and Nancy – honestly, I rarely hear anyone talk about them as a pair – they split up while stuck in this room filled with…well, it looked like pink, gooey Marshmallow Fluff, but seriously dangerous. And their big realization? All they really had in common was “shared trauma.” It struck me as a bit of a modern phrase to use for 1980s kids, but it got me thinking. I think that shared trauma is a big reason Stranger Things has lasted as long as it has. The numbers are huge – Season 4 is still in Netflix’s top three most-watched, and the first part of Season 5 apparently broke records. But honestly? How many people are raving about it? Most of the talk I hear is just complaints about how ridiculously long each episode is.

Even people who aren’t eagerly awaiting the last episodes of Stranger Things will likely watch them eventually – maybe even while recovering from New Year’s celebrations. But it won’t be for a surprising or satisfying ending. Instead, we’ll watch to recapture the comfort the show once provided during a particularly difficult time. Ten years later, we’re still grappling with those feelings and connecting with each other through shared memories of what Stranger Things meant to us.

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2025-12-26 15:07