All in all, the finale of Stranger Things, “Chapter Eight: The Rightside Up,” was a solid two-hours of Stranger Things. There are absolutely gripes to be had with the way it resolves certain parts of its story, but as a work of entertainment in isolation, it’s a big, blockbuster-sized finale that balances spectacle with heart.
Unfortunately, by keeping things so streamlined and efficient, the finale actually kind of makes the fifth season of Stranger Things as a whole worse, as it fails to actually pay off many of the threads that the show spent this season working so hard to incorporate.
There is no more obvious example of all of this than the entire subplot concerning the character of Holly Wheeler (Nell Fisher) and her classmates, all of whom were taken by Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) for some reason. Despite the bulk of the season’s runtime being devoted to this story, it’s never really quite communicated clearly why exactly Vecna needed these kids.
My best guess is to power the body of the Mind Flayer, where they’re all being held, and is certainly what the visual design suggests, but even if that is the case, it doesn’t answer why Vecna then had to entertain these children and keep their minds complicit in the A Wrinkle in Time-inspired dreamscape.
To be honest, I don’t even really care about the answers to these questions; what I care about it is that it all ultimately didn’t contribute to the finale at all.
We see Max (Sadie Sink), Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), and Kali (Linnea Berthelsen) all return to the dreamscape to help the children escape back to their bodies in The Abyss, which is intercut with the rest of the gang fighting Vecna and this physical version of the Mind Flayer. But then that whole storyline is just unceremoniously dropped. The next thing we see of the kids, it's just the main characters pulling them out of their fleshy stasis pods after already defeating Vecna and the Mind Flayer. So, the kids contribute literally nothing to the climax of the show, and that whole storyline just goes nowhere.
It would have been so simple to incorporate them here; they go through the journey in the dreamscape of returning to their physical bodies and all wake up in the Mind Flayer lair where Vecna and Eleven are dueling, pull themselves out of the fleshy stasis pods like audiences saw Holly do a few episodes earlier, and help the gang defeat the baddies in the process.
But by electing to not do that, it’s just this massive story thread that gets zero culmination, with the kids being reduced to passive damsels-in-distress who are saved by the de facto protagonists.
As a result, for as thrilling as this final episode of Stranger Things can be in spurts, it fails to tie all the various threads of the season together into anything coherent or satisfying. If anything, knowing that this is how it ends is destined to make rewatches even more painful.