Jonathan Byers wears low-top white chucks during the events of this season.
It’s taken nine years, but we have finally arrived at the end of the Netflix phenomenon Stranger Things. Debuting in 2016 and immediately taking the world by storm, and making stars out of its incredibly talented young cast. The sense of childhood wonder, combined with 80’s sci-fi nostalgia, ingrained the show in pop culture. Each subsequent season has been bigger and pushed the story forward, but many have complained about how long it has taken to make the show. This brings us to the fifth and final season, which arrived after a three and a half year hiatus after Season 4. Part 1 was released on November 26th, 2025, Part 2 on December 25th, 2025, and the finale on December 31st, 2025. The stellar cast returns and also adds even more members. Season 5 stars Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Finn Wolfhard, Millie Bobby Brown, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Sadie Sink, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Noah Schnapp, Joe Keery, Maya Hawke, Brett Gelman, Priah Ferguson, Nell Fisher, Cara Buono, Jamie Campbell Bower, and Linda Hamilton.
Robin, meanwhile, wears (usually untied) black high tops.
In the Fall of 1987, about a year after the events of Season 4, Hawkins is on complete lockdown. The military has established a quarantine zone around the town after Vecna (Bower) opened the four connecting rifts to the Upside Down. The whole crew is still doing all they can to find Venca and end him once and for all. Elle (Brown) is training with Hopper (Harbour) and Joyce (Ryder), while Mike (Wolfhard), Dustin (Matarazzo), Will (Schnapp), and Lucas (McLaughlin) try to finish high school. Lucas also spends much of his time visiting Max (Sink) in the hospital, where she still remains in a coma. Robin (Hawke) and Steve (Keery) run a pirate radio station, where “Rockin’ Robin” uses the airwaves to broadcast secret codes of the military operations to the gang while wearing her chucks. Jonathan (Heaton) also wears chucks throughout the season, and he and Nancy (Dyer) assist with the group's rebel activities. The build-up of the rest of the season is a bit messy, and the plot takes so many twists and turns that it’s nearly impossible to fully capture the whole narrative in a summary. For this season, you just need to strap in and enjoy the ride if you can.
Jonathan and Nancy traverse the Upside- Down.
This show got too big for its own good in more ways than one. If you’ll recall, Season 1 was a small-scale supernatural story that primarily focused on a mom trying to find her son. It was an obvious E.T. homage with a dash of horror thrown in. Over time, though, because the show became a mega-hit, this small-scale story grew and began to involve government conspiracies, multiple “big bad” monsters, different dimensions, the USSR, multi-subject psychic experiments, and an ensemble cast that ballooned from 7 to 20 actors. Through it all, it seemed that the Duffer brothers couldn’t decide who they wanted to be the “hero” of the story. Would it be Elle since she’s Vecna’s sister and has the powers, or maybe Mike since he was the original lead, or Will since he was taken by the Mindflayer, or maybe everyone in the main cast?. In the end, they never made a choice, and it feels like who the main character is changes from episode to episode this season. Part 1 of this season builds up Will as the one who is going to be the key to stopping Venca, but then in Part 2, we focus on Elle and her recently found sister as the two who are gonna end it all. Then, in the finale, Mike is unexpectedly the main focus again and the point of view from which we view the end of this story, but even then, Joyce is the one to actually kill Vecna.
Namaste, young William.
This final season really feels like the Duffers had a dozen ideas of ways to end this narrative, but couldn’t decide on one and instead tried to shoehorn them all in. Characters, plot points, and McGuffins are introduced and then dropped without reason. None of what happens matters in the end, and our bloated cast makes it through the events of the finale with no one dying. There are no stakes, it never feels like anyone is in real danger, and the end is never in doubt. This final season will go down as one of the worst that a show of this caliber has gone through, similar in many ways to Game of Thrones.
One of the many, many team huddle scenes used in this season.
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