The 5th and final season of Stranger Things came out this year, and it was highly anticipated. The first 4 seasons were highly praised by critics, and the show itself is award-winning. This 5th season, however, has seen the episodes decline in quality and ratings all the way to the final episode. People are saying that it was rushed and that the Duffer Brothers, the creators of Stranger Things, are terrible writers, with the amount of plot holes the show ended with, and how unsatisfying it was. But could this just be lazy writing or one of the most genius finales in television history?
Fans who haven’t seen the 5th season or the finale shouldn’t read the rest of this article, as there will be spoilers. In the finale’s epilogue, we see the core group, Lucas, Dustin, Mike, Will, and Max playing D&D for the final time. The whole sequence of events is a direct copy of how the show first opened back in 2016, with the shots being the exact same as we circle around the game. While this could be seen as written as a way to play off of fans’ nostalgia towards the show, many have seen this as a big deception, a part of a massive plan, and an insane plot twist: Vecna won.
In season 4, we see the Hellfire group playing a game of Dungeons and Dragons, and it is the first time that Vecna’s name is revealed. The reason I bring this up is that when the group thought that they had defeated Vecna, Eddie, the dungeon master for this game, exclaims that Vecna cannot be killed, and that he lives. In season 5, the finale has a very underwhelming battle scene between the characters and Vecna/Mindflayer, and Joyce seemingly kills Vecna in this battle. The epilogue following is filmed as if the town is in this dream-like state; many have noticed that the lighting is very similar, if not the same, to the lighting we see in Henry’s mind, where he kept the 12 children. This is odd, because didn’t they defeat Vecna? Why would the town go completely back to normal in just 18 months? What happened with the military? Why were there no demogorgons in the X dimension? None of it makes sense, and this led to people criticizing the Duffer brothers and calling their writing terrible and sloppy. There are so many plot holes, too many for them not have noticed, and it could’ve been their plan from the beginning.
When you look back into D&D lore, the Mindflayer still has a final form that we haven’t seen: Elder Brain. This final form has very strong mind-affecting powers and is very intelligent. We also have to take the False Hydra into account, as it was painted by Will for Mike in season 4, which is textbook foreshadowing. The False Hydra is known for its regeneration: sever a head and two more will grow back, which can only be stopped by fire. This is important; we see that the Upside Down is very sensitive to fire, as it’s what the military uses to keep the vines at bay in front of the gate. Even more importantly, they can cause memory erasure and perception filtering; what you see isn’t real, which, if Stranger Things is following D&D lore as they were in the beginning of the series, this would be an amazing plot twist that only hard-core fans would see.
With this theory, many fans thought that there would be a real finale, either a secret episode or movie, coming out sometime this month or in the near future. Secret episode or not, the ending being fake would be an amazing dark twist to this already amazing series, and–if true–would make this series go down in history, and the Duffer brothers would be one of the greatest writers in TV history.
