Chapter 5: Nothing Things

In the God-abandoned year of 2025, season 5 of Stranger Things premiered.

The gap between this season and the previous would end up being the longest of the entire series due to COVID-related complications and the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike^{1Flam, Charna. “‘Stranger Things’ Final Season Faces Delays due to Writers Strike.” Variety.} . During this gap, the Duffers purportedly changed many things about the outline, including the ending^{2Romero, Ariana. “The Duffers Just Shared Something About the ‘Big Ending’ of Stranger Things.” Netflix Tudum.} — yet despite claiming they used this time to hammer out the details they didn’t think they’d be able to include before the season’s confirmation, they began shooting season 5 without a script^{3Nelson, Samantha. “The Stranger Things Finale Started Shooting without a Script.” Polygon.} . This season released in three drops: 4 episodes in November for the first volume, 3 episodes in December for the second, and the grand finale on the auspicious date of New Year’s Eve. Mumblings of Byler were abound. Everyone still invested wanted to know how that particular subplot was going to resolve, if nothing else.

Because we desperately need to reconcile how long it’s been and the massive differential in the actors’ ages (canonically 16-year-old Mike Wheeler is played by 20-something Finn Wolfhard), we start with an 18-month timeskip. Hawkins is now under military quarantine, the Soviet plotline thankfully put to rest. The writers don’t really want to deal with a billion separate character introductions anymore, so the Wheelers and Byers all shoved into one house, Slendermansion-style. Yes, this means that eight different characters (including the gayboys) have been crammed in the same space for at least a month. No, we will never see any meaningful interaction come of this. Now that Hopper is back, he and Jane’s arcs have to be invariably tied in the least interesting ways possible. Are you sick of Jane’s character always surrounding a male authority figure trying to corral her for her own safety? Fuck you. Everyone’s performing bit parts in a mini-resistance throughout the occupation, coded messages and Diana Ross over the radio, to find Vecna and kill him once and for all. There always has to be a meanwhile with this show, so it splinters its runtime even further with a new central plot in the form of Holly Wheeler.

Remember Holly? Most people don’t, because at the beginning of the show she was a literal toddler. She is suddenly a POV character here, and she gets kidnapped to have an inciting incident with Vecna/Henry Creel. I actually don’t mind Holly character-wise as much as other people might, but she’s got the same problem as Eddie. We already have so, so many characters, and she’s not even the only new one introduced. The show never trusts its main cast to actually ever do anything, so it spits out new guys to jingle in front of the audience instead, and by now it’s gotten terribly fucking stale. It’s difficult to get invested in anything when it feels like none of it will matter by the finale. The gang performs a Home Alone caper to kidnap a child. Jane and Hopper infiltrate a lab in the Upside Down and rescue Jane’s sister Kali (the girl from season 2). Holly explores Vecna’s lotus eater machine mind palace (why he never used this before to entrap victims goes unexplained) and meets Max’s disembodied comaself. Much of the Upside Down’s remaining mystery is stripped away over the course of this season; the characters can pretty much just enter it whenever, they spend their time just wandering around looking for clues under no threat of monsters. The copious amounts of greenscreen computer-generated landscapes makes everything feel artificial and intangible, like they’re pottering around Dead By Daylight maps (oh wait). There’s an unpleasant AAA video game sheen to this whole mess.

I watched the first few episodes by myself, during which 2x speed and 5-second skips were heavily abused, entertaining myself by predicting the exact flow of every exposition scene held in the Wheelers’ war room. (Fun fact: if you take a shot every time a character dramatically stops mid conversation to demonstrate their thesis using a household object, is met by skepticism from another character, and grimly says something to the effect of, “I know it’s crazy, but it’s the best we’ve got,” you will be dead.) From episode 4 onward, I was accompanied by the friend who’d sent me down the dark path of rewatching Strangethings in the first place, which brightened the experience significantly. I went from dourly watching in dead silence to riffing with my companion, who could point out more bullshit that I wasn’t aware of— for instance, the amount of times Mike Wheeler almost physically touches Will Byers, but doesn’t.

Will has finally drifted back to central focus, though his spotlight has to be juggled with the aforementioned characters, and this time his homo bullshit is completely unignorable. He and Robin begin to bond, which is one of those duos that just makes sense; maybe if Will hadn’t been in California for no fucking reason, they would’ve been able to interact sooner. After witnessing Robin kiss her girlfriend, he asks her about gay stuff, namely how to tell if someone likes you back when you’re unsure of their feelings, and Robin responds that there are certain signals: “like a brush of the knee, a bump of the elbow, a shared look. It all just kind of accrued, like a snowball rolling down a hill, until it was obvious.” Mike proceeds to do all of these things throughout the rest of the episode (retroactively, he was already doing a lot of them too). They have a gay little walk through a field that made a lot of people who were on the fence pretty convinced something was going to happen.

In episode 4, Will’s homo shit finally collides with the ongoing supernatural plot. Robin has a conversation with him about Tammy Thompson, her previously-established straight-girl crush, that she’d eventually come to the conclusion that self-acceptance was the only way for her to become the best version of herself. Will subsequently unlocks his latent psychic abilities through the power of self-acceptance and lesbian mentorship. If I sound snide in my description, I’d like to clarify this shit owns. It misses the opportunity to swing the bat all the way by not killing Joyce off, but you know, little victories. As you might imagine, Byler stocks were flying through the roof. This was a meaningful development and a welcome break from the other plotlines (the Upside Down is revealed to be a wormhole, there’s a quick little reveal that the US government has continued the psychic child program and is holding a bunch of heavily pregnant women hostage in the alternate dimension but never mind all that), but far from a definitive conclusion to Will and Mike’s subplot. Viewers were excited, but nervous. They’d lived through some bullshit in the interim— 2017’s Sherlock finale and its fiery Johnlock fallout, Shiro Voltron’s dead boyfriend and epilogue husband, the Destiel scene which to this day serves as a meme template to deliver world news^{4zach---15. “Destiel Confession.” Know Your Meme.} — yet they never seemed to learn. The show only had a few more episodes to resolve any of this. The battered people, against their own judgment, got their hopes up. Holy shit, was there a chance this would actually happen?

Remember when I said Byler was going to be relevant to the finale? I’m really sorry.

Stranger Things season 5, episode 7, “Chapter Seven: The Bridge”, is the episode in which Will Byers comes out. He’s talking to just Joyce first, tells her he has something to confess, and then Mike wanders into the scene as he is wont to do, and Will decides he needs to hear it too. He says, verbatim, “Wait. I think you need to hear this too. Everyone does.” Remember how in season 3, Robin only comes out to Steve because they’re both high on truth serum and he had actively confessed feelings towards her? Well, Will decides that for the sake of disclosing his potentially exploitable weakness to the team, he wants to invite everyone. I mean everyone. Mike, Joyce, his other friends including his adopted sister/crush’s girlfriend, his older brother, Mike’s older sister, Steve(?), Robin’s girlfriend(??), Murray(???). Even Kali, freshly rescued from the Upside Down, gets to be there despite being a complete stranger. Once the entire cast short of Vecna is in the room, Will launches into a big monologue about how he’s been pretending for so long to be normal else out of fear of being ostracized, that he’s different in this one aspect but otherwise just like everyone else in the ways that matter, that he had a crush on someone but ultimately realized, “he’s just my Tammy. [...] it was never about him. [...] It was about me.” He says this shit directly to Mike’s face. Mike has about as much reaction as a dead bug. Everyone is, of course, completely accepting and draws him into a big, tearful group hug. “[uplifting music playing],” says the closed captions. It’s a New Year’s miracle. Roll credits. Next episode is the finale of the entire fucking show.

Suffice to say, people’s reactions were mixed. At least a few were genuinely touched: some praised its message of acceptance and affirmations for the show’s young viewers^{5D’Addario, Daniel. “Why Will’s "Stranger Things" Coming Out Speech Strikes an Emotional Chord.” Variety.} (even if most of the positive takes still admitted it was pretty corny). Will’s own actor, naturally, said Will is “one of the best gay characters we've ever received in media”^{6Vary, Adam B. “Noah Schnapp on "Stranger Things 5": Will’s Powers and Coming Out.” Variety.} — a bold statement on its own, but genuinely hysterical considering that the day before this episode aired the finale of PLUR1BUS released, and the day after so would Heated Rivalry’s (also, he said that while portraying Will’s powers he “consistently channeled a 6,000-pound silverback gorilla”^{7Nick, Romano. “Noah Schnapp on Will’s "Stranger Things 5," Vol. 1 Cliffhanger: "A Whiplash of A Reveal."” EW.com.} , which just makes me laugh). The vast majority of fan feedback outside of this was negative. People pointed out the scene’s absurd setup, its saccharine progression, its dodging of any acknowledgement that Will’s feelings weren’t just for some nebulous theoretical boy but Mike specifically, the fact that it all has nothing really to do with Vecna yet is treated like an essential lynchpin to overcoming him. “Not every coming-out arc needs to present something new or groundbreaking,” wrote Ben Rosenstock for Variety, “but this one hits all the expected beats [...] Integrating a character’s queerness into the narrative should add a layer of understanding, but in this case it further flattens Will, turning his lifelong issues with socializing into an empowering but simplistic A-to-B growth arc.”^{8Rosenstock, Ben. “We Need to Talk About Will.” Vulture.} The problem, again, isn’t the concept of the romance being unrequited; it’s that the show sets up a multi-season will-they won’t-they and doesn’t have the courtesy to conclude it. It drags the gay requitter through the trenches as the requittee gets to obliviously bounce between plot points mooning over his straight love interest (whom, let’s not forget, he also treats like shit), then acts like over the course of one pep talk the former has magically already gotten over his crush to the point of being able to directly confess to the latter about it. They couldn’t even be bothered to give Will a throwaway love interest like Vickie to provide reasonable doubt that he’s moved on.

Some people have conspiracy theories that Ross Duffer’s divorce from Fear Street screenwriter Leigh Janiak contributed to the ultimate unfulfilling outcome of the show— and Byler’s— trajectory^{9Klimek, Olivia. “New "Stranger Things" Theory Emerges amid Disappointment over Final Season — Divorce Gate.”} . They argue that not only was her presence in the earlier seasons what made the writing good, but she was responsible for the queer themes as she had previously written into Fear Street. The theory goes that when Janiak left, the show didn’t have the guts to execute on Byler becoming canon, so they swerved last-second. In the least charitable interpretation possible, it’s the coming-out equivalent of Oscar bait— a big, emotional, unearned scene farming a gay character’s arc for clout, because it knows it’s going to get articles and accolades and less informed people (and those with lower standards) praising it as an important step for homosexual representation or whatever the fuck. Let it never be said, however, that I believe the Duffers are that malicious or intentional— I think they simply fumbled on a level most would think impossible for even regular queerbait, because the Duffers have proved time and time again they do not understand what’s logical or interesting about their characters, nor are they able to write a long-spanning arc well on purpose. Perhaps it was always folly to expect anything different.

So after that uproar and a lot of review-bombing^{10Shanfeld, Ethan. “"Stranger Things 5" Gets Review Bombed as Will’s Coming Out Becomes Worst-Rated Episode on IMDb.” Variety.} , both from dudebros upset at woke fag shit in their all-American show (again) and Tumblrinas catatonically liveblogging that a pillar of their childhoods had been ruined, Strangethings blindly stumbled towards the finish line. My friend and I paused to go refresh ourselves and get bowls of snacks. I couldn’t say I was invested, but I also couldn’t say I wasn’t entertained. There are certain silver linings to watching something that flatly sucks— the things you don’t expect genuinely surprise you, you can’t in conscience call it good but that’s besides the point. The experience is sort of like having a cat bring a dead bird inside and vomit the carcass up onto your bed, but in the wreckage you find a gold tooth. You’re happy, you guess, but how did the bird have it to begin with? The world is a scary place. Anyways. The episode speedruns Vecna’s backstory to have it make even less sense. He’s evil because a random man in a cave tried to shoot him and he got his powers from a space rock. Mike and Will have an exchange nearly as infamous as the coming-out scene itself— “Friends?” “No thanks. Best friends.”— that was accurately predicted by a 16 year old on Twitter weeks before the episode dropped. Jane’s gotta go kill Henry Creel and blow herself up! Quick, there’s no time! Break into the lab, kill season-specific US government officials who don’t matter, Kali gets shot and in her dying breath tells Jane she’s gotta kill herself to stop the cycle of violence. Forty-something minute CGI battle with the Mind Flayer proceeds. It turns out the way to defeat an interdimensional 40-foot-tall nightmare monster is much the same as anything else: beating the fuck out of it until it dies. Will has an emotional heart-to-heart with the man who molested and impregnated him and the latter rejects his Steven Universe bullshit because he’s evil, goddammit. He also reveals that Will was targeted because of his weakness, despite the fact that Will survived one season being in Hell and another season being possessed by the devil. Sure! Joyce gets the final blow on Vecna, which I do actually kind of like, but she takes forever to do it which is really funny because his powers could demonstrably skeletonize her but I guess he wants this to be over as much as us.

The seasons-long waste-of-time teen love triangle? Dead in the water. Stonathan is more canon than either Nancy-oriented direction, why the fuck not. Jane blows up inside the portal to the Upside Down, even as her boyfriend tearfully pleads with her not to fucking kill herself in front of him; she tells him one last time that she loves him, and because he’s Michael Wheeler, he doesn’t say it back. Indeed, Jane killing herself seems to solve everything, as we skip to the epilogue immediately afterwards. Fuck those pregnant women, by the way.

It’s eighteen months since the final battle and everything seems fine. The teens, I mean fully-grown adult persons, are following their own paths fagging and dyking out. (We all know Robin is attending famously gay Smith college, but did you know Nancy dropped out of the equally gay Emerson college? Fun facts!) Speaking of dykes, Robin’s girlfriend doesn’t even show up. Erica shows up to give one last sassy one-liner, giving us 0-2 on women of color appearing substantially in season 5 without dying horribly. Dustin graduates valedictorian and makes a speech lambasting conformity, before showing off his Hellfire Club shirt (remember, everyone still believes Eddie Munson was a serial killer) and flipping everyone off. I’d usually make fun of this because there’s no way any of these little shits are even passing the year with their amount of skipped class, but I love Dustin and he’s the only one I still care about so I’m glad he’s happy. Ted and Karen Wheeler are ambivalently non-divorced. The new guard of D&D nerds is taking over for the old. Mike and everyone settle into the dusty Wheeler basement for one last game, and he reminisces about how all of this is all about stories in the end; how they can make the stories and endings they want to^{11Jane and Mike previously have a conversation about this in “Chapter 6: Escape from Camazotz”, where Jane explicitly tells Mike, “This isn't like one of your campaigns. You don't get to write the ending.” This, of course, he rebuffs.} .

Mike narrates some fanfiction about how Jane is actually out there in the world, living happily in a remote location where the government won’t bother her and never meaningfully coming into contact with civilization again. In a sequence that is several back-to-back kicks in the teeth, we get some hypothetical flash forwards for the characters present. Lucas and Max get to have a presumably long beautiful life with one another because they are at the movies. Dustin is probably going to go to space (but will still make time for hanging out with his best, older, much stupider friend). Will meets his honest-to-god Voltron-style epilogue boyfriend at a bar. Worse than Voltron, actually, he doesn’t even get a name. He’s imaginary. Mike Wheeler is making all of this shit up. The ending he makes for himself is him writing in his college dorm, alone, with his dad’s haircut. Finally, in Mike Wheeler’s mind palace, Jane explores the world, coming across the fabled land with three waterfalls that she and Mike talked about earlier in the season. Except there’s not even three waterfalls in the scene? There’s two. They could have just put three there, but they didn’t. I don’t know. As everyone tearfully puts away their D&D binders and clears out of the basement, Mike hangs back as he puts away his own. There’s a confirmed cut shot in the behind-the-scenes documentary of him stroking Will’s binder with his thumb^{12One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things 5. Directed by Martiana Radwan, Netflix, 12 Jan. 2026.}  . Okay man.

And that’s the end of Stranger Things.

The reception to the last episode was already bad, and this made it all fucking crater. “Game of Thrones level” began being passed around word-of-mouth. A worse queer rug pull than Destiel, worse than Sherlock. Mike Wheeler killing himself in 20 years after hearing “Good Luck Babe” became a widespread meme. People were, and are, convinced that this finale is the Duffers’ funny trick, that everyone in the episode is secretly being controlled by Vecna and that there will be a second, actually good finale in the coming weeks to explain all this stupid bullshit. This mass delusion is known as Conformity Gate^{13Davis, Johnny. “What Is Conformity Gate? Explaining the Theory That ‘Stranger Things’ Pulled a Finale Fake-Out.” Esquire.} , and the believers will be waiting forever. We laugh, but I do feel bad; a lot of these people are sincere, young fans who have a lot of emotional attachment to characters they grew up with, particularly Will’s story. I can’t blame them for wanting the show to actually be good. Really, they’re engaging more with the show’s textual elements than the writers, their only miscalculation is giving the Duffers any amount of credit— truly, they cannot be credited for a single goddamn thing. The scene in the finale post coming-out scene where Mike and Will actually talk and affirm their relationship only exists because Noah Schnapp begged the Duffers for scraps^{14Villarreal, Yvonne. “Noah Schnapp on the ‘Hopeful’ ‘Stranger Things’ Finale and Will’s Fate.” Los Angeles Times.} , and the best they could do was “Friends? No Thanks. Best Friends.” (In the same interview, he mentions he thought the coming-out scene would be just with Joyce until he read the script, and that he hadn’t even come out to the whole cast in his real life at that point. I’m not one to openly express sympathy for Schnapp about anything, but Jesus Christ.) As multiple people have pointed out, in their own behind-the-scenes documentary that they released, they’re shown with three ChatGPT tabs open^{15Santaflorentina, Hayley. “Stranger Things Documentary Director Addresses Claim Duffer Brothers Used ChatGPT for Finale.” E! Online, E! News.} — completing the circle of recycled, algorithmic garbage that didn’t even exist at the show’s onset but that by the end, with how long it was allowed to stew in its own juices, was perhaps inevitable.

I had a blast. Not because of the show itself, god no. It was entirely due to sharing the experience with my friend who knew just as well how shit it all was that buoyed me through the whole thing. I went into this knowing what was going to happen and with my bar of expectations on the floor, and the show did acrobatic dives through the dirt to reach subterranean depths beneath it. It was just about the closing-off for 2025 that 2025 deserved— an absolutely fucking shit year that everyone wanted gone. A year that when you think everything can’t get worse, knocks on your door and says, “guess who’s president again”. (I know he was elected the year prior, but inaugurated at the beginning, so I count it.) People celebrated the first time Trump went out— assuring themselves that such an embarrassment in US politics would and could never happen again— and like it was trying to prove itself, the world backslid.

Everyone has their own shitty 2025 experience, I can only speak to mine; there was something about the state of things that was, in of itself, revealing. Catastrophizing, hand-wringy media and politicians on Bluesky will insist that the current course of things is an aberration, that such fascist atrocities would never happen if not for the current administration. Ask anyone outside of the USAmerican sphere, or anyone with more than a rudimentary grasp on the country’s history, and they will laugh. Fascist atrocities certainly continue to happen, but they are nothing new, a substantial amount are fundamental to the roots of the country itself. The US did not stop committing war crimes when Trump was briefly away from the pilot’s seat, it did not let the undocumented kids out of cages as it promised, it sat smugly on its hands as the war on Gaza escalated, posting limp condemnations on social media all the while.

When things are bad, consistently bad, bad even when the material circumstances change in a way that should lead to something not as bad, you have to wonder how much of the foundations are in fact predicated on things going this way. It’s not the end of the world— you’re not doomed— but if you want to really find solace and solutions, you need to accept some things and face the universe with them in mind.

Conclusion