Spoilers ahead.
By the time “Stranger Things” reached its fifth and final season, the show had already become something far larger than a television series. It was a cultural phenomenon, a nostalgia machine, a meme factory and for many viewers, an emotional touchstone that helped define a decade of their lives. The show’s wide reach, at once the show’s greatest strength and burden, meant there was never going to be an ending that satisfied everyone. Yet despite its flaws, the wildly anticipated finale “The Rightside Up” succeeds where it matters most — in spite of the final season’s weaknesses.
From the outset, season 5 is structurally uneven. It repeatedly gives the impression that the script was written alongside production. The Duffer Brothers confirm this in the documentary “Stranger Things: One Last Adventure,” which offers an inside look at the series’ production process. The deliberate decision to release the season in three volumes fractures the narrative into three self-contained arcs that behave less like chapters of a single story, as in previous seasons, and more like adjacent films awkwardly stitched together.
Character development — especially in the case of central character Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) — also stalls and restarts across the season, and moments designed to be cathartic fall short of that effect. For instance, Will’s long-awaited coming-out scene in episode seven, arrives as a genuine breakthrough rather than as a manufactured checkpoint. The moment undermines the force of episode four’s explosive ending, which articulates Will’s growth far more clearly than the previous scene.
This unevenness becomes most apparent in the season’s handling of its largest narrative beats. Nearly everything of consequence is deferred until the finale. The result is a compressed climax in which the villain Vecna, built up over the years as an almost insurmountable force, meets an end within minutes that feels far easier than it should. The season saved too much for too little time.
Despite this compression, the finale operates on a different level from the rest of the season — excelling in the epilogue in particular. Over its final 40 minutes, the series commits fully to emotional, if not narrative, closure. While certain questions remain, the emotional story arcs for the central characters feel complete.
The result is an episode that is among the strongest in the show emotionally, delivering tear-jerking moments such as central protagonist Eleven’s heroic sacrifice and Henry Creel’s heartbreaking confession to Will, echoing earlier standout episodes such as “Chapter Four: Dear Billy” or “Chapter Nine: The Gate.” The needle drop choice to set Eleven’s sacrifice to Prince’s “Purple Rain” also marks one of the most powerful musical moments in the show — supplying the already emotional scene with the quiet devastation required to articulate the idea that love survives all. Across the board, performances in the finale rise to the occasion. As Mike Wheeler and Vecna respectively, Finn Wolfhard and Jamie Campbell Bower deliver career-best work grounding the spectacle of the finale with genuine emotional stakes.
Though conducive to criticism, the handling of the main characters’ fates also ultimately felt true to the overarching spirit of the show. Deliberately leaving her fate ambiguous, the decision to “Life of Pi” Eleven’s death will undoubtedly frustrate some viewers. Yet within the show’s internal logic, it makes sense. “Stranger Things” has already established death as reversible rather than definitive — as seen by police chief Jim Hopper’s presumed death and survival reveal at the end of season 3. Mike also chooses to believe that Eleven may not have died, which aligns with the way the series has always valued emotional truth over reality.
While perhaps obvious, the choice to set the final scene in the Wheelers’ basement felt like the only correct one. Ending the series with the “Party” together reaffirmed that “Stranger Things” has always been about the bond between a group of kids who grow up saving each other. It felt like the characters, and the actors themselves, were truly closing the door on childhood, lending the moment an authenticity the series has always chased.
Ultimately, the mixed response to the finale feels inevitable. It could never fully recapture the mystery or intimacy of the show’s earliest seasons — not because it failed, but because it outgrew them. What began as a small-town drama about disappearance and grief expanded into a sprawling mythology with monumental stakes and a massive ensemble. Yet importantly, the finale drives home the fact that the show never lost sight of what made it resonate in the first place. Corny, repetitive and often unconcerned with subtlety, “Stranger Things” remained steadfastly sincere — true to its emotional core — to the end.
