From the very first frames in Hawkins to the final, thunderous crescendo of that Lord of the Rings–style finale in Season 5, Stranger Things has felt less like a show I watched and more like a life I briefly got to live again. 
It begins with kids on BMX bikes and ends with a world on the brink, but the real journey is everything in between: childhood innocence slowly giving way to sacrifice, grief, and a hard-won, aching kind of hope. 
By the time the Duffer Brothers close the book with their monumental fifth and final season, it’s not just the story of El and her friends that’s ending-it’s a curtain call for an entire era of film, TV, and music that shaped an entire generation.
Season 1: The First Portal Back to Childhood
Season one is where the spell is cast. On the surface, it’s a simple genre blend: a missing boy, shady government labs, supernatural forces bleeding through from another dimension. But beneath the synth score and Spielbergian shadows, it’s something more intimate-a love letter to the fragile, fierce loyalty of childhood friendships.
The kids’ basement campaigns, walkie-talkie strategy sessions, and those long, haunted bike rides through the Indiana night capture a kind of emotional geography that feels painfully familiar. When Will disappears, it’s not just a plot hook; it’s the moment innocence itself goes missing. Eleven entering their lives is like magic crashing into suburbia, but what gives it weight is how the boys choose her, protect her, even when they barely understand what she is. That early bond, that fragile circle around El, becomes the emotional axis of the entire series.
And Winona Ryder’s Joyce isn’t just playing a desperate mother; she’s all the parents who refused to accept the official story, who clung to irrational hope because love allowed for no other option. Her Christmas lights on the wall, flickering in blunt Morse from another plane, remain one of the purest, strangest images of a mother’s faith ever put on screen.
Season 2: The Cost of Survival
Season two deepens the wound. The first season’s ending never lets us forget that survival comes with residue-the rot (and root) of the Upside Down still clinging to Will, lurking in the corners of Hawkins. The Mind Flayer moves from backdrop to infection, and the series quietly shifts from a rescue story to a meditation on trauma.
Will’s possession is horrifying, but it’s also heartbreakingly familiar: a child changed by what he’s lived through, haunted in ways the adults can’t fully comprehend. Mike’s frustration, Joyce’s fear, Hopper’s sacrificial protectiveness-all of it underscores the reality that the monsters we bring back with us can be even more terrifying than the ones we escape.
Eleven’s search for identity-her need to know where she came from and what that means-hits an especially raw nerve. Her reunion with Hopper, and then their fractious, deeply human attempt at makeshift father-daughter life, gives the show its emotional bassline. 
Hopper, stumbling, angry, gentle in his own broken way, becomes the embodiment of how love doesn’t erase the past but can give it somewhere to land.
Season 3: Neon, Noise, and the Cracks Beneath the Surface
Season three is where the show leans hard into the pop sheen of the 1980s: malls, pastel summer wear, neon-lit food courts, and a soundtrack that never lets you forget where and when you are. Scoops Ahoy, the Starcourt Mall, the garishness of it all-it’s almost too bright, too fun, and that’s exactly the point. The more colourful the surface, the deeper the darkness feels when it breaks through.
The Mind Flayer’s new form-this writhing, flesh-constructed abomination assembled from the bodies of the possessed is about as literal as you can get: all the small, compromised pieces of a town knitted together into one monstrous thing. Beneath the fireworks, the sales, and the shiny promise of consumer bliss, something malignant has been growing.
But it’s the character dynamics that really hurt. Friendships starting to fracture under the weight of growing up, first loves complicating once-simple alliances, Hopper’s desperation to protect El-even from the adult lives that await her-give everything a fragile, almost doomed sweetness. 
That note at the end, Hopper’s sacrifice, feels like a goodbye not just to him, but to the illusion that this gang can stay young and untouched forever.
Season 4: War on Two Fronts-Outside and Within
By the time we reach the penultimate arc, the show has grown up with its characters. The threats are larger, yes, but so is the emotional canvas. Vecna isn’t just another monster; he’s the embodiment of unresolved trauma, guilt, and the way pain can be weaponised, turned inward until it consumes you.
The now-iconic sequences-Max running for her life under the spell of “Running Up That Hill,” Eddie shredding “Master of Puppets” atop that hellish red landscape-aren’t just fan-service; they are emotional statements. Max’s escape is a raw, visual metaphor for clawing her way out of an emotional grave. Eddie’s last stand is what the entire show has quietly been about from the start: the misfit, the freak, the one written off by everyone, finally getting a moment of unambiguous heroism. He dies as only Stranger Things would let him-loud, defiant, and in absolute communion with the music that gave him identity.
Season 5: The Final Reckoning and the Long Goodbye
And then comes Season 5, the monumental, devastating, and transcendent conclusion that the Duffer Brothers have been building toward since the very beginning. 
This final chapter is where everything converges: not just in battle, but in understanding. 
All the scattered pieces of Hawkins’ dark history, all the personal journeys that seemed separate, all the sacrifices and compromises and small acts of love suddenly align into something approaching clarity.
The opening episodes of Season 5 don’t give us relief; they deepen the stakes. The gates between worlds haven’t just cracked-they’re on the verge of collapse entirely. Hawkins is no longer just a town harbouring a secret; it’s becoming the epicentre of an apocalypse. 
But more than that, the emotional weight shifts inward. 
These aren’t just kids fighting monsters anymore; they’re young adults grappling with the unbridgeable gulf between who they were and who they’ve had to become.
Eleven, no longer the silent, traumatised child with a shaved head but now a young woman carrying the weight of an impossible responsibility, must finally face the full truth of what she is and what her existence has cost. Her journey from laboratory subject to saviour, to the girl who must decide whether she can live a normal life, becomes the thematic heart of the season. 
The reunion with Hopper, long thought dead, is earned through episodes of genuine uncertainty and haunting absence. When it comes, it doesn’t feel like a convenient plot twist; it feels like a miracle that the narrative has spent seasons preparing us to doubt was possible.
The final 2-hour episode that the Duffer Brothers have crafted takes on that unmistakable Return of the King grandeur-but with a deeply intimate twist. 
Multiple fronts of conflict converge not just geographically but emotionally. The kids and their parents and allies aren’t just fighting Vecna or the Upside Down itself; they’re fighting to reclaim a version of reality where childhood friendships can survive adulthood, where love isn’t always a liability, where the small, ordinary moments matter more than the apocalyptic ones.
The finale moves between intimate character beats and truly epic confrontations. 
We see Dustin and Mike, now on the precipice of manhood, having to make impossible choices about loyalty and survival. 
We see Lucas, the tether to normalcy, finally having to fully acknowledge what normal will never be again. 
We see Max, who spent a season trapped between life and death, discovering what it truly means to live. And we see Eleven-the heart of everything-confronting the architect of all their pain, not with a grand display of power, but with something quieter, more human, more devastating.
What gives Season 5 its most piercing emotional note is Will’s quiet, devastating coming out. For four seasons, his pain lived in the margins-in the lingering looks, the half-swallowed words, the way he always seemed slightly out of sync with the life everyone else was racing toward. 
In the final season, the show at last lets him step out of the subtext and into the light, and it does so with a tenderness that feels almost unbearably honest. His confession isn’t some triumphant, fireworks moment; it’s messy, halting, and raw, the kind of truth that trembles out of you because carrying it any longer might crush you. When he finally names what he feels-especially in that heartbreaking, open-veined honesty with Mike-it reframes his entire journey, from the boy who vanished in the first episode to the young man who has spent years feeling like a ghost in his own life. 
The beauty of it is that his friends don’t fix everything with a single hug or a perfect speech; instead, they make space for him, and in that space, Will finally begins to exist not as the kid who was taken or the one everyone needed to protect, but as himself.
What makes Season 5’s finale so devastating is that it understands something Stranger Things has always known: you don’t defeat evil by destroying it utterly. 
You defeat it by choosing love and connection and community, even especially, when it costs you. People die. Not everyone makes it out. Some wounds don’t heal; they scar over. 
And the world that emerges on the other side is not the same Hawkins we started with-it’s not the same kids, not the same possibilities.
The Duffer Brothers pull out all the stops in that final episode because they understand they’re not just closing a story-they’re performing an exorcism. 
The monsters that emerge in the climax aren’t just supernatural; they’re metaphorical manifestations of every trauma, every regret, every moment when these kids had to grow up too fast. 
The battles are visceral, yes, but what lingers are the small moments: Joyce finally allowed to grieve and heal. Hopper is given a second chance at fatherhood. 
The kids sit together one last time, knowing it’s different now, that they’re moving into a world where Hawkins will be a shared memory rather than a shared present.
And then there’s the ending itself-not quite a happy ending, not quite a tragic one, but something more complex and human than either. 
A time jump shows us where these people end up. Some have found peace. Some carry visible scars. They’ve scattered to different parts of the country, following the paths that adulthood demands. But there’s a scene-a gathering, a moment where they’re all together one more time-that hits with the force of a goodbye that isn’t quite final. 
It’s the goodbye of people who’ve lived through the unimaginable together and emerged, forever changed, forever bonded, but no longer living in each other’s daily lives.
The final moments of the series return us to Hawkins itself. The town is healing, but it bears the scars. 
The Upside Down isn’t just gone; it’s contained, locked away, a wound that will never fully close but can be lived with. There’s a sense of fragile peace, of a community that has survived its own dark mirror and is now learning to exist with the knowledge that darkness exists, that trauma is real, but that connection-friendship, love, and sacrifice are stronger.
A Farewell to an Era
What ultimately makes Stranger Things so devastating and so beautiful is that it knows what it is saying goodbye to. The show isn’t just trading in nostalgia; it’s performing a kind of last rites for a certain way of being young in a world without internet, with analogue friendships and physical adventures, where your greatest treasures were mixtapes, VHS rentals, and the arcade cabinet that lit up your weekend.
Season 5 understands something crucial: it’s not enough to just end the supernatural conflict. You have to end the characters’ relationship with innocence itself. 
These kids entered the series as children who believed in the goodness of authority, the safety of their small town, and the permanence of friendship. They exit as adults who know that the world harbours genuine darkness, that institutions lie, that even the deepest bonds require distance and growth to survive.
Across all five seasons, the series has curated a mixtape of pop culture- John Carpenter synths, Steven Spielberg awe, Stephen King’s lurking dread, George Romero’s rot, James Cameron’s intensity-and woven it into a story that feels both familiar and startlingly specific. 
It becomes less about “remember this reference?” and more about “remember how this felt?” The late nights. The bikes. The walk home under streetlights. The fear that your parents don’t really see you. The conviction that your friends are your entire world.
By the time that final 2-hour episode rolls credits, there’s a sense that a chapter of our collective cultural memory has been gently, forcefully closed. 
The kids we met as wide-eyed nerds and lonely outcasts have become battered, brave young adults. Hawkins, once just another small town on a map, has become a battlefield, a cemetery, and ultimately, a monument to what we lose when we grow up. 
And the neon, the music, the analogue textures-all the things that seemed like window-dressing at first-reveal themselves as the emotional scaffolding of an era that will never fully come again.
What It Leaves Behind
For me, Stranger Things across all five seasons is less a binge and more a pilgrimage. 
From episode one to the final moments of Season 5, it has been a guided journey back through the corridors of memory-personal, cultural, cinematic. 
Every season invited me to remember not just what I watched or listened to back then, but who I was: the fears I nursed, the hopes I hid, the way friendship felt like armour strong enough to face anything.
Season 5, in particular, is the season that forces you to reckon with the fact that growing up means leaving behind not just the supernatural horrors of Hawkins, but the comfort of those friendships existing in daily proximity. It’s the season that says: yes, you survived the monsters, but survival comes with the price of necessary distance, necessary change, necessary grief. 
It’s heartbreaking because it’s true.
The series closes with the weight and grace of a story that understands endings: they hurt, they heal, and they’re necessary. 
Like The Lord of the Rings, it leaves its heroes changed, its world scarred, and its audience standing at the edge of something both lost and forever preserved in the amber of memory. But unlike Tolkien’s epic, Stranger Things insists that we don’t get to go to the Undying Lands, into the West. 
We have to stay here, in the real world, carrying the weight of what we’ve lived through.
Stranger Things doesn’t just entertain; it understands. 
 
It understands what it meant to grow up in that time, to be shaped by that pop culture, to find pieces of yourself in flickering screens and well-worn tapes. It understands that adulthood isn’t an escape from the darkness we encounter in youth-it’s learning to live with it, to carry it, to let it shape us without defining us entirely. 
 
And as the book finally snaps shut on Hawkins and the Upside Down, Season 5 offers one final, powerful truth: the monsters we survive and the people we survive them with will always be part of us. Even when the gates are sealed and the credits roll, the echoes of those years-those friends, those songs, those nights of desperate hope and absolute terror-remain, humming like an old synth line in the back of your mind, playing you out into whatever comes next.
 Now streaming on Netflix.
 
-Dirk Lombard Fourie