From Inconsistent Writing to Conformity Gates: How Stranger Things Dug Itself Into A Wormhole (TBC)
By: Neo Mosimane-Sala
IST, Tanzania.
After its ten year run, the Emmy award-winning Netflix original series “Stranger Things” has come to an end. The series directed by The Duffer Brothers became an emotional sensation shortly after its release in 2016. The show follows 4 boys in Hawkins, Indiana, a fictional town in which peculiar experiments are being conducted on children with “supernatural powers”. Throughout the 5 seasons, the plot of the show greatly expands, and each season presents a different antagonist, the most feared one being Vecna and the so-called Mind Flayer. However, fans started to notice the decrease in quality from season to season, and the final episode received a lot of backlash after its lack of coherence, which leads me to question, how does one make a bad ending to a series that represents the childhood of so many people?
Well, here is how (spoilers ahead):
Firstly, the time gap between not only filming but also the storyline presented a huge plot hole in the story. This sudden 18-month jump after season 4 resulted in an anticlimactic beginning to the fifth season, since it brought such strong expectations for what might happen in the final season. The plot hole led to a disoriented audience, since we felt like we weren’t a part of the natural flow that the story had kept up from season 1.
Moreover, the poor writing in the final season resulted in obvious inconsistencies and careless directing. Firstly, this season lacked the horror element present in the rest of the series due to Vecna’s less threatening portrayal, along with the visual and focus shift from everyone being terrified of the Upside Down, to suddenly everyone casually roaming around the Upside Down. This pivot in the storyline is mainly due to the prioritization of wrapping up the character arcs, which is probably why Will Byer’s coming out scene lasted longer than the final battle. This confusion in storyline led to a misrepresentation of what the final episode might be like, with fans creating several theories about how they hoped the season would end, and some fans were so stubborn that even after the series had already ended, they created a whole new “ninth” episode thanks to the “Conformity Gate”. This theory led fans to believe that the inconsistencies in the final season were part of a mastermind plan by the Duffers to reveal that the whole final episode had been a mind game by Vecna, and all of it was a lie. I mean, these fans were like Swifties… but on steroids!
In the end, I do feel like it is a huge responsibility to end a show that meant so much to its fans. I mean, look what Game of Thrones did. Overall, I do believe that positively ending these characters' stories was the closure we needed, and whether the ending was disappointing or not, the show will go down in history as one of the best Netflix series of all time… dare I say one of the best TV series of all time; Just the Facts.
