COURTESY OF NETFLIX \u00a9 2025<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nOverall, Season 5 was a rocky finish for the once-beloved Netflix hit.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Divided into three volumes, it started off strong enough in the first four episodes, with the gang banding together to rebel against the military quarantine imposed on Hawkins. But in the second drop of episodes on Christmas, \u201cVolume 2,\u201d the wheels started coming off.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Duffer Brothers have been reluctant to kill off anyone in the main cast \u2013 sure, there have been deaths over the years from side characters like Barb (Shannon Purser) Billy (Dacre Montgomery), Eddie (Joseph Quinn), but none of the stars.\u00a0They\u2019ve even done two death fake-outs for Hopper, which only dilutes the emotional impact of any real death. They\u2019re like the boy who cried wolf.<\/p>\n
The result is that the final season was overstuffed with too many characters.<\/p>\n
Season 5 even added additional characters, like Derreck Turnbow (Jake Connelly) and Holly Wheeler, who isn\u2019t new but who has taken on a bafflingly large role. And they brought back Kali, from that Season 2 episode that everyone hated, instead of sweeping that episode under the rug, taking the loss, and moving on from it.\u00a0<\/p>\nJoe Keery as Steve Harrington and Gaten Matarazzo as Dustin Henderson in \u201cStranger Things\u201d Season 5. COURTESY OF NETFLIX \u00a9 2025<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nCharacters we\u2019ve followed for 10 years only got scattered moments in the spotlight. <\/p>\n
Remember when Winona Ryder was one of the show\u2019s leads? In Season 5, Joyce became a background character.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The writing in the final season was filled with clunky exposition. Every other scene was a character explaining the plot \u2013 or a boring sci-fi concept \u2013 to other people.\u00a0<\/p>\nDavid Harbour as Jim Hopper and Winona Ryder as Joyce Byers in \u201cStranger Things\u201d Season 5. COURTESY OF NETFLIX \u00a9 2025<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nIt felt like the writers had a checklist of questions they wanted to answer and character moments that needed to happen \u2013 Mike and Eleven moment, check, Vecna backstory, check \u2013 and didn\u2019t bother putting it together elegantly.<\/p>\n
It shouldn\u2019t have been this hard to end the show. They had three years \u2013 Season 4 came out in 2022 \u2013 and unlike \u201cGame of Thrones\u201d or \u201cLost,\u201d the mythology wasn\u2019t that dense; they hadn\u2019t written themselves into a corner or run out of source material runway.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The ending was labored, and not in a good way.\u00a0<\/p>\nNoah Schnapp as Will Byers, Finn Wolfhard as Mike Wheeler, and Winona Ryder as Joyce Byers in \u201cStranger Things\u201d Season 5. COURTESY OF NETFLIX \u00a9 2025<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n COURTESY OF NETFLIX \u00a9 2025<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nTo be fair, some people on social media were acting like Season 5 of \u201cStranger Things\u201d was as bad as the final season of \u201cGame of Thrones.\u201d Those people forgot how bad \u201cGOT\u201d was; this isn\u2019t that level. The leads didn\u2019t act wildly out of character, and no fan favorites committed sudden mass murder.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Still, it wasn\u2019t nearly as good as it should have been.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cStranger Things\u201d ended, and nobody important died. It\u2019s a strange thing, indeed. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source celebrity.land \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s all turned upside down.\u00a0 Finally, after what feels like a hundred years, \u201cStranger Things\u201d has ended.\u00a0 The show first premiered in 2016, and ended with Season 5, now streaming on Netflix, following Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), Will (Noah Schnapp), Nancy (Natalia Dyer), Steve (Joe Keery), Hopper (David Harbour) and more as they live in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2218468,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25174],"tags":[40867,21741,346392,309707,23191,305890,21913,364445],"class_list":["post-2218467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gossip","tag-david-harbour","tag-entertainment","tag-joe-keery","tag-millie-bobby-brown","tag-netflix","tag-stranger-things","tag-tv","tag-winona-ryder"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/How-did-Stranger-Things-end-and-did-it-stick-the.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2218467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2218467"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2218467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2218469,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2218467\/revisions\/2218469"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2218468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2218467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2218467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2218467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![](\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F2%2F2025%2F12%2FUntitled-2-copy-3.jpg?quality%3D90%26strip%3Dall\")
<\/p>\n