* Before reading this article, understand that it does contain spoilers for season five of Stranger Things. If you do not wish to know them, do not read this article.
As 2025’s final couple of months came to a close, Stranger Things fans eagerly opened up Netflix, desperate to see the final season of one of the biggest shows of the last decade. After being promised a dramatic finale and the possibility of gut-wrenching, emotional deaths of beloved characters, they proceeded to spend a total time of 10 hours and 20 minutes on one of the most passable pieces of media ever created. The bloated cast, poor writing, and terrible dialogue make this a very weak season.
The cast is huge now, and in a lot of cases, the show just doesn’t know what to do with them. Much of the old cast ends up just playing through the same story beats as they did in previous seasons. Steve, Jonathan, and Nancy are once again in a love triangle, which, unfortunately, is pretty much the main focus for all three of them this season. Joyce is also back to playing the overprotective mom, and Hopper once again must learn to trust/give independence to Eleven. The difference is that this time all of those character traits or arcs are done much worse. On top of the already quite full lineup of characters, a plethora are brought back or newly introduced, so the end result is a show that tries to juggle too many characters at once, and ends up leaving most of them, and even some longtime favorites, underdeveloped as a result.
The new characters are easy to hate, given how much screen time they detract from the original cast, and a lot of that hate is justified. It’s the last season, and it’s just foolish from a writing perspective to focus on completely new characters that audiences have way less emotional investment in than ones they’ve seen develop over multiple seasons. Yet for some reason, here we are with six characters that are either completely new or were barely featured in previous seasons. Holly Wheeler is at least played well by her actress, but man, why does she have the most screen time out of any character in season five? It feels like a betrayal of the original characters and fans.
While a couple of plot holes would be somewhat acceptable, given the show’s fantastical nature, the huge amount that there are, and the fact that some of them go against lore which has been explicitly established throughout the series, makes it simply inexcusable. In the same episode, a Demogorgon cautiously backs up at the sight of Joyce slowly and clumsily swinging an axe, yet an hour later, multiple are shown to barely flinch even while being shot hundreds of times. Yes, they’re weak to big cuts, but obviously they would still at least try to attack someone who has a melee weapon. Also, where were they during that pathetic excuse for a final battle? Surely there would be at least a few on their home planet.
The cherry on top that makes season five stand out in a bad way is the dialogue. While Stranger Things was never highly praised for its dialogue, up until now, it was good, or at least good enough not to draw the widespread, and well-deserved ire that season five’s dialogue has. The general rule of thumb for exposition is to show and not tell, but they really just threw that out the window here, to the point where someone could probably just listen to the dialogue without watching at all, and still know almost everything that’s going on.
If these examples aren’t enough, the reaction to the season’s final episode on social media should be pretty telling. Due to how bad the final episode was, fans began to buy into the idea that there is actually a secret final episode that is yet to be released, which will actually solve everything and make the season good again. Unfortunately, such an episode does not appear to exist, and even if it did, it’s unlikely it would be able to undo all of the damage done by the rest of season five, the worst season of Stranger Things.