Stranger Things Season 5 Spoiler Discussion

[Bop]

What did everyone think of this season?

The final episode was very well done overall, especially Eleven's death. I don't think the epilogue needed to be as long as it was but some parts of that were great and I love what they did with Kali's character, instead of making her a villain or disposable she got the same ending as El showing that they were both always kind of the same. But as for Mike's theory that El is alive do you believe it? I think if the show ever continues it allows them to bring El back but... I think she's dead.

I'd rate it like

Vol 1: 7/10
Vol 2: 5/10
Vol 3: 9/10

 

[Hunga Munga]

I think this is the worst season . Still a solid 7 , but it's a high bar .

Steve survives ! Which is basically all I cared about to be honest 😀 . Not a great season for him though .
Or Eleven for that matter .
I kinda agree about your rankings @Bop , though I'd probably downgrade the finale score . Volume 2 on it's own felt a bit aimless . Should have dropped 2 and 3 together in my opinion .

Worst season for 80s trivia . So much goes on in the dreamworld/Dimension x / Upside Down/ Military bases etc , you don't get that nostalgic charm that ST has traded on heavily in earlier outings .

Don't feel we paid a sufficient emotional toll this time either . Karen Wheeler , Ted Wheeler , Steve ...they teased big deaths and trauma in this season but never delivered . They couldn't even bury Eleven cleanly. .

Post automatically merged: Jan 1, 2026

I love Steve so much . For me most of his charm comes from his wild overestimation of his own abilities . He reminds me of the qualities that draw me to the Xander and Spike characters . Brave , confident but mostly unprepared and self deluded . 🙂

 

[Cohen]

I felt underwhelmed with almost everything after the closure of the upside down. Honestly, I’d have preferred they went right into the final DND scene and then the passing of the torch moment. Everything else was unnecessary, and if we think about the series as a whole it really centered around the 4 boys, Max and El.

I really enjoyed the 80s sci-fi elements of “the abyss” and the fantasy/adventure aspect of it. So I really liked most of the finale. I just think they faltered on the ending a hare.

 

[Hunga Munga]

New Holly was an electric performance , Delightful Derek was damn good too . Stranger Things had a gift for creating fleshy characters and making you care about them . Eddie , Chrissie , Fred, Bob Newby all came out of thin air but their deaths still cut pretty deep .

 

[Bop]

Don't feel we paid a sufficient emotional toll this time either . Karen Wheeler , Ted Wheeler , Steve ...they teased big deaths and trauma in this season but never delivered . They couldn't even bury Eleven cleanly. .

I thought there was a chance they wouldn't kill any significant character when they kept the Wheeler parents alive but in my opinion El's death made up for that because she was a huge character and it was especially sad because of her backstory and how much she wanted a happy ending.

I love that they showed Steve and Dustin going on roadtrips when he has summer break from college 🥺

 

[Hunga Munga]

I thought there was a chance they wouldn't kill any significant character when they kept the Wheeler parents alive but in my opinion El's death made up for that because she was a huge character and it was especially sad because of her backstory and how much she wanted a happy ending.

I love that they showed Steve and Dustin going on roadtrips when he has summer break from college 🥺

I saw a commentator on Youtube suggest that nobody would die to protect merch sales going forward . My Stranger Things fan life has been a solo journey . The farthest I've gone into the fandom is chatting about the show on here over the years . It's only then that I discovered that Scoops Ahoy was a popular Halloween costume now 😀 . I just love that ! 🙂 . Scoops Ahoy! is probably my favourite Duffer invention .

I do wonder if they gave us the ending we wanted ; rather than the one we needed .

Funny enough , my pitch for a ST spinoff was Steve and Dustin travelling around in an RV solving mysteries . 😀 The Duffers were pretty adamant that ST was done and dusted but there's whispers of Nancy coming back already .In my opinion , how can you ignore that potential for a big audience ? Milk that cow 😛 .

 

[thetopher]

Hate to be a downer but this was a very weak season with an incredibly 'safe' finale. Right from the opening of Vol. 1, where the writers could've gone for something very different they went back to what they knew, character and plot retread.

This isn't a disaster of a show but nor is it a great show; it had it's good seasons- 1 and 4- and mediocre to awful seasons- 2 and 3. The final season was on the weaker end I feel.
Glad Dustin and Steve survived, didn't care much for anyone else by the end of it all.

 

[November]

I just didnt get the hype about this show, but watched it all anyway. So these are the opinions of not a superfan. There were a number of times the last season was just 2025 with 80's clothes on. So that was annoying, if its going to be set in the 80's, make it set in the 80s. Honestly, this ad haunted my dreams for far longer than Vecna ever would.

Max was a standout performer for me, she didnt have much this season, but shes probably the only one I will remember by this time next year.

I do want Eleven to have survived, since everyone else got to! I did like the end DnD scene, that was fun and well done. And the next lot of kids taking over was cute too.

 

[whatdBuffyDo]

Funny enough , my pitch for a ST spinoff was Steve and Dustin travelling around in an RV solving mysteries . 😀 The Duffers were pretty adamant that ST was done and dusted but there's whispers of Nancy coming back already .In my opinion , how can you ignore that potential for a big audience ? Milk that cow 😛 .

I think they are already milking it. I see two upcoming ST spinoff projects on Duffers’ IMDB page: an animation spinoff taking place in ‘85 that is going to come out in 2026 and an untitled series that is in pre-production phase.

I hope that untitled spinoff takes place some place else that is quite unlike Hawkins Indiana and gives us a chance to see the same characters in different settings and situations, very much like the first part of S3 😄

 

[Bop]

Hate to be a downer but this was a very weak season with an incredibly 'safe' finale. Right from the opening of Vol. 1, where the writers could've gone for something very different they went back to what they knew, character and plot retread.

This isn't a disaster of a show but nor is it a great show; it had it's good seasons- 1 and 4- and mediocre to awful seasons- 2 and 3. The final season was on the weaker end I feel.
Glad Dustin and Steve survived, didn't care much for anyone else by the end of it all.

I wouldn't say the finale was safe at all, I think Eleven's fate makes for a good enough sacrifice and even if I imagine they had a few other characters die it would have been overshadowed by what happened to El.

 

[thetopher]

I wouldn't say the finale was safe at all, I think Eleven's fate makes for a good enough sacrifice and even if I imagine they had a few other characters die it would have been overshadowed by what happened to El.

Well, they could've killed people off before the finale, to illustrate the stakes, to show how dangerous Vecna was, etc. Eleven's 'fake out' death was nothing really. So yeah, I'd say entirely safe. Especially for a horror series.

As it is there were just too many characters for all of them to do anything meaningful in the finale episode. Maybe Hopper should've stayed dead at the end of S3, maybe Max should've died at the end of S4.
Too many characters, all of whom sounded the same by the end or just redundant. The finale should've gone back to the beginning with the core cast being the focus.

I watched the previous seasons in preparation for S5 and its evident that the writers were just making crap up as they went along. And for a decade long TV show its incredibly shallow in terms of character

 

[Hunga Munga]

it's true .Only 42 episodes and they still couldn't keep the story straight. The inclusion of First Shadow lore didn't help matters either . How did Hopper join the army ? How old is Ted Wheeler ? Really obvious errors in the verse lore .
No mention that Henry Creel went to school with all the adults . They show you the memory though .

 

[Hunga Munga]

Post automatically merged: Jan 4, 2026

I thought this was quite a nice post-finale chat with the creators .

I have come round to the opinion that both Eleven and Kali are still alive . I don't especially like that ending but that's what the text is telling me . Even at the time , I thought Kali's injury was a fakeout illusion .

 

[thetopher]

I'm gonna say it; the Duffer Brothers have taken the torch from JJ Abrams in terms of overrated hack writing. They are fairly good at set-up- Seasons 1 and 4 and pretty awful at any kind of satisfying payoff- 2 and 5. (Their writing style being mocked is all over social media)
It's the same with relationships; good at getting two people together and then having zero idea what to do with them once their together. But usually the boyfriend will become ancillary to the girlfriends story, kinda like a prop, Lucas and Jonathan being good examples of this.

Also I discovered that a lot of the good character stuff throughout the season is usually provided by the actors, not the writers, incredibly. Bob Newby and Billy Hargrove are perfect examples of this; really only three-dimensional because of the ideas the talented actors bring to the roles...and then summarily killed off to give the illusion of stakes.

 

[Mr Trick]

I'm gonna say it; the Duffer Brothers have taken the torch from JJ Abrams in terms of overrated hack writing. They are fairly good at set-up- Seasons 1 and 4 and pretty awful at any kind of satisfying payoff- 2 and 5. (Their writing style being mocked is all over social media)
It's the same with relationships; good at getting two people together and then having zero idea what to do with them once their together. But usually the boyfriend will become ancillary to the girlfriends story, kinda like a prop, Lucas and Jonathan being good examples of this.

Also I discovered that a lot of the good character stuff throughout the season is usually provided by the actors, not the writers, incredibly. Bob Newby and Billy Hargrove are perfect examples of this; really only three-dimensional because of the ideas the talented actors bring to the roles...and then summarily killed off to give the illusion of stakes.

I think it is stakes though. When Bob died we cared mostly because we were invested in Joyce and felt her pain in losing him, that and he had a nice little arc that season and went out doing something heroic. Same with Barb in S1 for Nancy (and her character later looking for closure). This season when Karen was in danger, I felt it because it was a great tense horror scene, a great character moment for Karen, and because she’s Mike and Nancy’s Mum I was invested.

 

[HowiMetdaSlayer]

It's probably the weakest season. It does finish strong.
Few shows really stick the landing and I think this one nailed it! Give them props for having guts to finish like they did.
Not since BSG can I recall a show trust an audience with that much exposition after the resolution.
Surprised at the discussion bout Eleven's fate. Seems pretty obvious (once explained) that she's still alive.

 

[Hunga Munga]

I watched Season 5 again last couple of days .

First off , I enjoyed it a LOT more already knowing the ending . It's still not a great season but it's an acceptable resolution to the story in my opinion .

My main criticisms . Too many wordy feelings .Can't they just hug it out silently sometimes ? 😉 Not enough emotional toll . A lack of internal consistency . A tendency to paint with very broad strokes that undermine the story .. Way too many flashback clips from the show (that was downright jarring for me ) .
First few episodes were strong as an ox though . Felt it meandered a bit after that , then came in for a very safe landing .

.

Post automatically merged: Jan 6, 2026

@Mr Trick Well it doesn’t really affect match sales anyway. You can still sell merch for characters who are dead lol

This fandom is too large and passionate now to be predictable . Would I wave my meal ticket around in windy weather ? Hell no !

 

[thetopher]

When Bob died we cared mostly because we were invested in Joyce and felt her pain in losing him, that and he had a nice little arc that season and went out doing something heroic

Bob wasn't supposed to live that long, he was supposed to die much earlier - third or forth episode- but Sean Astin was so damn likable and fleshed out stuff about his character (as well as being an actual example of a decent father figure) that he lasted just a little bit longer. Plus I'd say he was liked by the audience, not just Joyce. But he was introduced and fleshed in the season he was killed off, that's generally the pattern.

Same with Barb in S1 for Nancy (and her character later looking for closure).

The show only cared about Barb in S2 when they realized that they screwed up about the town seemingly caring about only one child disappearance instead of two, so they overcompensated and so suddenly Nancy is super invested in exposing 'the truth' for those grieving parents.
She doesn't, but she does get all the 'good' military personnel kicked out of town just in time for the Ruskies to take over.

Plus Barb's death now makes no sense because the Demogorgans were under the control of Vecna the whole time, so why was she killed, dragged in the upside-down and left in a swimming pool? Why didn't Vecna sacrifice her to weaken the rift? We knew he was around controlling the demogorgans because he was...doing weird things to Will and leaving him to (hopefully) be eventually rescued and brought back to the real world. Or something.

Yeah, S5 writing is pretty catastrophic to the whole show.

This season when Karen was in danger, I felt it because it was a great tense horror scene, a great character moment for Karen, and because she’s Mike and Nancy’s Mum I was invested.

But the show didn't give a crap about the father did they? He also got messed up and hospitalized and the show/no character is really seen giving a crap about him. Because the show's opinion of fathers is that they generally suck. Yes, that includes Hopper.
Tbh when I saw that the writers wouldn't kill off a minor character like Will and Jonathan's parents I figured everybody else of note was gonna be fine.

 

[Cohen]

Yeah, S5 writing is pretty catastrophic to the whole show.

I was just talking to a friend about writers tending to have great original ideas for shows/book series but when they become popular and turned out for gold, not knowing how to end something they continued past their natural end date.

For example, minus the Russian twist at the end of season 3, the Battle at Starcourt could have served as a natural ending to the show, but Netflix wanted to continue churning the butter, so we got the Vecna season 4 stuff, but the final two seasons don’t feel as complete of a saga as the first 3 seasons.

Natural endings become sticking points for writers when the purse strings come out. Same thing happened with X-Files season 5. Buffy season 5. Charmed season 7. One Tree Hill seasons 4, 6 and 8 (though 9 was a solid finish, so no complaints for that final extension). Multiple points for Grey's Anatomy, truly. Then when we look at popular literature. Twilight saga sucked altogether, but Breaking Dawn was atrocious. Divergent. Hunger Games (though the prequels have exceeded Mockingjay in quality.) Onyx Storm is a far cry from the original promise of The Fourth Wing. GRRM can’t even finish the Song of Fire and Ice series because he can’t figure out how to finish it (I’m convinced).

Don’t get me started on film franchises.

So I think the odds were always stacked on the Duffers to crank out a “perfect” ending.

 

[Bop]

Well, they could've killed people off before the finale, to illustrate the stakes, to show how dangerous Vecna was, etc. Eleven's 'fake out' death was nothing really. So yeah, I'd say entirely safe. Especially for a horror series.

As it is there were just too many characters for all of them to do anything meaningful in the finale episode. Maybe Hopper should've stayed dead at the end of S3, maybe Max should've died at the end of S4.
Too many characters, all of whom sounded the same by the end or just redundant. The finale should've gone back to the beginning with the core cast being the focus.

I watched the previous seasons in preparation for S5 and its evident that the writers were just making crap up as they went along. And for a decade long TV show its incredibly shallow in terms of character

I don't think El's death was a true fake-out, her being dead makes the most logical sense but they left enough room for Mike and some portions of the fanbase to believe she's alive if they want and so they could bring her back if there's ever some kind of continuation which seems fair enough.

I think people are being a bit unfair to Stranger Things when it comes to them needing to kill off main characters, Buffy never killed off a core character even when they were establishing Angelus as a huge threat he only ever killed Jenny which wasn't as bold as people like to claim sometimes- the way they portrayed her death and the impact on Giles was powerful, I love Passion, but it wasn't a bold decision to kill her off, it would have been bold if Angelus killed someone like Joyce or Xander.