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Stranger Things (finale) ★★★★½
Warning: This contains spoilers for the final episode of Stranger Things.
After nine years, five seasons, and the awkward disconnect of seeing young teens played by actors a decade older, Stranger Things has wrapped up its tangled, messy, highly intertextual storyline with a bang followed by a strangely satisfying whimper.
Jamie Campbell Bower as Vecna.
Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bowers) was defeated, as we always knew he would be, but not before we finally got to see his origin story. And it was a quite masterful piece of storytelling that wound the various strands of narrative together as tightly as the otherworldly sinews of the vile creature’s hyperextending arms.
As a young Boy Scout, Henry Creel was transformed into the metaphysical supervillain of this story during a tragic encounter in an underground mine with an injured man who mistook him for a pursuer and shot him, piercing his palm. As the man took aim again, a desperate Henry struck him with a rock, the defensive instinct soon morphing into an act of pure rage.
Opening the briefcase attached to the man’s wrist, Henry found a strange glowing lump of rock, an artefact from another dimension, another planet, which quickly bonded with the wound in his hand. With his dying words, the man urged him to resist, or it would take him over. Worse, it would take over the world.
The episode in which Will (Noah Schnapp) comes out was review bombed online, but made perfect sense within the overarching narrative.Credit: Netflix
The rock came from the same realm as the Mind Flayer, and it was to Henry as the Ring is to Gollum – a gateway to unbridled ambition, jealousy, fury and power. Only Henry didn’t lose his key.
In pursuit of Holly and the 11 other kids he needed to bring about a calamitous meeting of the Flayer’s realm and Earth, Henry was dragged inside the cave of his memory and forced at last to confront this foundational trauma. But from outside, Will (Noah Schnapp), now imbued with psychokinetic powers of his own, attempted to reason with him.
“You’re just like me, Henry,” Will urged. “A vessel. But you can resist it, help us fight it.”
“No. It showed me the truth,” Henry responded. “It showed me that this world is broken, that man is broken. It has never controlled me, and I never controlled it. I could have resisted it, but I chose to join it. It needs me, and I need it. We are one.”
El (Millie Bobby Brown) and the other lab rats had gained their powers after being infused with blood taken from Henry, subject No.1. She knew that while she lived, the military would do everything possible to pursue her, to keep the experimental program alive.
Nell Fisher as Holly Wheeler, who became a key player in season five.
Even if Vecna could be defeated, she knew the only way to stop the experiments, and to ensure the Mind Flayer did not succeed in its aim of obliterating humanity and the planet, was for her to die. But her friends and her adoptive father, Hop (David Harbour), would do everything possible to prevent that happening.
And so the great themes of this series all came together in a finale that was, at a little over two hours, perhaps too long, but utterly satisfying. Friendship, self-sacrifice, community on one side; corruption, rage, secrets and lies on the other. Vecna, for so long in the last two seasons an avatar for the sexual abuse of children (as the military scientists had been earlier for their physical, psychological and emotional abuse), finally took full material form.
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The endless pop culture references and nostalgia for an unremembered ’80s were still at play (hello, Prince; hey there Pixies and Cowboy Junkies), but in this final season, and especially in this final episode, the Duffer Brothers stamped their very personal mark on things, to ensure that finally Stranger Things should stand the test of time as something more than a masterful act of pastiche. Well played.
What did you think of the final of Stranger Things? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
Stranger Things is now streaming on Netflix.
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