Although the WGA and SAG strikes, the pandemic, and other setbacks were responsible for the prolonged release of Stranger Things’ final season, the show’s an indictment of how making events of streaming projects has done more harm than good. Broadcast networks set the expectation that shows would air new seasons on a yearly basis, and premium outlets like HBO or AMC would rarely wait more than two years in between installments. The multi-year gap has affected other high-profile titles like Andor, Severance, House of the Dragon, and The Rings of Power, but it's particularly glaring for a show like Stranger Things because the audience can see the young actors age out of their roles. Almost a decade passed in between the debut of Stranger Things’ first and last seasons; as a point of comparison, Warner Bros. was able to release eight Harry Potter films, each of which cost around $200 million, in the same time.
One of the consequences of contemporary television habits is audiences’ unwillingness to invest in a series if it’s not confirmed that it “stuck the landing.” It may be a ridiculous notion to suggest that the disappointing finale to 24 somehow invalidated the previous 200 episodes, most of which were pretty entertaining, but it’s become a critical factor for shows with intense mythologies that built hype upon years of foreshadowing. Stranger Things didn’t have to fall victim to these expectations because that’s not how the show began. In its inception, Stranger Things was a fun throwback to 1980s “kid-venture” films like The Goonies and Gremlins that would occasionally hint at a broader universe of supernatural entities. Any illusion that the show was meant to be relatable for its adolescent audience is dispelled in the final episode, “The Rightside Up,” in which the characters make their way through an abyss to prevent an interdimensional villain from folding together two worlds.
Netflix has no one to blame but itself for the imposition of these calculations on “time well spent” because of the odd rollout of Stranger Things’ last run of episodes. It’s not unusual for the last season of a show to be divided into two chapters, which was the case with everything from The Sopranos to Breaking Bad. However, Netflix seemed so keen to dominate the media landscape with its last monocultural event that the final eight episodes of Stranger Things had a staggered release on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. The last episode, which ran 128 minutes, played in many theaters, which would make it appropriate to hold it to a high standard of quality. The blandly-rendered digital effects and clear insertions of audio doubles stick out even more for audiences that saw the episode in a theater that also showed a technical marvel like James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash.
In fairness to Matt and Ross Duffer, the brothers who created the show, “The Rightside Up” was painted into a corner where it would never be entirely satisfying to its obsessive fanbase. Any media franchise with such a broad cast of characters will face speculation on which of the protagonists will end up surviving, which creates disappointed reactions when the ensemble is intact by the end. In the same way that active viewers held their own “Dead Pools” ahead of the release of Avengers: Endgame or the last episodes of Game of Thrones, Stranger Things actively hinted at the potential death of many characters.
The lack of deaths in Stranger Things’ final episode isn’t disappointing in its own right because there isn’t a dramatic purpose to killing off any of the leads, other than shock value. The most obvious candidate would’ve been David Harbour’s Jim Hopper, but his character was seemingly killed off and revived two seasons prior. Stranger Things didn’t need to get darker, but it did suffer from a lack of stakes. That Stranger Things concludes with the characters attending their high school graduation ceremony is a reminder of how implausible it is that they’d have any semblance of normal lives.
Comparisons to Harry Potter are apt for Stranger Things because both franchises had to make bets on whether the young actors assembled would retain their talent by the time that the characters grew up. Concerns about the younger Stranger Things castmates holding their own were evident by the time that the show began to evenly split its screentime between the kids, teenagers, and adults in the midst of its second season. It’s no shock that the finale’s best moments involve Joe Keery’s Steve Harrington, a regular from the first season. The same can’t be said for the super-powered teens Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and Will (Noah Schnapp); it’s hard to give an authentic performance when forced to contort in front of a greenscreen background, but neither actor has the emotional register to sell the more outlandish concepts in Stranger Things. It doesn’t help that the young stars, all clearly into their late-20s, feel awkward when asked to embody the immaturity of teenagers.
Those who rolled their eyes at the “multiple endings” of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King might be repulsed by “The Rightside Up,” in which 45 minutes after the final battle are spent addressing the fate of each of the main characters. It’s a flex on the part of the Duffers that was justified, given that Stranger Things isn’t looking to pick up any new fans at this point in its run.