Kate Beckett said:

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So do we believe Mike when he says El is still alive? It makes sense when you think about it power wise.

I did cry at the end, because I am a sap and it's ending after 9 years.

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I think it was legit that El is alive.

I've been one of the most vocal critics on this thread about this season. I think that after 7 episodes wandering in the wilderness they finally, somehow, against all odds found their way back home and stuck the landing.

A couple too many monologues still early on on, but in the end this episode did what I was wanting them to do all season...boil it back down our core group (plus Robin, I suppose). The group that started the fight against the Mindflayer-Vecna ended it. Looping the tertiary characters in for the wrap-up was fine and fitting, as was the future arcs for our characters, and I loved the D&D game and basement ending.

And finally, yes, I choose to believe Eleven made it out alive.

Was kind of worried but I thought the finale was well done and it ended on a good note!

That episode felt like one of the most unlikely landing sticks of all time.

The action stuff was fun enough, but an hour-long denouement seemed excessive.

The goopy set looked like something out of a high school production. The tissue membrane holding the kids wasn't much better. The spider thing was kind of cool, though.

I had binged whole series with my teenage daughter and we went to see it in theaters. Awesome experience with her and the rest of the crowd cheering and reacting.

Screaming no at Steve fall fakeout. Then screams of joy when caught.

Good El fake out when she was shot. Lots of "nooooo" in theaters. The reveal of her being shot and the reveal of it being fake were both well done.

Cheers at Derek rescuing Holly from Vecna. Even bigger cheers at him giving Vecna the finger.

Dumb move by the military driving up to the lab in the open. They should have snuck in.

Cheers at 11 killing dude with his own gun.

Giant spider at the end is this Wild Wild West?

Eleven vs spider was BA.

Nancy = Rambo. Hair, weapons, abilities, etc.

Will with perfect timing takeover on Vecna.

Somehow in 11 and Will vs. Vecna they made holding hands out in the air empty compelling.

Cheers when Joyce grabbed the axe. Thor could learn a lesson from her.

Great use of Prince x2.

Steve as baseball coach is perfect.

Jamie Campbell Bower with some great only face acting in cave memory scene.

Dustin as valedictorian with a great speech!

Good ending for older group of kids.

Finally Joyce and Hopper with an Enzo date! Their proposal song was my wedding song. Love it. Lots of " awwws"

Weaving the D&D ending into El escape was brilliant. I thought it was all a Kali mirage when Mike and Hopper talked at the town memorial. My daughter grabbed and held my hand when she realized El escaped during D&D. Also a brilliant forecasting of the younger kids future. Just great writing.

Ending with Bowie's heroes and great credits with the art work.

Duffer bros need an action movie to direct. Give them the X-Men or a Star Wars movie.

All that you can ask for in a finale. Tied up all characters and storylines. Great action. Great character moments. Ended things such that there is little chance at sequels. Still a few mysteries and loose ends to argue about that don't really matter

I loved the first season, then it's sort of been a wander in the wilderness. I enjoyed it overall, but there have definitely been some highs and lows. I do like how they wrapped it up at the end. El might be alive, but there wasn't a cheesy reunion. It was a more adult ending, fitting of the kids' ages. It was definitely a fun ride.

Kate Beckett said:

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So do we believe Mike when he says El is still alive? It makes sense when you think about it power wise.

I did cry at the end, because I am a sap and it's ending after 9 years.

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Pretty obvious to me. He is really ****ing distraught but during the grad ceremony he flashes back to the sonar jammers and I think the revelation occurs to him

I thought it showed incredible restraint to basically wrap up the conflict in the first hour and spend the last hour on epilogue type stuff. Too many shows just wrap up and you are left wanting to see the aftermath.

I'm very whelmed.

We get the Mindflayer voice with Henry then see its physical manifestation… great build across the seasons to only end in 5 minutes. Way too easy. 9 years and that's it? And we still had an hour left!!! Also, nothing on the actual Mindflayer rock that infected Henry from the dead cave dude. How'd that dude get it?!

Will's power penultimate moment is to stop Vecna's arm reach. No demo dogs or anything to fight as well? Just absent?

Hop murders an entire squad of soldiers and just… goes back to cop duty? Military just up and outs?

Dr. Kay? All the preggers in the upside down lab just dead I guess. Evil big government plot shoved at us for two seasons, move on.

Everyone lived? Maybe not El - I'm not sure if the power suppressors would work across the bridge, if so, then she's alive.

Dustin moved on from Suzie?!?! When?! She's not even in this season. Thought for sure she'd be in the wrap up.

I guess the hive mind stuff didn't hurt Will at the end? Even when he is in Vecna's mind?

Boss battle wasn't near long enough.

The finale worked for me I guess in part because I've never been one who needs every detail spelled out and wrapped up in a bow. But also because I have a different stance on the whole point of the show. Shows like this always seem to divide the audience into those who get wrapped up in the plot vs those who are invested in the characters.

- What happened to Robin's girlfriend, are they still together and is she still a candy striper?

- What about the WSQK van, is it still parked in town or has it been driven back to the station?

- What about Kali's body? Did she get buried or cremated?

.....none of that really matters.

This show was always really about the innocence of youth and friendships made in youth and that time you had together before growing up and apart. That's why the show got worse over the past few seasons as the writers focused less on that and more on the evil government plotline and overcomplicating the Henry-Vecna character.

Wrapping up the specifics of those secondary and tertiary plotlines aren't important enough to waste precious finale time on because it was the characters, not the plot, that made (most of) us truly tune in and care.

So after an hour long final battle, and an hour long epilogue which included basically a few sentences for every character, we couldn't get any details on what happened to our guy Murray after it was over? It was pretty basic for all the other characters so it's not like they went into great detail about any of them.
Dustin went to college and sometimes sees Steve.
Mike is a writer.
Lucas and Max are still dating, sometimes they go to the movies…that's it.
Will went to NYC, there's other gay people there.
Steve stayed in Hawkins, he coaches baseball and teaches sex ed, sometimes he sees Dustin.
Robin is at Smith college, an all women's school, because she gay and she's a woman.
Nancy dropped out of Emerson, but is a reporter at The Herald, because she's a rebel who doesn't need to follow the rules to do the thing she wants to do.
Johnathan is at NYU making an anti-capitalism film, because he's poor and from a small town so the way you reconcile that is by moving to the biggest and most expensive city in the country and attend an expensive private liberal arts university surrounded by rich kids who are also anti-capitalism.
Joyce and Hopper are engaged and maybe move out to Long Island so that Hopper can be chief of police, which won't be a problem even though he killed a lot of soldiers from the US military.

Murray went to the kids' graduation but literally nothing else.

I did think Mikes speech about Eleven wasn't really about what happened to her in reality. How is Kali, who was very much shot in the stomach and bleeding out in a building that just detonated a large amount of C4 that was enough to destabilize and destroy a wormhole, able to make Eleven both be invisible outside the upside down and also appearing to be inside the upside down as it's destroyed to fake her own death? She's also able to find her way to what appears to be somewhere in Europe where there's waterfalls outside of a small town. My take on that is Mike is just telling a story to his friends. That story allows him to move on and help his friends move on from losing their friend, who is very much dead. I'm not complaining about it, to me it makes the most sense while also probably helping to ease the blow to younger viewers of the show for them to think El is alive somewhere in the world.

Overall I'd give the finale a B, not perfect but I had plenty of fun. I'm glad we got this show, as a child of the 80s I miss the kinds of movies and shows that were an inspiration for this show. I did a full rewatch in 2025 and I'm sure I'll do it again at some point when my kid is older and she won't be too scared. To me the biggest way to know whether or not a show was great is if I'm going to miss it, and I'm going to miss this show.

Dustin Henderson fulfilled Eddie Munson’s biggest dream of snatching that diploma from Principal Higgins’ hand and flipping the bird, and I think that’s fucking beautiful! #StrangerThings5 #StrangerThingsSpoilers pic.twitter.com/j48IH8epqB

— sƃǝɯ ➃ MET JOSEPH QUINN • fred hechinger ceo (@fredhechinger) January 1, 2026

Ugh, no spinoffs please. I hate when Hollywood won't let an IP end when it should and instead drags it out just to make more money.

I think you are overthinking it...I think about it like my own High School experience. people came and went from my friend group all the time. Someone would become a pretty good friend just because you sat by them in math class, but at the end of the semester you almost never saw them again. Someone would get a girlfriend or get into drugs and disappear.
Do I sit back 20+ years later and wonder if Matt and Katherine are still together or if Candace still works at Chili's? No because High School romances and first jobs rarely last even if they seemed like the most important things in the world at the time. High school is a turbulent time of life where a lot changes quickly and then everything changes big time in college. Does anyone realistically think the older group of kids met up more than 8 times at their monthly meet ups? Maybe because they were bonded by trauma. But has anyone ever kept up a monthly meeting up with old friends?

No one knows except Murray and Hopper that Hopper killed a bunch of US military. As far as Dr. Kay knows those guys were still alive in the Upside Down before it was destroyed.

Sometime kids that have never had the chance to participate in capitalism don't like capitalism because they've been excluded. People also love to rebel against things in their 20s.

They gave us enough details to make us leave happy and let our imagination fill in the rest. Did you want a longer denouement?

Arguments about if Eleven is alive or not forever is exactly what the writers wanted. It's an intentionally ambiguous ending like Inception.

Quad Dog said:

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No one knows except Murray and Hopper that Hopper killed a bunch of US military. As far as Dr. Kay knows those guys were still alive in the upside Down before it was destroyed.

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Nance waxed a few on our side of the portal this season... Right in front of Dr. Kay.

The series begins with Eleven's origin being a mystery to the group. It ends with her fate being a mystery to the group. It even reflects her number 11 that begins and ends with the same number. I like the bookends.

Solid finish to the series as a whole…doesn't redeem some of the awful individual episodes in season five though. But zooming out, the series worked and landed well in the end. Fun decade of nostalgia.

nosoupforyou said:

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Excellent post (although you can remove the spoiler tag… I think it's your own fault if you're reading this thread and haven't yet watched the final finale)

I would also give it a B which is good - it was not dark or scary… They tried to focus on the emotional side of it

I'm curious if teenagers watching this felt emotional about it… So much crying and tears, but I didn't feel any of that - did anyone else?

I saw it in the movie theaters and it was actually pretty fun, listening to some of the cheers and especially the groans re Will and Mike when they had a scene together (nooooooo!! was yelled across the theater)

Eleven is for sure dead - she would have made contact with Mike after 18 months.. but if she lived she would not have been able to have children or ever get caught - so her self sacrifice was correct

I'm curious if the spinoff is about how they got that stone in the briefcase

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I am 35 and I got a little emotional at the end. This show basically kicked off while I was starting my young adult life a long way from home at the time. I think it got to me during the final D&D scene

whatever happened to good old dr owens?