The fifth series of Stranger Things may have ended with David Bowie’s iconic song ‘Heroes’ being played – an appropriate piece of serendipity, given that Bowie departed the world ten years ago – but there has been very little heroic about the rest of the conclusion to one of the biggest shows on television. Such was the disappointment with the underwhelming finale, ‘The Rightside Up’ that fan chatter suggested that there was a ‘secret’ ninth episode of the show that would be released and make everything right, undoing all the hackneyed plot developments and lazy writing in the process. The ninth episode, unsurprisingly, did not materialise, and anger continued to grow in the process.
When the final series of Stranger Things premiered on Netflix at the end of November, the reaction to it was generally positive. While I thought that the show was by this point largely aimed at dedicated fans rather than the casual viewer, I still enjoyed the big-budget fantasy-oriented storytelling. I wrote in a positive Spectator review that “there can be little doubt that Stranger Things, in all its loopy, self-referential excess, is pretty much the exemplar of Eighties-themed fantasy on television. A lot of people are going to be made very happy by this, and it would be churlish not to wish them joy.”
Yet I also couldn’t help wondering whether the decision by the showrunners, the oddly named Duffer Brothers, to eke the final episodes out in three separate tranches – four episodes out in November, three on Christmas Day and the grand series finale on New Year’s Eve – was likely to lead to disappointment and a backlash if they were not of the best caliber imaginable. And now that the final episodes have appeared, it seems as if Stranger Things fandom, has seen something that they do not like – that they really don’t like – and have duly gone to town on it.
The obvious comparison to be made is with the final series of Game of Thrones, which took one of the most popular television series in living memory and destroyed its legacy with a series of rushed, incomprehensible episodes that seemed so in thrall to fan service and methodically allowing audiences to get precisely what they wanted that the showrunners forgot to make them entertaining, plausible or remotely satisfying.
So it has proved with episodes five to seven of Stranger Things, which have an impressively poor 56 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and a diabolical 5.4 rating on IMDb for the already notorious episode “The Bridge,” which has attracted particular criticism for a series of artistic missteps. These include (but are not limited to) poor acting, a preponderance of unnecessary exposition, the mishandled scene of a major character’s coming-out and surprisingly poor special effects for a show with a rumored $60 million budget per episode.
The finale has attracted hundreds of millions of viewers, but they are not demonstrating the approval and reverence the show once attracted. (Its IMDB rating is 7.6/10; not bad, but considerably less than the far higher rankings of earlier series.) The failure of the last installment of Game of Thrones – and, going back a few years before, the similarly flat finale of Lost – ultimately tainted the show in the estimation of its fans, and they have gone into criticize it with a vigor and a consistency that means that many might seem embarrassed, even ashamed, by their earlier appreciation for it.
There will be an inevitable afterlife to the Stranger Things debacle, too. Upset fans are not quiet fans, it is likely that all of the internet chatter and criticism – including, but not limited to, the offscreen lives of actors David Harbour and Millie Bobby Brown, and their supposedly fraught relationship with one another – will only intensify. The news that there will inevitably be a spin-off series has been greeted with groans and anger, not keen anticipation. Excitement has turned to fury, and a once-beloved show has become another byword for failing to live up to the hype. The title of “the next Game of Thrones” is not one that anyone would want, but now the most feared description of any major disappointment will be “the next Stranger Things”. I cannot think of anything more damning.
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