The wild and weird year of 2025 exited last night, and with came an apropos ending to a strange stretch -- the series finale and end to Netflix's Stranger Things. Millions of people tuned in on New Year's Eve to watch the final two-hour movie-length episode of a surprisingly popular sci-fi thriller that snuck onto the streaming television scene and into a nation's consciousness almost ten years ago. It's actually hard to believe that show arrived a decade ago, though the summer of 2016 could certainly be considered the beginning of "stranger things."
To watch the final episode with flashbacks to the young actors -- some of whom were barely out of elementary school when it started -- was kind of wild. And it was actually a bit of a head scratcher that Netflix managed to draw five seasons of a limited series over ten years. That said, it "strangely" made sense to see the characters age through high school and beyond as they battled to save themselves and the world from the Upside Down.
If you're looking for a quick summation of everything you saw -- or maybe missed -- during the show's abnormally long run, NY Times writer Noel Murray has a piece explaining "What Happened in the Series Finale?"
Worlds collide. Heroes die. The day is saved … but not without a little heartbreak. So ends “Stranger Things.”
After five seasons — spread across nearly 10 years — the “Stranger Things” creators Matt and Ross Duffer concluded their enormously popular Netflix show on Wednesday much the way they began it. Although the brothers’ budgets have gotten bigger, their aims have remained mostly the same: to tap into their core influences (Stephen King, Steven Spielberg, teen comedies and “Dungeons & Dragons”) and tell the story of a handful of brave young people in the 1980s, protecting their small town of Hawkins, Ind., from monsters.
In the two-hour series finale, titled “The Rightside Up,” the heroes are helped as always by their secret weapon: Jane (Millie Bobby Brown), a.k.a. Eleven, a teenager whose innate psychic abilities became supercharged when she was imprisoned in a secret government lab as a child. Thanks to Eleven, a group of Hawkins middle schoolers and high schoolers discovered the Upside Down, a shadow version of their town in another dimension, populated by dangerous beasts.
As a fifty-something Gen Xer -- roughly the same as age as Stranger Things mom Winona Ryder -- I was drawn into the first season with its references to a 70s childhood era hooks like Dungeons & Dragons, and I enjoyed that first season. The interesting thing to me was how much the story reflected themes and structures of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And if you want to dive into critical analysis, you can certainly start connecting the story arcs to other archetypal stories -- Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter -- all rooted in Campbell's monomyth.
While I did not tune in committedly for the entire run of the show, I did enjoy the wrap up last night, and hanging with my wife and two twenty-something kids, it was a rather low-key and satisfying way to ring out a strange year -- and strange ten years or so -- before we switched over to playing games, eating tiramisu, and enjoying some much-deserved and appreciated family time.
So, here's to 2026, a fresh start and perhaps fewer strange things.
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