SScience fiction. Horror. Drama. Friendship.
A show that perfectly mixes a retro 1980s vibe with monsters and alternate dimensions: “Stranger Things,” a Netflix show created and directed by the Duffer Brothers, ended 2025 with the exhilarating and much-anticipated release of season five, the last and final season.
Fans across the world rejoiced on Nov 26, 2025, when Volume 1 (Episodes 1–4) dropped on Netflix. This first batch of episodes was met with high expectations and mixed reactions. On Dec. 25, 2025, Volume 2 (Episodes 5–7) was released on Netflix on Christmas Day, providing the perfect entertainment for families during this holiday. And finally, Dec. 31, 2025, brought the very final episode of the five-season show to end the year—and the fandom. Episode 8, titled “The Rightside Up,” was released on Netflix and also in select theaters in the U.S., heightening the suspense and grandeur of the finale.
Despite the excitement and hype that united practically every “Stranger Things” fan before and during the release, opinions on the show, particularly the writing and the acting, ended up very mixed.
“I thought [season five] was a pretty good season overall. It’s a good ending to the whole show, but the ending, like the finale, was definitely very sad and a little questionable here and there,” explained “Stranger Things” fan and junior Samantha Kirkpatrick.
Since the first season of “Stranger Things” came out in the summer of 2016, lots of the audience practically grew up watching the show, alongside all the characters. This led to incredibly high expectations for the wrap-up of the Stranger Things world, which many claim fell short.
“I wasn’t a fan of the finale at all,” shared “Stranger Things” fan and NDB senior Isabella Michael. “It was plot hole after plot hole. I’d recommend it if you already watched the series, but you could probably stop watching it at the end of season three or four. The first half of season five was good, but it was really unfulfilling.”
Interestingly, devoted fans who were unsatisfied with the ending of the show began creating theories as to why the show ended as it did. Some even believed that the finale was a “false ending” and that more episodes would come out at a later date, despite being debunked by the Duffer Brothers.
One social media-viral theory, dubbed “Conformity Gate,” called for the release of cut scenes and a theorized unreleased episode. The name comes from the conclusion in the epilogue, which almost represented a kind of forced conformity that goes against the show’s core themes.
Other fans theorized that the show’s main villain, Vecna, who has mind control and memory-altering powers, controls the story narrative and all the characters in the show. This idea was drawn from the sheer amount of mismatched information and inconsistencies within all of the season five episodes, which could point to Vecna’s influence. However, many don’t believe this theory, and instead call out the inconsistencies as poor writing, or that perhaps the production errors and overall ambiguity were intentional.
“There’s definitely some theories that I think are really interesting, but I don’t really think a lot of them are true, just because I feel like there’s no reason to do it. The show’s over, unfortunately, but it is over, so I don’t think there’s, like, any extra episodes or anything like that,” Kirkpatrick continued.
While no fan theories have yet proven to be correct, the sheer amount of audience involvement demonstrates the importance “Stranger Things” has held for people and the significant impact it has had worldwide.
