Ignoring all the other noise?
The story of Stranger Things is NOT finished.
The Lab and the Military story is left completely hanging.
Dr. Brenner -we never find out what the hell that man was really up to. Ever. He's messing with kids. He's using Henry's blood to make them. And yes in TFS we know his father came back from the Philadelphia experiment with issues and he's obsessed with the MF and that alternate dimension but... it never comes together in a remotely cohesive way IN THE SHOW. In the show? This man is still a complete mystery. Especially when you throw in his sudden interest in exotic matter and wormholes at the eleventh hour.
Dr. Owens-the good cop to Brenner's bad, he obviously knows all about Henry and he's got a mysterious son named Peter who gets his room ransacked by the military-Why exactly?
He helps Hopper adopt Jane. Helps Jane hide in California. Argues with the scientists that are cool with letting Will die. He brings in the military at the mall. So he's a good guy right? But we NEVER find out what his part in all of this was. Is he acting on a guilty conscience? And we know he's not dead at the end of 4, so where tf is he throughout season 5? Is he still trying to help? Does Dr. Kay have him locked up in a room in the lab too? Where did this man who was pivotal from 2-4 go? They didn't even mention his NAME in 5. Like he never existed.
Dr. Kay -Sullivan would have made sense in this role, since he was the only face of the military we saw in 4 coming after El. But no. We add Dr. Kay and Akers, make Sullivan a kind of pointless character, and then NEVER REALLY EXPLAIN wtf they have a lab in the UD for if their entire focus is supposed to be on El. And we only have Kali's word for it on what they were doing there. There is actually zero explanation here on both the battle between the lab military and the pentagon military, and the ultimate goal for, well, either of them.
Dr Kay, Dr. Owens, Dr. Brenner? None of them explained anything. And then we jump ahead in time and they all just...disappeared? What?
They spent 5 seasons making them a scary mystery. Shouldn't they have solved some of it instead of making it more confusing? Even Scooby Doo gives more answers than this show.
Vecna's Evil Plan makes no sense
All the little things he did up to season 5 made sense if we were leading up to a fantastic reveal.
However after 4 ominous chimes, 4 deaths and 4 gates, we suddenly get an entirely new style of kidnapping. We have 12 children kidnapped which, sure, the man's obsessed with clocks and time. We have them put into a sweet illusion while being attached to his organic machine instead of just traumatized. Poor Will (unless coming back to Hawkins was his illusion, but that's pure conjecture) We have the suddenly kind and sneaky Mr. Whatsit instead of scary Vecna and we have....NO F-ing CLUE what's going on because suddenly, instead of being about time it's about space. Instead of being a horror of the mind and picking people with shame and secrets, he's just using imaginative kids like batteries to move a whole ass planet down a fleshy-egg-sac style wormhole.
And why is he merging worlds, you ask? For the MF? Where is the MF? It's not that spider monster, that's for sure. It had no apparent sentience or special abilities. It was just reacting to an attack. Like an alarm system outside of a building where Vecna was holding the kids.
All Henry's time references, and showing Nancy the future and those scenes with him spinning back a clock with his mind don't matter at all. 12 kids? That number was arbitrary. A wormhole with no side effects? Perfectly normal.
We're just making slots and fitting planet A into planet B like Lego's. That's the whole plan.
This only makes sense if its an illusion, because it doesn't connect or conclude the story we were watching until the end of season 4. There's no "Look back, it all makes sense now" revelations. Just absolute confusion.
Mike, Will and El are left in the 2nd act
I've mentioned this several times, but it bears repeating. These are the big 3 connected to both the lab and the supernatural/sci fi story line. Will is taken and changed. El is changed and escapes. Mike is connected to them both, and integral to their choices. His inability to deal with his feelings about either of them is, in my mind, one of the main reasons the show isn't finished.
Not a single one of them had a completed ending. They said bittersweet. They didn't say incomplete.
Will got no epilogue, his coming out due to Vecna didn't actually matter in the end, and his mom killed the bad guy for him. El left for a stupid reason that even the show undermines the importance of with "I believe." Mike was never brave or honest and, at the end, looks like he's about to jump off the quarry again.
Episode 8 left those characters in the black moment before the ending. Before Mike looks at the painting and realizes this isn't reality. Before El wakes up in The Nina. Before we find out Will made this entire illusion because he's trying to protect his friends. Those are just examples, but you know what I'm talking about. It feels like that moment before the other shoe drops, right up until the credits roll.
They left the 3 main characters in the 2nd Act, pretending it was the 3rd. All of them unhappy. All of them unfulfilled. All of them unfinished.
So the human villains have an incomplete story. The supernatural villains have an incomplete story. And the 3 main characters connected to the first two have an incomplete story.
How is anybody is okay with that "ending?"
