Editor’s Note: This story includes mention of suicide and grooming. If you are struggling with suicide or your mental health, you are not alone. Resources are available here.
SPOILER: This column contains potential spoilers for “Stranger Things” season five.
After many years of anticipation, one of Netflix’s most popular shows of all time, “Stranger Things,” finally reached its conclusion Dec. 31. Despite fans’ high hopes for a great ending to the beloved show, many viewers left disappointed.
While most fans complained about plot holes, rushed storylines and cringey dialogue, I think not enough people are talking about one of the biggest reasons this finale was an unjust ending to the show: it was a huge disservice to the characters who suffered the most throughout the series.
Every character in this show goes through a lot, especially considering many of them are kids. However, I think there are a couple characters that stand out as the show’s primary victims: Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), Will (Noah Schnapp) and, surprisingly, Henry (Jamie Campbell Bower), also known as Vecna.
Eleven has been a central point of the show since the first episode and she has, arguably, the most tragic story of all the characters. She spent her entire childhood in a lab, being experimented on and manipulated by lead researcher Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine). While she managed to escape the lab, she was then thrown into a life where she had to save the world while evading the military.
Eleven never got to experience a real childhood. She spent her life being poked and prodded, being manipulated by the men in her life and thinking she was the problem. This is why the ending the Duffer Brothers gave her is so disrespectful to her character.
While her sacrificing herself makes sense for the wider narrative and was the pretty obvious choice, it means this character who we’ve only ever seen suffer and get taken advantage of never gets to live out a life of peace along with her friends. And while many fans stand by the fact that Mike’s (Finn Wolfhard) fantasy, that Eleven managed to escape and is living a secluded life somewhere with magic waterfalls, was the truth, this still isn’t the ending she deserves.
The Duffer Brothers basically gave the audience the choice between choosing to believe the one character who deserved a happy ending the most killed herself or has to live out the rest of her days alone. Meanwhile, the rest of the main party got to graduate high school together, end up with their romantic interests and, at least, laugh and cry with each other. Eleven deserved that just as much, if not more, than the rest of the characters.
The way the Duffer Brothers handled her ending proves they have no respect for her as a character and only really consider her a shiny prop meant to take out the bad guys when it’s convenient.
Ross Duffer even said in an interview the reason they felt she had to die was because “she represents magic in a lot of ways and the magic of childhood. For our characters to move on and for the story of Hawkins and the Upside Down to come to a close, Eleven had to go away.”
This shows how little respect they have for her character given the fact that she never even had a childhood, let alone a magical one. To lessen her to the idea of childlike wonder and imagination shows she was never truly a character to them, but only a plot device. So, when it was convenient, she sacrificed herself, once again suffering just to make the show tie up in an even neater little bow.
Henry Creel actually falls into a similar boat as Eleven. And while I know it may be shocking to consider the villain of the show as one of its primary victims, he endured just as much trauma as the main kids on the show.
If you’ve had the chance to watch the play “The First Shadow,” this becomes even more evident. Henry was just a kid who got manipulated by the Mind Flayer to be evil.
While I’m glad the writers at least touched on this in the show, I hated the way they went about it. They essentially insinuated Henry was always evil and that he agreed with the Mind Flayer’s twisted view of the world.
To me, this is once again so inconsiderate to his character because this is someone who essentially got groomed and manipulated when he was a child. To act as if he is the same as the Mind Flayer feels so wrong because you would never think the child is the one to blame in the case of grooming.
While I never expected Henry to become the hero of the hour, I think he deserved to have a powerful arc where his trauma was properly explored rather than popping up in the finale for one minute just to get shut down.
While Will mirrors Henry’s experience, my gripe with his ending doesn’t have to do with his supernatural trauma, but rather how the writers handled and explored his queerness.
While I’m glad the Duffer Brothers chose to make his queerness and journey to self-acceptance a focal point this season, I think it’s incredibly disrespectful that Will didn’t get his own love story.
I’m not just saying this because I’m a “Byler” shipper. Even if his romance wasn’t with Mike, he should have at least properly expressed his feelings to him and had the time to get over him so he could then have a romance plotline with someone else.
Practically every other character on the show had a romantic plotline at some point on the show. Instead, the writers built up Will’s belief that he would never find love because of his queerness and then had him fall in love with his best friend only for it to amount to nothing.
The Duffer Brothers explained the reason they chose to do this was because they wanted to focus on his self-acceptance arc to communicate the message that your power can be found in yourself, not other people. And while, yes, this is a good message on paper, it doesn’t translate within this context.
When you see so much of yourself in a character and keep hoping he’ll get the love story he deserves just like all the other characters, only for him to get rejected, it doesn’t promote the idea of self-love. It promotes the idea that people like him don’t get love stories, in fiction or real life.
This “message” does much more harm than good. Yes, I’m glad Will got a self-acceptance arc, I’m glad he found power in himself, but filmmakers need to understand that queer characters can have self-acceptance arcs and love stories; they aren’t mutually exclusive. So often in mainstream shows with a queer side character, their entire plot line is just coming to terms with their sexuality. And yes, this is an important story to tell, but queer people are more than just finding self-love, and writers refuse to display that on screen.
While it’s impossible to go back and fix the trainwreck that was the ending of “Stranger Things,” all I can hope is that future filmmakers will learn from these mistakes. Let it forever be known as a cautionary tale: don’t end up like Season 5 of “Stranger Things.”
A list of resources is available here if you or someone you know is struggling with suicide or mental health.
