The Stranger Things finale dropped on New Year’s Day and the internet has been losing its collective mind ever since. The Rotten Tomatoes audience score nosedived to 56%. Fans are furious. People are writing essays about how the Duffer Brothers betrayed them. There is a conspiracy theory that the real ending is coming in a secret Episode 9. It is chaos out there.
I thought the ending was fine.
Not perfect. Fine. Good, even. It reminded me of movies from the 80s and 90s, the era Stranger Things has been lovingly ripping off since the beginning. Those films had optimistic endings. E.T. goes home. The Goonies save their neighbourhood. Marty McFly gets back to the future and his dad is suddenly cool. There was hope. There was closure. The heroes won and you left the cinema feeling good.
Somewhere along the way we decided that ambiguous endings were more sophisticated. Inception ends with a spinning top that may or may not fall. Vanilla Sky leaves you unsure what was real. These films are fantastic, but they trained a generation to expect that a proper ending should leave you confused and slightly unsettled. If you understand what happened, the thinking goes, it must be too simple.
Stranger Things went the other way. Vecna is defeated. The Upside Down is destroyed. The kids graduate high school. They play D&D one last time. It is sentimental and earnest and yes, a bit long in the epilogue. But it is also satisfying in a way that callbacks to the storytelling I grew up with. Not everything needs to be a puzzle. Sometimes the good guys just win and you get to feel happy about it.
The Eleven situation
The one piece of genuine ambiguity is Eleven’s fate. She seemingly sacrifices herself to close the gate, disappearing along with the Upside Down. But the show leaves breadcrumbs. A heartbeat on the soundtrack. A flickering finger that matches what happens when Kali’s illusions break down. The 011 tattoo mysteriously absent from her arm in certain shots. Peter Gabriel’s “Heroes” playing over the credits, the same song that played when Will and Hopper had their fake deaths in earlier seasons.
Mike spins a theory during the final D&D game that Kali created an illusion to fake Eleven’s death, letting her escape and live anonymously in some distant village. The show never confirms or denies this. The Duffers have said they wanted audiences to draw their own conclusions.
I am fine with this. It is a small serving of ambiguity inside an otherwise complete meal. You can choose to believe she is dead and the sacrifice was real. You can choose to believe Mike’s theory and she is out there somewhere, finally free from being everyone’s weapon. Either reading works. The story is finished either way.
Some people are furious about this, which I understand less. The complaint seems to be that the show should have committed one way or the other. But why? Real grief works like this. You tell yourself stories to cope. Sometimes you never get the closure you want. Mike choosing to believe she survived is more interesting than a definitive answer would have been.
The secret episode conspiracy
This is where things get properly unhinged. A segment of the fanbase has convinced themselves that Episode 8 was a fake ending and Netflix is hiding a secret Episode 9 that will drop any day now. They call it Conformity Gate, which is a very serious name for a theory based on the way extras held their hands during a graduation scene.
The evidence, such as it is, includes: students at graduation holding their hands in poses that vaguely resemble Vecna’s claw. Characters with hairstyles that look a bit like Henry’s. Max graduating despite having been in a coma for two years. The D&D scene ending with a roll of seven, which obviously means January 7th. The fact that searching for “bad ending” in the Netflix app brings up Stranger Things. (It also brings up about fifty other shows, but never mind that.)
Look, I get it. When a show you love ends, part of you does not want it to be over. The urge to find hidden meanings and secret continuations is understandable. But the Duffers have explicitly said the story is complete. Netflix announced a behind the scenes documentary, not a surprise episode. At some point you have to accept that the thing is finished and move on with your life.
Or do not. Keep checking Netflix at midnight. I am not your dad.
The real problem
I think the actual issue is that Stranger Things ran too long and people’s expectations became impossible to satisfy. Eight years from first episode to last. A global phenomenon. Millions of people with their own ideas about how it should end. No finale was going to make everyone happy. The show could have cured cancer in the final scene and someone would have complained about the pacing.
The ending we got is coherent, emotional, and true to what the show has always been about: friendship, growing up, and the power of believing in each other even when things look hopeless. Is it a bit cheesy? Sure. But Stranger Things has always been cheesy. That is part of the charm.
I finished the finale feeling satisfied. The story had a beginning, a middle, and an end. The characters I cared about got endings that made sense. It hit the emotional beats it was aiming for. That is more than most shows manage.
If you hated it, fair enough. We all wanted different things. But I will take a sincere, slightly saccharine ending over a cryptic non-conclusion any day. Give me the 80s movie energy. Let the kids be okay. Close the book properly.
Stranger Things did that. I thought it was fine.