Has Netflix’s megahit Stranger Things lost its way?

0:01Hi, I'm Charlie Duffield and welcome back to The Standard Podcast. if you're new here hit follow and give us a rating for all the latest news head to standard.co.uk coming up later in the show what can we expect from the stranger things finale this season doesn't really feel like it has its own distinct identity beyond throw everything at the wall and do massive finale and make big bangs it feels almost like the duffers that they have the ending site and they're just trying to get over the finish line which is a bit of a shame to be honest it would be sad if the show ended with a whimper rather than the bang but i think that is also the case with these massive shows they just become too big almost to satisfy everybody and give everyone what they want but we'll see i could be surprised but first i thought if i fought hard enough i could be free

0:59you were never meant to escape

1:06I've been inside his mind I know how he thinks

1:15I can feel it again it's not gone it never was if you've been enjoying time on the sofa this festive season you may have tuned in to sci-fi hit Stranger Things which is about to air its final ever episode. The second half of season five arrived on Netflix on Boxing Day, ahead of a bumper finale due for release at 1am on New Year's Day, making it the first must-watch show of 2026. Stranger Things is set in the 1980s and follows the residence of a fictional Indiana small town called Hawkins after a young girl with psychokinetic abilities opens a gateway between the Earth and another dimension known as the Upside Down.

2:02In the final instalment, the Duffer brothers have a lot of tying up of loose ends to do. There's the monstrous Vecna to defeat, Will suddenly has superpowers, and also the US military is on the loose. A day before the series finale was due to drop, all previous Stranger Things seasons made it to Netflix's top 10 shows charts, a first for any show on the streaming platform. Season 5 has been three years in the making and is hotly anticipated, with co-creators Brothers Matt and Rostafa sharing that it will feature the most violent death of any season. But the most recent episode achieved one of the lowest fan ratings in the show's history.

2:45Fans have made numerous complaints, with some arguing there is a lack of major developments across the episodes, while the show's writers have been forced to clarify what happened to one much-loved couple after confusion over a particular scene. And a petition has also been launched, signed by 280 ,000 people at the time of recording, which argues that footage has been cut from the final series. To find out more, I spoke to The Stand's commissioning editor and culture writer, Vicky Jessup, and just to let you know that there are spoilers ahead. Vicky, you gave the penultimate episode of Stranger Things three stars.

3:23What did you make of it? So I gave three stars to volume two. So the whole show is dropping in three parts. So part one dropped back in November, and that was four episodes. Part two dropped on Boxing Day, UK time, Christmas Day in America. And then part three will be dropping on New Year's Day. So I initially really liked season five, part one, as I guess we'll call it. It was fun, propulsive, action-packed. It's been such a long time since we've spent time with this cast and these characters, and they're so deeply loved. I think it was quite a thrill to dive back into that world, especially as it ended on quite a bit of a cliffhanger.

3:58I'm not sure if this counts as a spoiler, but at the end of season four, Vecna, the season's big bad, basically ripped a hole from the upside down, which is the kind of parallel universe or parallel world to 1980s America. So he ripped a hole from that into Hawkins, which is where our characters live in Indiana. and then when we start season five basically the U.S. army has moved in and erected a kind of barrier wall around Hawkins a kind of quarantine zone people can't leave people can't enter I think the show did a good job of hitting the ground running it gave us lots of gore and then I think the wheels fell off a little bit for me I think and I don't think I'm alone in that a quick google online you know the forums are not happy the critics are not happy I just think it feels a little bit slapdash maybe um and i think a big problem for me really is that the cast is so huge at this point you know there's i think about 14 main cast members it's very difficult to juggle all of those different cast members giving them the time the care that they kind of need at this point because they're such established characters you want to kind of spend time with them and for them to have a satisfying character arc and a satisfying ending it's difficult to do that when you're trying to marry plot twists action meaningful relationships stuff like that so the show has tried to do that by and it's done this in previous seasons too by switching up the kind of pairings that you get so you know is nancy going to be with jonathan or is she going to be running around with steve or is she going to be running around with mike so there is that this season so i guess the duffers enjoy pairing different character combinations together and seeing how they work off each other but it still feels quite rushed there are some plot twists in there that I think weren't really signposted well enough I think and yeah the stakes feel they've never felt so high but also they've never felt so low in the sense that no one is dying at all none of the main cast members have died apart from I guess Eddie back in season four so yeah we'll see there's one episode left it's going to be a big one I think it's about an hour and a half so we'll see if they can pull it off and stick the landing currently I'm a little bit worried so what do you think viewers will want to see resolved in the final episode yes lots of plot points to wrap up i guess the main one is we find out in season five part two that the upside down isn't its own plane it's a wormhole between our world and something called the abyss they describe it as a place of evil and like darkness and blackness so i guess like the upside down on steroids and the upside down is kind of like this middle plane that's connecting the two and vexner for reasons best known to himself, but can probably be described as baddie.

6:35He wants to smash these two realms together, so bring the abyss into, I guess, 1980s America, which will obviously cause carnage. And yeah, so we ended season five, part two. He's abducted a whole load of kids to help him channel his powers better. And he's basically putting his grand plan into motion. He's attempting to enact this grand plan. And the main cast members have found out or they figured out kind of what he's up to and are setting out to stop him so that is the big question mark will they manage to do it in time I guess the other question mark is we can reasonably expect there to be a character death I know that I've been complaining about there not being any I would imagine that the Duffer brothers the showrunners are saving that for the last big oh big sacrifice kind of way so I guess you can speculate about who that's going to be and then after that I guess who gets their happy endings you know L11 and Mike there's been a lot of talk about going to live somewhere far away in a place with waterfalls that seems kind of doomed we found out that max sadie sink character has been trapped in vector's mind palace and she's just managed to escape so she's out now it doesn't look like she can walk will she be able to kind of have a normal life after that so yes i guess there's a lot of one big question and then following on from that a lot of small questions let's go to an ad break coming up has stranger things become a victim of its own success.

8:00We'll see you back here in just a moment.

8:07Welcome back. So Vicky, tell me more about this petition which has been created, supposedly about scenes being deleted from the show. I think basically this is just an expression of how upset the fans are with the way that this season has panned out. So yeah, there's been a petition that's been created. I think At the time of recording, it has about 250 ,000 signatures. There is a Google document that's been circulating that contains details of kind of entire plot lines and character arcs that have been edited out or changed mid-filming by the showrunners for various reasons. So the fans have been raging about this and basically think that we've been deprived of a season that I guess makes more sense.

8:50So as I mentioned, the upside down is this wormhole between dimensions. and that wasn't really very well signposted as a twist. Maybe like at the start of season five it was, but that's not been referenced at all throughout all the previous four seasons. So I guess stuff like that where people are like, well, that doesn't add up. People have taken that and run with it and basically made a petition demanding that the Duffer Brothers release the, I guess the Snyder Cut equivalent of Stranger Things season five. I don't think it's real personally. The Duffer Brothers have talked in the past about them having like struggles with editing and like leaving things on the cutting room floor and like making sure everything flows.

9:27They haven't commented on this. There has been a person that has spoken about it, an actor called Randy Havens, who plays Dustin's middle school teacher, Scott Clark. And he said on Instagram, there is no Snyder Cut of the show. Please don't believe everything some random ass tells you on the internet. I think it's basically wishful thinking from the fans in the hopes that we might get something a little bit more satisfying. But sadly, it's just the finale that we have to go now. And I think there will be no Snyder Cut. Do you think Stranger Things has become too watered down due to its popularity?

9:55No, I don't think so. So in terms of like watered down, in terms of gore, the show is gory and certainly this season is gory. Season five, I think the Duffers said that featured the most violent death that they've ever had in a season. I can confirm it is very much there because it's in the finale for part one. and it features a soldier having his head exploded by Vexner's root hand which kind of expands to kind of explode his head through his eyes and I was watching that and was not expecting that and that was kind of horrific so no it's not become watered down in any kind of gory sense I think it maybe has lost its way for the reasons I described in terms of plotting I just think there's so much riding on the show the fan base is so massive it's very hard to please everybody and they're juggling so many different balls at this point they're juggling all the characters i guess like the netflix's expectation they want the show to be massive obviously they want the final season to be a massive hit and i think the final season does feel like it's spinning its wheels slightly like previous seasons have been quite notable and i think the show became so popular because it was very willing to reinvent itself you know we had the first season which was a very kind of 80s like almost spielbergian adventure of these underdog kids kind of outwitting the baddies and we had had season two which kind of lent more into kind of horror and gore elements of it we had season three where we had romance for the first time and i think it was more we had a kind of exploration of american capitalism we had like the star called mal and the russian base i do believe it and in season four we almost had like kind of exploration of i guess almost drawing parallels to kind of donald trump in that we had the satanic panic in hawkins high school with eddie munson rip his Hellfire Club and people freaking out about these kind of random deaths around Hawkins and then people turning on each other and attacking the cast members, well not the cast members, but attacking the characters or like our heroes, which felt a bit like parallels to Trump's America.

11:52And how significant a show has Stranger Things been as it comes to an end after nearly a decade on our screens? It's probably the Netflix show, you know, when Stranger Things came out, that was 2016. It wasn't the first Netflix original show that was House of Cards, but Stranger Things feels like the one that's really stuck, I think. And it certainly feels like its biggest show. And because Netflix is the biggest streaming platform in the world, probably, that means it's also become so massively popular for different reasons. I think it gives adults above a certain age, there's nostalgia there.

12:24It has action, the amazing child actors, not children anymore, but they've all merged to create something that really feels like it's taken over pop culture. I guess the best example I can think of is a Kate Bush song Running Up That Hill, which featured in season four, a kind of very pivotal moment. It helped save the life of the character Max, that Sadie Sink's character. That song, propelled by Stranger Things, took off massively. I think Kate Bush, it sent her back to number one, her first number one in 44 years in the UK. It gave her first ever US top 10 hit. It's 37 years after the song was first released.

12:59I'm sure she's made a lot of money in the last three years simply off the back of royalties for that song, which is kind of incredible. And other songs like Diana Ross' song, Upside Down, which I think has found a new Gen Z audience. I think it's streaming maybe increased by 1 ,250 % since that first premiered on Stranger Things. So it has like massive cultural clout, I suppose. And then on the other side, I think it's been credited with seeing a big surge in popularity for Dungeons and Dragons, which is what the main characters love playing. People are a lot more tuned into that now. Certainly from my own experience, it seems like it's a lot more popular.

13:33I have friends who play it in groups. I guess people that you wouldn't say are stereotypically nerdy. And I think also, I guess, the popularity of the 80s. I don't think the 80s has ever gone away. But I feel like Stranger Things has really brought it back in a big way. Or I guess like Gen Zed especially, who didn't grow up during the 80s.

13:55And that's The Standard. for all the latest news head to standard.co.uk if you'd like to get in touch please do drop us a line at podcasts at standard.co.uk we'll be back here tomorrow morning we'll see you then