Spoilers follow for Stranger Things, up to and including the series finale.
Stranger Things burst into the pop culture zeitgeist 10 years ago to become an instant global phenomenon that captivated audiences for five seasons and 42 episodes. An original story from then newbies Matt and Ross Duffer, the Netflix series wore its ‘80s nostalgia on its sleeve, but it gave us indelible characters and performances that grabbed our collective hearts. As it wound down to its final two hours on December 31, the expectations for Stranger Things to stick its landing achieved the same fever pitch as Game of Thrones and Lost had in the lead-up to those shows’ endings. As we know, there’s no pleasing everyone, but the Duffers’ series finale focuses on its characters first and in doing so delivers emotional closure that makes up for some of its less satisfying choices.
While the two-hour and eight-minute runtime of “Chapter Eight: The Rightside Up” implies a movie-length conclusion, the finale is really the sum of two parts modeled much like Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. Here, the first hour functions as a mega-budgeted, mashup homage to some of the great action classics of the ‘80s era — Red Dawn, Aliens, Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, and even TV miniseries IT. While the second hour serves as an extended epilogue that gives almost every significant character in the ensemble a goodbye moment of note. As a piece, the action resolution portion hits its high point early when Vecna’s the Abyss descends into Upside-Down Hawkins, dislodges beloved Steve Harrington (Joe Keery) from the WSQK radio tower and then goes to black. After a dastardly extended beat, Steve is revealed to be alive and snatched back from certain death by Jonathan Byers (Charlie Heaton), which goes down as the biggest rush of the whole episode.
After that, the scale of several battles culminating in the Abyss are tense and effective. What happens to Kali (Linnea Berthelsen) is particularly painful, especially in the wake of Hopper’s incredibly poignant speech to Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) about their suicide pact. But her need to give El a life beyond their shared pain adds resonance and purpose to her character. On the other hand, as expected the unrepentant ire and sadism of military figures Dr. Kay (Linda Hamilton) and Lt. Akers (Alex Breaux) never gets contextualized in the time allotted, which makes them the most throwaway characters of the series. Hamilton deserved better.
