Episode 87: Stranger Things Season 5 and Finale

Transcript

So just two things real quick before getting started here. First of all, I was starting a new, or I was trying a new recording method for this episode. So there's, if this is your first time here, usually the audio doesn't quite sound like this.
There is a reasonable amount of background noise in this. I was trying to see if I could take a microphone and record while driving on a trip. I considered re-recording this episode, but ultimately decided that, you know, I said what I wanted to say in the episode, and I think that it, you know, covers the things I wanted to talk about.
But it's not horrible, right? It's just not usually where things are. I did try some editing methods to remove some of the background noise. They only work to a certain extent.
So in the future, I have some ideas on how to maybe make this work better in the future, but if this is kind of your first time here, normally this is not quite how the audio sounds.
I try to keep things cleaner, kind of like you're hearing now. But I just wanted to put that out there. So, you know, a little bit of, just give me a little bit of patience through this one.
You know, I hope you enjoy it. Secondly, I do want to mention, because I don't think I say it in the episode, this does contain spoilers. Not tons of them, but a decent, you know, I do talk about things that occur throughout the season and the finale for Stranger Things Season 5.
So if you haven't seen that, and you don't want spoilers, you probably don't want to listen to this, or you can come back later and listen.
But anyway, thanks, and I hope you enjoy the episode.
Trying something a little different today. I don't know. We're going to see how it goes.
Also having some early morning coffee, not late morning.
I want to talk about Stranger Things. I have some thoughts.
First of all, well, I want to say a couple things at the top.
First of all, I had an absolute blast.
So we, this was the first, hmm.
There aren't many shows that I remember in my lifetime.
And if it wasn't in my lifetime, there weren't many before my lifetime either.
There haven't been a lot of shows that sort of bring this cultural presence along with them
in the way that Stranger Things did.
You know, I can think back to, I can probably count them on one hand, the ones that I can really think of.
You know, I can think of Game of Thrones is probably the one in most recent memory.
Before that, I can probably make an argument for The Sopranos, Seinfeld, maybe Friends, maybe.
But by the time Friends wrapped up, first of all, it was a sitcom.
And second of all, I think that, you know, the last season or the last few episodes of Friends kind of weren't doing much anyway.
But anyway, maybe Friends.
And I love Friends, by the way.
It's just that the, you know, the finale didn't feel as culturally massive as some of these other things.
Um, Seinfeld probably fit into this category.
Uh, and then I always heard stories about M.A.S.H., like the finale of M.A.S.H. being such a big deal.
I've never seen M.A.S.H.
I don't know much about M.A.S.H.
I wasn't alive, I don't think, during the finale.
I don't even know when the finale was.
But, so anyway.
But those are the ones that I can think of, you know.
Sort of in order, I guess there was M.A.S.H., Seinfeld.
You know, Friends, Game of Thrones, and Sopranos.
Oh, you have to reverse those last two, but whatever.
My point is there aren't many, right?
There are not many shows that manage to survive with such a cultural presence.
Most shows, even the best of them, tend to have a strong season.
One, maybe two or three, and then they get milked out of existence, in my mind.
Like, every season gets a little worse, a little more jam-packed with filler, a little less, you know, plot-relevant, a little more jumping the shark.
Speaking of jumping the shark, maybe Happy Days had a big finale, I'm not sure.
But most shows go downhill after, generously, after season three.
So, my point being, by the time most shows get to a finale, the show has already fallen apart.
It has largely fallen out of cultural favor to begin with.
It's just not, you know, it's not set up to have a giant finale.
Stranger Things kind of bucked this trend, right?
For one thing, it only had five seasons total with pretty long breaks in between some of those seasons.
I can't remember how long of a break it was between seasons, say, one and two or two and three.
But by the time we got to four and five, there were substantial gaps in time.
Like, actual, you know, real-world time.
Three years, I think, we waited three, three and a half between season four and five.
Like, it's, they are long gaps for a show.
These are not yearly shows with 24 episodes to fill time.
These were eight or nine episodes released every two to three years.
So, it only went to season five.
So, it didn't have, in some ways, it didn't have the time to really just, you know, end up out in left field somewhere.
In some ways, it is pretty impressive that the show managed to kind of keep its momentum the way it did.
And, you know, I think if you go back and watch season one, it's pretty clear it was never meant to be this kind of cinematic cultural phenomenon.
It was a, it was a fun little story set in sort of a fantasy slash realistic kind of world with a lot of nostalgia bait.
And this was at a time, you know, I don't know if it's fair to say that this show kind of kicked off 80s nostalgia, but it certainly solidified it, right?
And since this show, which I forget when it aired, if it was 2016 or 2015 or something, since it originally aired, the shows that try to take advantage of nostalgia bait have skyrocketed, right?
There are many, many more of them than there used to be.
And I think that this show was really a catalyst for that or a, you know, a proof of concept for that.
The other thing, so that was one thing, you know, just about shows in general, right?
Most shows just don't get to a place where they can actually do a finale like this, where anybody cares, right?
The other thing that I would say is that it's impossible.
It, as a, like from a creator's standpoint, it is impossible to actually do this in a way that would satisfy all of your fan base.
It's just not realistic.
And we've seen this to varying extents.
And I'm not going to say that the, that, well, let me jump ahead.
I think that the finale of Stranger Things was okay.
I don't think it was horrible.
I don't think it was a giant disappointment.
I don't think that it puts a scar on the legacy of the show.
I don't think any of those things.
I just think it was okay with a few flaws, right?
And I think that some of the flaws were probably, they smell sort of like studio constraints or budget constraints or something.
But I think it did some things well, too.
And I think it took a few risks as well.
Like some of it was very safe feeling.
And some of it, I think they did take a few narrative risks that, you know, are worth commending.
But if you look at some of these other shows, like, I think Game of Thrones is the one that really, like, the finale, the whole last season, but certainly the finale, the way the show wrapped up in Game of Thrones was so bad, so offensively terrible, that it effectively killed the show for its fandom.
I mean, Game of Thrones was the show for quite a while.
And it had an enormous fan base, very dedicated to it.
And the finale was so bad that after that last season was done, I almost felt like it just, people didn't, the criticism wasn't even that bad because it was just, like, unspoken.
At least in the circles that I kind of bumped into at that time.
It just faded into nothing.
It was like everyone collectively and unconsciously was like, okay, let's just never speak of this again, right?
That's what it felt like.
It was that horrible.
And this certainly was not that.
I would even, and Sopranos was another example of a finale that really kind of rubbed pretty much everyone the wrong way.
I'm kind of in the minority on that one.
I, I, the story with, one of the things about The Sopranos is the creator tried to stop that show several times.
And they kept throwing more money at him to keep it going.
So, by the time it got to the end, I just think all the, the good ideas were kind of gone.
Like, there wasn't much left to do.
And so, you know, the way they wrapped it up was like, it was okay.
It was, well, it wasn't okay.
If I'm describing Stranger Things as okay, I can't describe Sopranos as okay.
It was, it was sub-okay.
It was below-okay.
But it, it wasn't, again, it, it didn't reach the offensive levels that Game of Thrones did.
But I don't think under the best of circumstances, Stranger Things could have wrapped things up in a way that, I think that the hype for Stranger Things had gotten too big for what it actually was.
It was to actually effectively wrap up the show because it had become almost this, at least for people, maybe, I don't know what it's like necessarily for kids or for younger generations.
But for older generations, people in their, you know, 40s, 50s, something like that.
I think it became like a, like a portal into a time that never fully existed, but that everyone kind of wanted to rewind to.
Like, they had done the nostalgia so effectively that I think people started placing their hopes and dreams on this, like, this, this show about a girl with magic powers, right?
It, it became way more than it actually was.
Which is great.
for the show, but makes it very difficult to please the fandom.
And by the time season five had rolled around, the cast had gotten very large.
And there were a lot of plot lines that hadn't been wrapped up or even like adequately set up to be wrapped up.
And so there was always going to, no matter how you wrap this thing up, it was going to have certain criticism around,
well, what about this plot line and what about that plot line?
So I'm, I'm willing to put all of that aside and just talk about the, the episodes in the last season for what they were, for what actually got committed to screen.
Putting aside some of the buildup, putting aside, you know, the, the cultural pieces, putting aside the open plot lines.
Like, I'm, I'm going to talk about it from that angle.
I'm going to give two main criticisms and one thing that I think was sort of a, a bold move, but they all, they kind of all wrap together in some ways.
My, my first, my main criticism, the main thing that I think in a vacuum, no matter how I slice it, no matter how I, I piece it together in my head, the, the ending battle sequence, the big boss fight was just too short and too easy.
And didn't feel like it had enough weight or enough movements behind it.
And what I mean by movements is, you know, one side has the upper hand, then the other side gets the upper hand, then one other side gets the upper hand, you know, like that sort of back and forth.
It just didn't feel like it had much of that.
It felt like it was a little too easy for the protagonist.
And it just felt too fast with something that had been going on as long as it had with some of the, the buildup that they had done in terms of plot for some of these, these villains.
I just felt like it wrapped up too quickly.
Sort of a sub complaint there is that I don't feel, I feel like the creators couldn't decide ultimately whether.
Whether the big bad was Vecna or whether the big bad was the Mind Flare.
And I feel like they punted on that and just went with a throwaway line that was like, we are one.
Right.
And I don't, that, that, that didn't land for me, but that's sort of a sub thing.
The main thing is I just, I think the big battle should have been a bigger climax.
The, the other thing and what plays into that is that my second kind of criticism is I feel like the grouping of episodes was awkward and I kind of get it, right?
It almost feels like it wasn't originally designed to have a standalone finale where like the, the, the final episode was released on.
And for those of you, you know, maybe listening to this later or whatever, the whole thing was released on New Year's Eve.
The final episode, it was two hours long.
The, the problem is it felt like two totally different episodes.
There was an episode with a final battle and then there was an hour long episode, almost an hour.
I think it was more like 45 minutes where they sort of wrapped up plot lines for characters.
And that, not to mix this too bad, but that was my main thing that I thought was brave that they did sort of, was their last episode was not action oriented.
It was not any of that.
It was really an exploration of how the characters wrapped up.
And I liked that.
I thought that was good.
It went on for a little long.
I think they could have trimmed 15 minutes out of that and maybe added 15 minutes to the battle instead, but for what it was, it was pretty good.
I thought that was a brave choice, but the whole thing felt a little bit like studio interference because for example, I think it would have landed better for me.
Better, not perfectly, but better if episodes seven and eight were together in a three hour finale because episode seven had quite a bit of like action oriented buildup and impact and that kind of stuff.
And I think that if you put seven and eight together, that final action sequence would feel like more of a payoff because you would have been spending plenty of time initially during episode seven with all the buildup and it would have felt more cohesive.
As it stood, to have episode seven be kind of a standalone thing and then to not wrap it up until eight, like a week later, it felt like an interruption and not in a good way.
And so you had this episode seven that was like a great setup and then you had eight, which felt like a rushed battle on a character wrap up that were two different things.
So I think that's part of it.
So I could have seen, I wonder if there was a world where initially this was either supposed to be a three hour finale where seven and eight were together or a world where the last four episodes, five, six, seven, eight, were all supposed to drop at once.
So you could binge your way through it and possibly even have a ninth episode where it was just character wrap up.
But then if you could imagine a world where a studio might have walked in and said, we need a big finale and all this stuff was already put together and they're like, uh, how do we chop this up to give the audience a two hour finale at the end?
And the only option was take the last essentially two episodes that are not thematically similar, group them together and release them in a two hour chunk.
I'm not saying that's what happened, but I could definitely see it feels like that to me.
Despite all these things, I will always have a very special and fond place in my heart for this show for a couple of reasons.
And by the way, one of them isn't really nostalgia.
Like, I, I think it's been kind of like widely shown that a lot of these shows and other things that rely on nostalgia, they're largely, it's largely fake nostalgia.
Like things didn't really exist in the way that they, they depict them here.
But for me, it's like a double layer of fake nostalgia because first of all, there's that, right?
The fact that these are not representing the true state of things in like the eighties pieces of it are real, but it's really, you know, you watch these shows and you think that all it was, was people running around with like Rubik's cubes and bike riding.
Like it's, it's not how the eighties really, truly were.
But the other thing for me is that I wasn't really a child of the eighties.
Like I was born in the eighties, but I, I was mostly a child of the nineties, right?
So, so for me, it's, it's almost like I'm the things like this trick me into feeling like I was part of something that I wasn't right.
Like I remember some of this stuff because some of it went into the nineties too.
And some of it, you know, I do remember from a very early childhood, but, but largely I grew up in the nineties, not the, not the eighties.
So for me, it's almost like double fake nostalgia.
So, so my point in saying that is that like the special place in my heart is not because I connect super deeply to the nostalgia of the show.
I will remember this fondly for two main reasons.
And by fondly, I mean like this will hold a special place in my heart for two reasons.
One thing it did was it brought the game of Dungeons and Dragons into the popular zeitgeist in a way that I never would have imagined was possible.
Never would have imagined it.
Growing up, I, throughout a good chunk of my childhood, played D&D with various people.
And it was something to be like hidden and ashamed of.
Like it was the dorkiest of dorky hobbies, right?
And, and it, it was not a thing that you went around telling people you did, at least in my area, or that you had school clubs for or anything else.
And so even as certain other very geeky, dorky, you know, hobbies over the years have become much more mainstream, things like Magic the Gathering, video games, you know, that sort of stuff that was also at the time pretty nerdy.
D&D never really took that leap.
It was just the bridge too far.
It's this like sit down with a pen and paper and talk about your wisdom statistic, you know, like it was just the bridge too far, generally speaking.
And while it has taken strides over the years, this thing, this show really pushed it out in a way that now, if you talk about it, people have some concept of what it is, even if they've never experienced it themselves.
So from just kind of a, you know, hobbyist and personal hobby kind of angle, I think this show did, did good there.
But the other reason that this will forever hold an extremely special place in my heart was because this, so we, we had put off for years showing this show to the kids.
Not necessarily because of the content, like, yeah, there's some gory content, but on, you know, re-watches, like, it's not, you know, it's not too bad from a content perspective.
I don't think generally speaking, this show is going to be running around giving anybody nightmares, but it was more from a, you won't understand the context because it was so based in the eighties.
And because it was so, you know, there was a lot of like kind of teenage level, you know, kind of world, and our kids were still pretty young.
We put it off and put it off and put it off.
And then this year or earlier in the year 2025, I guess, we, we decided, you know, the kids had gotten old enough and we were like, okay, let's watch the whole thing.
And they loved it, right?
So by the time season five rolled around, they had seen the first four seasons.
Not only had they seen them, they loved it.
They had gotten really into it.
They were like theory crafting about what was going to happen in season five.
And this was the first sort of cultural phenomenon show that really went like that.
And we, you know, my wife and I got to share that with the kids.
And so we threw like a big viewing party for, in particular, the first part of season five.
And then the finale, we had some of their friends over on New Year's Eve and we did a big viewing party.
And, you know, it was just, it was the type of event that, you know, I'm not sure I ever, I don't, I don't remember ever doing that with my parents.
You know, having like a TV show that we all really sat down and were super into and like was a huge part of the cultural, you know, zeitgeist and had become this phenomenon.
And like everyone was super into, right?
Because for every bit as into this show, as like my wife and I are, were, the kids were like at least that much, if not more.
And for like a few weeks in the year 2025, as we wrapped things to a close and went through the holidays,
is we had a chance to share something truly culturally significant, even if it's silly, right?
Even if it's just a TV show about some kids with magic powers and D&D, right?
But it was something that really, like I'll have that forever.
And I hope that they do too, right?
But again, I think that the content in the show was okay.
Like the finale itself, for what it was, was a reasonable way to wrap up a show.
Do I have criticisms?
Yeah, sure.
I think it, you know, you could have criticisms about almost anything.
But this will hold such a uniquely special place for me forever because of how significant the culture was around it
and because of just how much, how much it meant as just a small, you know, family unit
to kind of be part of and be there for and go in on.
Um, I remember the only thing that came close in my life that I can think of, and it's not anywhere near it,
but the original run of Avatar, The Last Airbender, the show that was on Nickelodeon.
I didn't even watch the show, but at the time that the finale rolled around,
someone in sort of my social group had been a big fan.
Um, and we threw a viewing party for that.
And I remember watching the finale and being like, oh, this is, this is like really cool.
And there was like 12 people in the room.
And I felt really part of something, even though I'd never even watched the show.
Like I had never watched it.
And I went back years later and watched it because it was really a very good show.
But I wasn't even part of the culture around this show.
And it wasn't even as big of a show as Stranger Things had become.
Um, but I still felt like part of something, like something kind of special during that,
like finale viewing party.
And, and in this case, we got to throw something like that, you know, with the kids in our family
for something that like, no one was dragging their feet through this.
Everyone was excited.
And that really made it special and fun.
So regardless of how this show wrapped up and whether or not it had become too hyped for its own feasibility
or whether or not there were plot holes or anything else,
the fact that something like this brought us together during a time in the world
when it is so easy to be kind of distant and separated
was really something worth commending.
And that's worth much more than whether or not a final battle goes 15 minutes too, too short
or whether a character arc goes 15 minutes too long
or how they group season, you know, episodes seven and eight or anything else.
So this, this will just, it will live in infamy, at least in my own head
about how much it meant to the people I was around at that time.
And at the end of the day, I'm not sure you could put a higher accolade
onto any piece of art, whether that, whether it's writing or painting or a movie or a TV show.
I think the ability to, to really be something special to even a small group of people.
That's what art's all about, I think, at the end of the day.
And I think the world needs more experiences like that.
And so I give the highest commendations and the highest accolades
that some random guy on a podcast can give
simply because I think that regardless of the intricacy
or the implementation details of this specific thing
at the very least, it, it, in, with flying colors
achieved what art really is supposed to
or what art aspires to achieve in a way that very few things do.