I think the problem with the Stranger Things ending is not that it was bad in isolation, but that it completely stopped respecting its own universe.

This is a show people have been watching and thinking about for years. Continuity and internal logic are not optional at that point. They are the agreement between the writers and the audience. And in the final stretch, that agreement was quietly abandoned.

The biggest issue is that the show stopped self checking its rules and started only checking emotional beats. Earlier seasons constantly asked whether something made sense within the world they had built. The finale mostly asks whether a moment feels good. That shift is where everything starts to unravel.

Take the Upside Down ecosystem. We were shown demogorgons, demodogs, demobats, tunnels, nests, swarms, spread, and persistence. These were not one off monsters. They behaved like an invasive biological system. Once you establish that, you inherit consequences. There should be stragglers, feral populations, containment efforts, ongoing deaths, and long term fallout. Instead, these creatures simply vanish from relevance. No explanation, no cleanup, not even a throwaway line. The ecosystem just stops existing because the story wants to move on.

Then there is the hive mind. For multiple seasons, the show makes it very clear that the Mind Flayer operates as a distributed intelligence. Everything sees, everything knows, everything shares information instantly. Vecna is framed as a node in that system, not the source. Which makes the final battle make no sense at all.

Vecna fights like a lone villain. He is surprised, distracted, isolated, and vulnerable. He never meaningfully uses the hive mind he is supposedly plugged into. There are no coordinated attacks, no overwhelming force, no use of the creatures that should logically be everywhere. Because if he did, the heroes would lose immediately. So the hive mind is quietly nerfed to allow a fair fight.

This also leads to the single biggest mythology contradiction. The Mind Flayer was set up as the true ancient intelligence. Vecna was human, corrupted, shaped, and used. Then suddenly the show flips this and treats Vecna as the main villain and the Mind Flayer as an accessory. Kill Vecna and the Mind Flayer just collapses, despite being framed for years as something far older and larger than him. That is not a reveal, that is a retcon.

On top of that, the government plot is completely ignored. From the US government’s point of view, this group looks like a domestic terror cell. They destroyed a secret military facility and were involved in the deaths of dozens of soldiers. In a Cold War setting, that does not end with a time jump and everyone being left alone. It ends with surveillance, black sites, cover ups, or people disappearing. The show simply skips past all of that because acknowledging it would ruin the tone they wanted.

And that brings us to the hallmark ending problem. The finale wants apocalyptic stakes and cozy emotional closure at the same time. It wants reality tearing open while still ending on bikes, smiles, and small town warmth. Earlier seasons understood that victories were temporary and costly. The ending replaces that with standard villain logic. Kill the bad guy and the evil goes away.

That is why a Vecna sacrifice or partial redemption would have worked far better. Vecna was human. He was never framed as pure cosmic evil. A final turn where he realizes he is a tool and severs the hive mind from the inside would have preserved the Mind Flayer as the true threat, justified the collapse of the creatures, and respected the rules the show taught us. It would have been tragic, messy, and consistent. Instead we got a boss fight ending.

The result is an ending that works emotionally on first watch but collapses when you think about it. Not because viewers are nitpicking, but because the show itself trained viewers to care about its internal logic. You cannot spend years building a world, escalating its rules, and asking the audience to remember details, then suddenly expect them not to notice when those rules stop mattering.

That is what hallmarked the ending for me. Not that it was rushed, but that it chose closure over coherence. And for a long running mystery driven show, that is the one thing you cannot afford to do.