Why the Stranger Things Ending Felt Symbolic

By Meda Borghei ‘27

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS

Season 5 of Stranger Things was full of plot holes and bad acting and dialogue so poorly written that even the actors were probably cringing. But none of that really mattered. What mattered was that it was the last season. 

I started watching the show in 6th grade, and I was immediately obsessed. My friends and I drew fan art, made video edits and plays, shared memes, and wrote fanfiction. I had a birthday party where everyone dressed up as a character, and of course, I was El. We talked about it so much that one of my friends made a separate group chat just for Stranger Things. 

We made the characters our own, until their personalities were completely disconnected from the screen. They were real people who lived in our imaginations. It wasn’t really about the show for us. It was just a source of laughter and ridiculousness, and fun. 

By the time I started freshman year, my love for the show had completely faded. The new season wasn’t coming out until 2025, a year that sounded impossibly far away. I mostly forgot about my old obsession, and Stranger Things became immature. I was sucked into school, grades, new friends, and new TV shows. Just like when I spent 2014 obsessed with Frozen and then soon renounced having ever liked it, I decided I had grown out of Stranger Things. 

When the new season approached, I wasn’t particularly enticed. In the teaser, a little boy (“young Will”) who looks more like AI than human performs some incredibly impressive acrobatic feats and is eventually slimed by Vecna, who has grown shoulder pads and glamorous nail extensions. It was hard to rekindle that same sense of infatuation I felt for the show as a child, and I didn’t really feel like trying. And the first few episodes were equally Okay, whatever, if you say so. The season had a hundred scenes in which a character earnestly explains a genius plan they thought of two seconds ago, using props or a movie reference. It had a hundred dramatic plotlines that tried to obscure poor writing with action. And all the actors, old enough to have uninspiring plastic surgery and children of their own, were still pretending to be in high school. Their childish fashion choices, bad haircuts, and immature lines didn’t hide their age. 

But at the end of the last episode, the characters leave their D&D folders in Mike’s basement and walk up the stairs to enter their new lives. At 11:58 pm on New Year’s Eve, the final credits rolled, and my childhood friends and I went out into the rain to watch the fireworks. That was when it hit me—this 5-year period of my life was over. 

Pretty soon, I’m going to leave that basement too, moving on from childhood to go to college. All the crazy, ridiculous, creative fun, which was never really because of the show but because I was a kid, will be gone. There will be other shows and other experiences and other people, but childhood is singular. So Stranger Things was, too.

It’s easy to get caught up in the future. But just like so many other teenagers who grew up with the show, the ending made me look back, just for a moment. I appreciated the symbolism of the ending. And I understood that once we leave the “basement,” we can never go back.