The Stranger Things Ending Was Not An Ending (We Suck At Endings)

As someone who studies disaster related media, one of the topics within that realm that most holds my interest is the way these stories end. I wouldn't really call Stranger Things disaster media, at least not primarily, but it is still a very big, dramatic story with heavy emotional beats, threats to lives and worlds, injuries, mess, gore, and loss. All of those are elements present in most disaster stories as well and all of them are things that should be wrapped up well at the end to give audiences a sense of closure and completeness to the story.

But for some reason we're fucking allergic to doing that in our media. We don't end our stories! At least not our mainstream ones. And it's weird. It's weird that we just stop without ever wrapping things up.

Everyone knows the standard, basic plot diagram. This one:

Exposition, conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution.

We are great at beginnings, great at middles, but then the end just falls apart. We're taught this graph in school, but somehow always stall out at the last third. A lot of our media these days ends at the climax, or minutes after it. We're frequently given no falling action, no real resolution. Maybe the core plot conflict is resolved, but the story, all the things that propped up that core plot conflict, is left hanging.

On Stranger Things we got the climax, and the resolution, but there was no falling action to make that resolution feel cathartic after all the emotional turmoil of the final season and the show in its entirety. It was just this big gaping hole between the screaming terror of the military capturing everyone to getting dropped into the middle of their graduation.

We've been promised for months that this final episode, this two hour long movie, would answer all our questions, resolve everything that had been set up. Then half of that episode is dedicated to a timeskip that, frankly, had nothing to do with the actual plot. The resolution wasn't earned, it wasn't cathartic, because we don't actually know how they got there. We don't know what happened with the military, we don't know what everyone's parents were told, we don't know how long it took Max to learn to walk again or if Holly had nightmares or what happened to Vic, and a hundred other things.

But even with that, we did get so much resolution. Way more than you see these days in most other media. We got to see how they felt about graduating and closing this chapter of their lives, we got to see how the older bunch started to find their feet as adults, we got to see Holly and her friends becoming the next generation of feral little basement gremlins. So much was left out, yet at the same time so much was given. It fascinates me.

It's like the Duffer Brothers really did want to wrap up their story well, but they didn't want to look at the messy parts. They didn't want to look at the uglier truths of how a story like this would resolve. The nightmares, the PTSD, the scars that still sting when you move wrong, the questioning stares from people who know what happened but will never understand because they weren't actually there, the othering of carrying the weight of your secrets from the rest of the world, of knowing what else lurks in the dark that nobody outside your core group will ever know about.

And I think that's what it all comes down to. We, as a society, don't like recovery, in fiction or reality. We want to look at something, see that it's broken, then look away until it's fixed and we can look back at it and smile and say good job, even though we refused to look at you as you struggled, good job, because now you're okay again and we can bare to see it. We'll hold a hand out to help in the moment of initial pain, pull you up out of the hole, but when the dirt from the hole lingers on your clothes? Well, no one wants to see that. Go clean yourself up and come back when you're presentable again.

I think the Stranger Things finale would have felt more finished, more cathartic, if we had been shown just a little of that falling action, that initial recovery. Split the last hour half and half. The first half, show us more of the Mac Z and resolution with the army. It doesn't need to be detailed, have the camera focusing on Mike dissociating the entire time, make the audio a little distant and distorted, show us Max fidgeting in her wheelchair because she's not used to it and this is a hell of a time to very suddenly not be able to walk or move the way she has her whole life, show us parents showing up to get their kids and slices of whatever stories they were told. It doesn't have to be detailed, just snapshots. Show us the first night back at the Wheeler house when it's just Mike and Nancy trying to clean up the blood and broken walls because their parents are still in the hospital and Holly's there for the night too to get checked out. Show us Ted waking up from his coma. Show us Mike and Nancy sitting down to tell their mom everything. Show us Steve going back to his empty apartment (or wherever the hell he lives) that's just five sticks of furniture and nothing else because he's never actually there but he's got nowhere else to go right now. Show us Max struggling to catch up in school and the others helping her. Show us Hopper trying to clean up the cabin and finding memories everywhere. Show us Murry really coming to terms with the fact that one of his conspiracy theories was true. Show us Mr. Clarke staring at and then throwing away all his old lesson plans because his entire understanding of science has been radically altered.

Show us the aftermath, then show us their graduation. Because the graduation was important too. It shows that there is a life beyond the terror, beyond the pain, beyond the recovery. But with only the terror and the pain shown, not the recovery, the resolution of graduation loses its punch.

But still show us that what happened lingers. Show us Nancy scanning every room she enters, show us that she's still got a gun within reach at all times. Show us Joyce going still and scared because a light flickered even though it's just an old bulb going out. Show us that Holly traded rooms with Nancy because she couldn't stand being in her old room after what happened. Show us that you can recover, carry the harsh portions of your past with you, and be happy all at the same time. Because we need more stories that do that, that don't gloss over the harder parts and act like all we need is a timeskip to be completely fine. Show us that recovery is earned, and worth the struggle.