What Went Upside Down in ‘Stranger Things’ Season Five
Warning: Article contains spoilers.
In case you haven’t heard of it, ‘Stranger Things’ is an American television series written and directed by twins Ross and Matt Duffer. The show follows a group of young boys in the 1980s investigating the disappearance of their friend. As they search for answers, the children unravel a series of extraordinary mysteries, including a dangerous alternate dimension called ‘The Upside Down’. The show rose to popularity almost instantly, and for ten years, Stranger Things has dominated many aspects of television and pop culture.
Unfortunately, all things must come to an end, as Volume One of the final season was released on November 26th, 2025.
In an interview with Variety, The Duffer Brothers said that “The show [Season 5] is not ‘Game of Thrones.’” The final season of ‘Game of Thrones’ has been regarded as one of the worst ever. In that series finale, characters behaved absurdly, and nearly a decade of buildup led to an unsatisfying and rushed conclusion. Up until that point, Game of Thrones was one of the most popular shows in the world, dominating a worldwide audience and capturing millions of viewers. This is not the first or last instance of having a final season let down. Shows like ‘The Boys’, ‘Lost’, ‘Dexter’, and ‘How I Met Your Mother' were all extremely popular series that experienced a creative downfall in their final seasons.
Suffering the same fate of final seasons like these was likely a major concern for the Duffer Brothers, as Stranger Things had also gained a similar sort of attention.
The final season of Stranger Things, however, was not a disaster like these shows, but possibly something much worse than the universally disliked Game of Thrones finale—it was unremarkable. The characters full of depth that we all had grown to love, became over the top caricatures, and the inventive storytelling from previous seasons was nowhere to be found.
Take Steve Harrington (Joe Keery) for example. Steve’s character was not the most likeable at the show’s start, but he experiences real character development. He starts the series as a side character, embodying the stereotypical jock/bully archetype. Steve begins dating one of the main characters, Nancy Wheeler (Natalia Dyer), and in the first season, he is, by all accounts, a jerk. He and his friends belittle other characters both physically and verbally. But, over the course of the series, he becomes kinder and more genuine—still written as a little dumb but with street smarts, and he proves to be a loyal and strong friend to many characters in the series. This characterization does a complete flip in Season Five. He becomes extremely dumbed down and is used as a comedic relief character—which felt very insincere to the character we had seen so much development from. Every time the characters discovered something and explained it verbally, Steve would make a sly, ‘funny’ remark about not understanding, or look confused so that the plan could be described visually. Steve was never portrayed as an intellectual mastermind, but he was not stupid. This was not only an assasination of his character, but also a complete retconning of how Stranger Things subverted stereotypical tropes to create compelling characters.
Another example of this disingenuous writing was Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard). His character in Seasons One through Four was the unofficial leader of the main group. He had real depth to him—a complicated relationship with his girlfriend, father, sister, and best friend, while still being witty, nerdy, and genuine. He expressed real insecurities about himself and his connections, such as his worries about being a ‘Lois Lane' to his psychic girlfriend's ‘Superman’ or becoming distant with his best friend. But in Season Five, all of that character development vanished. He became the shell of a character we all had grown to love for his honesty, compassion, and bravery. He lost things audiences loved about him, like his feisty comebacks and authentic confessions. Mike’s role in Season Five revolved around other people's issues, he rarely commanded any group conversation or discussion, and his character felt nothing like the leader we had seen in previous seasons.
But TV shows are, of course, about more than just characters. The writing and story of Season Five also fell flat. Seasons One through Four interwove many 1980s period-accurate issues into its seasons, while translating them to a modern audience. Concepts like period-typical classism, homophobia, sexism, racism, The Satanic Panic, Government Distrust, and more were heavily featured and explored in Stranger Things. But Season Five did not feature that expected social commentary at all.
In earlier seasons, there were real stakes, with characters dying, getting severely injured, or suffering extremely traumatic events. This was not the case in Season Five, as the only characters who died were the main villain, a side character from a notoriously bad Season Two episode , and a main character who was left with an ‘ambiguous’ ending, never confirmed to be alive, but never confirmed to be dead either. The writers were understandably afraid to kill any characters off, for fear of fans becoming angry. Although, yes, a high death count does not automatically equal a ‘good show,’ the lack of stakes in Season Five was almost ridiculous.
In the finale of Season Four, we were left with a distraught Hawkins to navigate, full of monsters, special forces, and fear. But, instead of utilising the potential for horror in the final season, show-writers backed away from it- and chose to do something safe. In place of an apocalyptic final season, the town was patched up with metal scraps, and the characters mainly went to school instead of investigating and fighting off the horrors of the Upside Down.
There were moments, however, where Season Five felt like it was going to do something actually shocking. For example; Steve Harrington (Joe Keery), a fan favourite, fell off a tower in the final episode, and for seven whole seconds, the screen was dark. During that moment, it felt like there was a legitimate risk, but that cliffhanger was quickly resolved, as Steve was caught and survived, and that tension fans yearned for vanished. The final season had no real lesson or moral to it, other than ‘The villain is bad, and the heroes are good’. The writing of Season Five lacked stakes, social commentary, and the passion that previous seasons had, which were all aspects adored by critics and fans alike. And to put it simply, the writing of Season Five played it safe.
In an effort to cater to everyone, the final season of Stranger Things ultimately catered to no one. And the show that people revered for its dynamic characters, interesting plot, and uniqueness became just another victim of the dreaded ‘final season curse’.