In the God-abandoned year of 2026, I finished Stranger Things after nearly a decade.
Why? Good question. I’m still figuring it out, really. I think it was mostly my friend’s liveblogs during the finale. I didn’t even know Stranger Things was ending, but that’s the case with most TV. I’m a reclusive wretch who doesn’t follow shows very closely as they’re airing, instead landing on them about a year after they end, when all the juicy thinkpieces have been written and everyone else has already moved on.
It was near midnight on New Year’s Eve— the end of a year that everyone was happy to see go. I didn’t have classes due to the winter holiday, so I was up shooting the shit with no particular plans. Distant fireworks were echoing down the street. My dear friend, who knows way more shows than me and holds the prestigious honor of having watched Riverdale in its entirety (and several seasons multiple times), supplied our groupchat with live commentary. I was half-paying attention; I hadn’t watched Stranger Things in nearly seven years. I had no context for anything from the last few seasons but was vaguely aware of some bullshit having to do with a guy named Vecna and that Will Byers was maybe gay, but played by a Zionist, so it cancelled out.
The things my friend said gradually increased in absurdity. Fake out deaths. One of two women of color in the cast bites it. Eleven blows herself up and fucking dies? And so do a bunch of pregnant women? The canonical lesbian’s maybe-girlfriend goes unmentioned in the epilogue. Out of sheer morbid curiosity I looked in the season 5 tag on Tumblr and scrolled live updates for half an hour. It was the most entertained I’d been in some time. Byler people exploding. Multiple users saying it contained the worst coming-out scene they’d witnessed in anything including Destiel. People think that the finale is a misdirect and that there’s a secret episode. I knew it’d be bad, but wow, it’s fucking bad. No one is happy with this.
There have been a few historically butt ass TV finales of our time— Game of Thrones, Supernatural, Wonder Egg Priority, Dexter according to a bunch of Google top ten lists and Reddit, Umbrella Academy. Of course, only a couple retroactively sour people’s perspective of the entire preceding show— to have an ending that ruins something, the thing has to have been good in the first place. By the time it ended, Stranger Things was not good. I wasn’t even caught up, and I knew this. Stranger Things hadn’t been good in fucking forever, so how was any of this news?
But wasn’t there a time, some glimmering year ago when there definitely wasn’t any suffering or potent political and economic strife, when people liked this thing? Openly? Gave it acclaim, even? Everyone liked Stranger Things back then. You can’t lie to me. It was fucking everywhere. I watched it by parasitizing off my dad’s inexplicable Netflix account on my shitty Android phone, and my 14-year-old ass was eating up every second. I don’t remember a singular moment of disillusion— simply time rolling past, and me growing older. I moved on to other things (not necessarily better things). For a while I kind of forgot it existed. Various transformative things happened in my personal life. The political climate of the country I lived in changed drastically multiple times. A pandemic started and didn’t end. In the background of it all, Stranger Things chugged onward.
The year is now 2026. In the decade between Stranger Things’ first episode and its last, the following works released: seasons 3 to 6 of Better Call Saul, the entirety of Barry, Russian Doll seasons 1 and 2, Bojack Horseman, 13 Reasons Why, seasons 13-20 of Supernatural, Fleabag, Derry Girls, Midnight Mass, YOU, The Good Doctor, The Good Place, the first two seasons of Severance, the entirety of Succession, around 23 movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Moonlight, Portrait of A Lady On Fire, Disco Elysium, The Last of Us Part II, Wonder Egg Priority, My Hero Academia, Demon Slayer, The Promised Neverland, Jujutsu Kaisen, most of Voltron, Heartstopper, Arcane seasons 1 and 2, Sinners, PLUR1BUS season 1, and Heated Rivalry season 1. I could go on.
Hearing news of the show’s death knell, complete with its coffin flop in front of hundreds of thousands of spectators, made me wonder: what was the deal with this show anyway? It was roaringly successful and spawned a thriving multimedia empire. The Demogorgon is in Fortnite for some reason. There has to be something to it other than sheer 80s nostalgia, right? Most of the fans weren’t even alive for the 80s. Then again, people will like anything. It doesn’t have to be good, they just have to see something good in it. Hearing more from my friend about the supplemental material left me even more baffled. What do you mean there’s a multiple episode podcast and an entire book about the lesbian character that doesn’t fucking happen in the show? What do you mean she wasn’t even originally written to be a lesbian and it was an idea from the actress? What do you mean they had a mixtape with “For Will x” written on it sold as merchandise? What do you mean they wrote the character’s birthday into canon and then next season just forgot it? Why do the actors have to remind the writers of character-critical information that they wrote, and ask them for scenes like dogs begging for scraps? What do you mean they filmed their Kill All Commies subplot in a former Holocaust prison and opened up an AirBNB there? Jesus Christ. How did I ever like this show? That I was 14 be damned. I was stuck between willingly amnesticizing myself of the thing’s existence or diving deeper so I could peel back its guts and expose its rotten core. I wanted to snatch up its errant elements and macgyver them into the good story it had the potential to form.
I thought back to season 1. That’s the one that everyone says still holds up, an excellent piece of TV on its own, even. Many people argue that the series should have ended there, or continued in anthology form; moved on from the characters rather than following their increasingly banal and nonsensical arcs. I weighed the pros and cons of biting the bullet and watching it myself. Pros: not that long. 5 seasons of 8-ish fifty-minute episodes, two of which I’ve already seen; compared to many other shows, I could clear it easily. I really was curious about the things that seemed actually good— like the lesbian character that I had no idea existed, or the “Running Up That Hill” scene, which I had no context for but everyone seemed to agree was genuinely emotional. I don’t like forming thoughts on something I haven’t experienced fully myself, so this would scratch the itch of unknowing with the confidence of my actual opinions. Cons: the embarrassment of willingly watching Stranger Things in 2026. My fear / shame gland produces more than is reasonable in any given situation, and watching a bad tv show is tantamount to ritual humiliation. Not to mention the Problems. The copaganda, the misogyny, the racism, the misogyny combined with racism, the America glorification, the entire brain-bleeding Red Scare level Russia subplot, the fucking Netflix-sponsored prison AirBnB. There’s just so much wrong with it. It’s almost entrancing by way of a 40-car-pileup. The bar is low for Americans, sure, but why would you make anything like this on purpose?
I decided I wanted to perform a necropsy after all, just to make sense of it. If the corpse of Stranger Things proper wasn’t cooling on the ground in a Family Guy death pose1As of January 2026, animated spinoff Stranger Things: Tales from ’85 is yet to be released. , I wouldn’t be nearly as reticent to the idea. But it was, and everyone was throwing tomatoes at its prone body. No one was more bitterly disappointed than those who’d held hope for something, anything, satisfying to happen— the finale caused a fandom prolapse of Sherlock magnitudes about a secret, second finale that would recontextualize everything as the villain’s evil gay dream. All this from a show that in 2016, if you asked a normie on the street, would be classified as at least “pretty good”.
More than anything I wanted to know what the fuck was going on, and whether there was anything worth salvaging. I don’t watch shows legally and I don’t willingly give TV networks money. No one on the Strangethings board is getting a cent from my watchthrough— the only way I’m paying is with my time. Luckily, there’s nothing I love more than wasting precious minutes of my finite life analyzing frivolous bullshit that is objectively bad, stupid, gay, and cringe.
As of January 2026, animated spinoff Stranger Things: Tales from ’85 is yet to be released. ↩