For Gen X, it was Star Wars. For Millennials, it was the wizarding world of Harry Potter. And for the past ten years, The Duffer Brothers and Co. have taken Gen Z to the town of Hawkins, Indiana with the hit series Stranger Things.
Like all good things, even the most charming, beloved sagas have to come to their inevitable conclusions. And, like clockwork, with each end comes a profusion of criticism from the fans who have devoted a good chunk of their lives to these series. The most relevant of these is Stranger Things, which — after a 10-year run on Netflix — came to its dramatic end on New Year’s Eve in a three-part release.
The public has always had its qualms with the series and its production. While the show ran for ten years, the series produced only 42 episodes across five seasons, with an average of roughly two years between releases. Many viewers have also felt lost in the show’s minor unrealisms, intersecting storylines and constant introduction of new characters.
Now that Stranger Things is complete, its ending has drawn more criticism of the show than ever. While the finale received some positive responses, many viewers took to social media and decided that the finale closed the lid on a garbage can of a season. In seemingly every corner of the internet, people are upset about virtually every aspect of the finale, from the downfall of “Byler” to the death of that character.
My family and I have watched each season upon its release since 2016. As a family, we have always been drawn to epic series like Stranger Things and have experienced our fair share of controversial finales. And on New Year’s Eve 2025, we took to the theater again to watch the final episode of Stranger Things.
Upon leaving the theater, the three of us loved the finale. So when we saw the negative reception from people online, we were shocked. According to some online users, the Stranger Things finale was one of the worst finales of all time. I was scratching my head for a while, trying to figure out what I missed that made the finale so terrible. Was it really that bad? Did it truly degrade the previous four seasons of the show like viewers said? And then I realized, finales are never good enough.
Even as someone who enjoyed the ending, I had my own criticisms. I was particularly upset by Eleven’s fate. Yet again, popular media had chosen to sell this story about how the lives of the abused are not worth living. It felt incredibly sad that the final message of the most popular show of the decade was that the only way to end a cycle of abuse is to end one’s life, whether it be ended by disappearing or by death. But for all intents and purposes, Stranger Things had the best finale it possibly could have had.
Every time the book closes on one of these series, everyone is mad. People hated the epilogue of Harry Potter when it was released. And when the finale of Game of Thrones premiered – oh man, you would have thought that World War III popped off. The ending of Lost still angers and confounds viewers to this day. Pretty Little Liars, Umbrella Academy, True Blood – the list goes on and on. This could be simply written off as bad writing, but I think it’s because people just hate endings, period.
Stranger Things was marketed as “the never-ending story,” and, in a sense, many of the stories I mentioned have a similar feeling. These shows run for years, and they build fanbases who grow to feel emotionally connected to these characters as if they were actual friends and family. Some people grow up with these stories and feel that a part of their identity is attached to them. Their ends can feel like the closing of a chapter of one’s life, and the end of a chapter never feels great. Some of these endings really are just bad and poorly written (sorry, Game of Thrones). But in the case of Stranger Things, it isn’t the writing or the plot that fans are necessarily upset about. Quite frankly, they’d just prefer that the story not end at all.
People don’t want to see the end of “the never-ending story.” Perhaps the best example of this is that many Stranger Things fans began to speculate that the finale wasn’t even the finale – that the showrunners had more content still to be released.
At the end of the day, we all have to understand that the Duffer Brothers and their crew had an incredible feat to conquer. Not only did they have to come up with an ending to the show itself, but they also had to come up with the ending to a cultural phenomenon. Despite the extreme amount of pressure that entails, they managed to deliver a near-perfect finale that tied up every pertinent storyline with a bow on top.
Despite my very big feelings about Eleven’s fate, my current feelings about the finale honor my initial ones. The Stranger Things finale did the entirety of the show and its fanbase justice. There truly wasn’t much more we could have asked for.
