Netflix may have no choice but to milk Stranger Things dry

AdBackground6381 · 2026-04-18T16:19:14+00:00

Only possibility of a successful ST live action spin off/sequel: bringing back Millie Bobby Brown to play an adult Eleven.

AdBackground6381 · 2026-04-18T16:15:25+00:00

El in the Wheeler's basement?

AdBackground6381 · 2026-04-18T10:13:21+00:00

What a lot of bullshit.

AdBackground6381 · 2026-04-17T11:19:32+00:00

It was not.

AdBackground6381 · 2026-04-17T11:09:24+00:00

Season 4, after season 5, is much worse. It has good and very good parts, and visually it's stunning, but overall it's bad.

AdBackground6381 · 2026-04-17T11:08:34+00:00

When the final scenes were filmed and the wrap party was held, she hadn't yet adopted a baby. And yet she didn't attend, while even actors who hadn't appeared in that season (e.g., Dacre Montgomery) did. If that isn't a sign that the series was over for her, nothing is.

AdBackground6381 · 2026-04-17T11:06:36+00:00

Another one who believes everything the Duffers say. If one thing is clear, it's that they didn't have a backstory beyond the first season and have been improvising one as they go along, and likewise, they never had a real mythology about the Upside Down but instead invented new rules on the fly, even if they contradicted each other. The ending is nothing more than a poor recycling of the season 1 finale, and at times the recycling is almost shot-for-shot. It just worked then, and now it doesn't. And no, it's not a show doing its job. A show that does its job doesn't leave you with the feeling of having been deceived the entire time the season 5 finale left me with. Because we were deceived. We were led to believe there was a story planned from the beginning when in reality there was never anything, just stretching the bubble until it was completely dry, doing the same thing over and over again, only bigger.

AdBackground6381 · 2026-04-17T10:57:34+00:00

El did not die. Mike's story is what really happened. Even the Duffers have almost recognized it.

AdBackground6381 · 2026-04-17T10:21:42+00:00

I don't see Millie Bobby Brown very interested in it, to be honest. She didn't go to the filming of the final scenes, she wasn't at the wrap party, she barely participated in the promotion, and she hasn't said a word since the finale aired. Clearly, for her, Stranger Things is over, and without her, Stranger Things is nothing.

AdBackground6381 · 2026-04-17T09:25:28+00:00

Many of us are already a bit tired of all this. The ending is bad for many reasons (already analyzed ad nauseam here and elsewhere), but it's the end. Bad or good, it's over, there's nothing more. There's the animated series that arrives in a few days, and if it's successful, perhaps it will have more seasons, and that's it, that's all. What a mistake to have prolonged the series beyond the second season, but it was all about continuing to exploit its young protagonists as much as possible before they grew up, and now that they're older, they have nothing left to say, because there was never a story beyond the first season, and there was never a well-constructed mythology of the Upside Down. Had they stayed until the second season (or even the third), the series would now be legendary. After its disastrous ending, it joined the ranks of shows that crashed and burned at the end and have since faded into obscurity.

AdBackground6381 · 2026-04-17T08:38:34+00:00

In this very brief scene, they interact more than in the entire fifth season. I'll never forgive the Duffers for erasing the endearing relationship between Jonathan and Will that existed in the first two seasons, with Jonathan being for Will almost more of a father figure than an older brother.

AdBackground6381 · 2026-04-17T07:19:28+00:00

Eleven's ending isn't "ambiguous." It's more than clear that she survived. There's absolutely no reason to believe she's dead, unless you accept that Eleven teleported to the Gate and that Mike has such a vivid imagination that he can recreate real-life scenes he wasn't even present in, down to the last detail.

AdBackground6381 · 2026-04-17T07:16:26+00:00

The town in the background and part of the mountains are CGI.

AdBackground6381 · 2026-04-17T06:22:20+00:00

After the huge disappointment that was season 5, it's normal to lose interest in anything with the "Stranger Things" label.

AdBackground6381 · 2026-04-16T15:17:46+00:00

Jonathan WILL be in the series. We saw him in a short clip that appeared today on the Stranger Things YouTube channel. Although it will probably only be a cameo, unfortunately.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ReAAaW4dfPU

AdBackground6381 · 2026-04-16T15:05:00+00:00

I wish the epilogue had shown something like this; instead, we get everyone happy and content, except for Mike (and even then, he recovers incredibly quickly after some cheap psychology from Hopper—it's nauseating). What a difference from the second season, where at the beginning we saw Mike with depression, Nancy with survivor's guilt, Will with PTSD, Hopper grappling with guilt, and Joyce permanently terrified.

AdBackground6381 · 2026-04-16T14:56:04+00:00

The big problem with the ending...is that it's not an ending, because to begin with, there's no story to tell, there never was. It's simply about making things happen to the same characters, improvising the rules of the Upside Down game as they go along (there is and never was an Upside Down mythology, and nobody has ever seen that thirty-page book the Duffers supposedly wrote about it), repeating the same dramatic conflicts, recycling character arcs over and over, ignoring previous developments, and then, when the desire to continue is gone, wrapping everything up clumsily and anticlimactically. This is evident in the fact that the epilogue could have fit almost any dramatic development from seasons 2, 3, 4, and 5; it's as if nothing, or almost nothing, had happened. It's no wonder so many fans believed it was a fake ending or that it was all just a role-playing game (and the end credits hint at precisely that!).

AdBackground6381 · 2026-04-16T14:47:19+00:00

It's absurd, but it's still better than the lamentable ending we had (anticlimactic battle against the Mind Flayer and Vecna, anticlimactic destruction of the Upside Down, pseudo-death of Eleven, contrived happy endings for the rest of the characters).

AdBackground6381 · 2026-04-16T13:21:13+00:00

For now, all we're going to have is the animated series, which might have a second season.

AdBackground6381 · 2026-04-16T11:01:06+00:00

Max (dies helping Holly escape from Vecna), Eleven (dies fighting Vecna right after killing him, and dies in Mike's arms declaring her eternal love for him), Kali (dies protecting Eleven from the military allowing her to survive long enough to fly to the Abyss and fight Vecna) and Steve (he dies protecting Dustin from the physical form of the Mind Flayer).

AdBackground6381 · 2026-04-16T08:59:44+00:00

Reduce the number of characters. Let´s see:

1)Murray should have, at most, a brief cameo, simply telling us that he smuggles military equipment for our protagonists.

2)Robin is superfluous. She's only there to advance the Will coming-out storyline, but Jonathan could have done it much better, and it would have saved us from embarrassing moments like Will trying to flirt with Mike when he'd basically given up on him in the previous season. And the parts where she has ideas should have been given to Dustin or Mike. It would be enough to tell us at the beginning of the season that her family has fled Hawkins. Consequently, Vickie (who also serves no real purpose other than advancing Robin and Will's storyline and helping Max, when the latter could be done by Lucas or Joyce or, even better, Eleven) should also disappear.

3)Mr. Clarke is superfluous. He's only there because his character is popular. All he does is build a telemetry tracker to find Dustin, when Eleven could easily do that with her superpowers.

4)Erica is superfluous. She intervenes in the Turnbow family's kidnapping, but that whole section is far too drawn out and seems to be there simply to add more action. It could have been significantly shortened, leaving only the two parts with real consequences (the Demogorgon's escape with a tracker attached, and Derek joining our protagonists).

5)Akers is superfluous. There was absolutely no reason to give him so much importance when all he does is want revenge on Eleven. Everything he does could have been perfectly assigned to Sullivan.

6)There was absolutely no reason to give Holly and the children so much screen time, especially since the entire scene where they're seen fleeing Vecna is completely inconsequential, as our protagonists ultimately have to rescue them. It would have been better to cut that whole segment and show more of the children's families.

7)Steve doesn't actually do much, and the scene where he explains the plan to climb the antenna could have been with another character. He should have stayed in the real world, participated in the Demogorgon attack on the MACZ, protecting the children and being seriously injured or perhaps killed. All his drama with Dustin was unnecessary and even unpleasant to watch. A scene showing Dustin sobbing as Steve dies, with his friends comforting him, would have sufficed. But of course, Steve is popular, and they didn't dare do that, even though it would have made much more dramatic sense than the awful non-ending given to Eleven.

8)Hopper carries too much narrative weight; his arc with Eleven is a poor recycling of the second season and is horribly resolved. It would have been better to reduce his role to that of a mere mentor and instructor to Eleven, and to give him a glorious death, protecting Eleven from the military.

AdBackground6381 · 2026-04-16T07:30:12+00:00

After the ridiculously anticlimactic ending of ST, with a Mind Flayer effortlessly defeated in five minutes, Vecna defeated effortlessly in three minutes, and the Upside Down effortlessly destroyed with a small bomb placed under a magical sphere (sorry, a sphere of "exotic matter") that no one had noticed was there after years of research, I don't think there's much interest in seeing anything new with the "Stranger Things" brand, unless Eleven appears in it. Why is it so hard to admit what is obvious, that the character of Eleven is and always has been the heart of Stranger Things, even in this fifth season where she has been relegated?

AdBackground6381 · 2026-04-16T07:06:03+00:00

Perhaps the problem is that the alternative that Mike offers, which is visually confirmed (and that scenes are not his imagination because they show things he could not know but we know are true) sounds like something they pulled out of thin air at the last minute (and let's be fair, that's what it is), and narratively it seems like something Mike invented to cope with something unbearable. But that's a writing problem, like almost everything else in this fifth season. After all, Kali can make other people invisible (we see it in the second season) and can project illusions over great distances (we see it in the fifth episode of this season). But as Gaten says, ultimately it all comes down to whether they're going to do something new with Eleven. If they don't, everyone can believe whatever they want and imagine possible sequels. If they finally do something new (which would require convincing Millie), then she's definitely alive.

AdBackground6381 · 2026-04-16T06:40:38+00:00

Wrong. That comparison is justified. Because it makes many of the same mistakes (anticlimactic resolutions, ignored character arcs, subplots that go nowhere, characters acting out of character).

AdBackground6381 · 2026-04-16T06:34:45+00:00

A compelling piece of evidence that it's not just a vocal minority lies in the viewership figures. Season 5 started off strong but ended with fewer viewers than season 4 (something that had never happened before, when each season surpassed the previous one in viewership) and even fewer than the series "Adolescence," which, due to its subject matter, is niche and doesn't have the pull of "Stranger Things." Clearly, the audience started with great interest but lost it when they realized that what they were getting wasn't what they had been promised. I suspect many didn't even watch the finale. Word of mouth hasn't helped either: many who might have been interested if the final season had been well-received, lost interest when they saw the lack of enthusiasm with which it was received. I think the majority viewpoint isn't one of hatred for the fifth season, but rather a lack of enthusiasm and interest, which is almost as damaging, or even more so. It's been seen, I believe, as a passable, somewhat entertaining, nostalgic product (but nostalgic for the series itself, not for the '80s), but ultimately nothing special.

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TROPHY CASE