“Stranger Things” ended on New Year’s Eve 2025 with screenings in theaters across the country and loyal fans counting down to the launch on Netflix. After the truly bizarre response to the second volume of the final season that saw some of the worst media literacy in years—there was even a viral theory that Noah Schnapp’s Will was really Vecna in disguise for most of the second volume, including during the coming-out scene, which makes less sense than Flat Earth—and divided (and some depressingly homophobic) responses to Schnapp’s big moment, the buzz around “The Rightside Up” was as high as something can be in pop culture in the 2020s. So did the Duffers stick the landing and send these popular characters off in style? Yes and no. The finale falls victim to some of the issues that plagued the entire inferior season, but it’s hard to deny the power of the last half-hour, the scenes when the show returns to the people we love instead of the chaos and finds itself one last time.
From the beginning “The Rightside Up” (or “Stranger Things: The Finale” in theaters) feels like a movie. It’s got the runtime, budget, and urgency. The Duffers have riffed off the cinematic language of the films they loved from the ‘80s for a decade now, paying homage to James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, Wes Craven, Robert Zemeckis, George A. Romero, and more, over the course of five seasons. Somewhat sadly, the finale has the scope but not quite the visual language of the best of this show or its influences. Tim Ives was the main director of photography over the first three seasons of “Stranger Things,” and those years just had a much stronger aesthetic, one less cluttered by CGI and bad lighting. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
As there has been all season, there are a few too many planning scenes in “The Rightside Up,” but at least they pay off this time with action. The plot of the finale sees the gang working together to stop Dimension X from crashing into reality, which means killing Vecna and the Mind Flayer, and giving most of the major players a role to play in the climax. There’s Joyce dealing the fatal blow, Nancy doing her best Sarah Connor impression, and Eleven battling Henry Creel. Credit to the Duffers for allowing each character to play a part in this final campaign. One of the strongest themes of the overall arc of “Stranger Things” has been that evil thought it had control over a lonely kid named Will and discovered that not only was he stronger than he thought he was but that he had friends and family who would never let him go. Giving all of the members of the party a hero moment or two was probably predictable, but also harder to pull off than it looks.
Sadly, what holds the finale back is a plot that forces so much of the action to take place in imaginary worlds. Too little of the chaos feels grounded in these dreamscapes, reducing tension. It’s CGI-heavy action that doesn’t feel like it has the same stakes as when a creature chases a child through a mall in season three, for example. The plotting forced the finale to take place largely on alternate planes, but it still drained a lot of the thrills from the piece and produced too few memorable set pieces or even action choreography. It didn’t help that Linda Hamilton was totally wasted as the least effective guest star in the run of the show. A stronger villain and more time spent in reality are two things that really would have improved this season.
When the dust has cleared, and Steve isn’t dead (props to the show for playing with how much America seemed to almost want poor Joe Keery to eat it with a clever fake-out), “The Rightside Up” gets to the best scenes of the season back in Mike’s basement. There’s a wonderful bit (I wish there was more) of “Six Feet Under”-esque flash forwarding to see glimpses of the future for these characters, ones that fans will truly miss. It’s funny that so much of the buzz around this show was around the potential for “Game of Thrones” carnage when this was never that show. It was the original “Star Wars,” “E.T.,” “The Goonies,” even most of the main cast of “Harry Potter”—those don’t end in carnage. And seeing these kids put away their D&D campaign books almost as if they’re moving from childhood to adulthood was an effective choice that the Duffers likely thought of years ago. It’s both an end, but also a recognition that those books can come down again anytime. Or even be passed on to another generation.
The game is over. For now. The phenomenon didn’t quite end with the pop culture adoration it could have a few years ago or with a few better creative choices in the final season. However, it’s impossible to deny the impact of “Stranger Things.” There’s no other American show that could have sold out movie theaters for its series finale in 2025. And there may not be another one for a long time.
