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.
Volume 2 just dropped and it rewrote everything we thought we understood. Turns out the Upside Down is not a parallel dimension at all. It is a wormhole. A bridge between Hawkins and another realm called the Abyss, or Camazotz as Holly names it after A Wrinkle in Time.
Here is the chain of events as we now understand them:
The Abyss is where the Demogorgons, Mind Flayer, and all the monsters actually come from Eleven banished Henry Creel there in 1979, where he evolved into Vecna On November 6, 1983, Brenner had Eleven unknowingly search for Henry using her powers When her mind made contact with the Abyss, she accidentally created the wormhole we know as the Upside Down Brenner stabilised it using exotic matter suspended above Hawkins Lab The Upside Down is frozen in time at the moment of its creation, which is why everything looks like 1983 This is infrastructure, not magic. And infrastructure can be destroyed.