Love triumphs over lore in the teary ‘Stranger Things’ finale

Note: This review contains spoilers for the “Stranger Things” series finale.

“Stranger Things” believes in repair.

The series that started with kids playing Dungeons & Dragons has done many things well over its nine-year run. It created a stable of memorable characters. It featured an impressively varied range of monsters. It delivered flavors of horror ranging from physical to psychological to supernatural to simply geopolitical. And it has pretty consistently managed to layer three genres on top of one another — kids adventure movie, teenage horror and adult thriller — without getting too tangled up. Above all, it captured that ’80s feeling. The mall. The fashion. Cold War Russophobia. Bikes. Also, crucially, how stories from that decade felt, even if the plots didn’t always make sense. There was so much darkness, so much horror — even and especially in kids’ movies — but also enough comedy and levity and friendship to make that old chestnut true: It really did feel like the real treasure was the friends we made along the way.

The Duffer Brothers respect those old formulas enough to iterate more than they innovate. The show’s resolutions have always tended to reaffirm emotional bonds — and restore the sweet, humdrum rhythms of ordinary life after fighting unspeakable horrors — more successfully than they address questions of lore (or even basic narrative coherence).

They steered even harder into that mode in the finale, which dedicated the last 45 of its 125 minutes to explaining how things stand 18 months after the gang defeated Vecna (and the Mind Flayer). The tone ranges from touching to treacly. Dustin channels Eddie at graduation. The older kids make doomed and poignant promises not to lose touch as they start their adult lives. Hopper gives a broken and bereaved Mike a grim pep talk about loss and resilience. And proposes to Joyce. There were gaps: Murray didn’t get a moment. Neither did Mike and Holly, who really should have. The high school grads enjoy one last D&D campaign that ends with Mike (who had nothing to do this whole season) finally getting to improvise a very touching alternative ending about what really happened. Whether all that worked for you depends on whether you buy the emotional core the series is selling — or care about the lore.

If the latter matters to you, the finale was probably a letdown. I’d long assumed the Duffer Brothers were making the show’s cosmology up as they went along, and that was part of the fun: Dungeons & Dragons has lots of that. And sure, it lowers the series’ collective stakes, but the proliferation of theories and tropes is part of the fun. No one expects different campaigns to merge into one mega-story that makes perfect sense. Why should the Freddy Krueger season be shoehorned into the botanical underwater horror that initially characterized the Upside Down?

It became clear in the fourth season that the show did, indeed, aim to organize its monsters, at least a bit. Dustin and others started theorizing that Vecna — the Big Bad that Eleven has been training to fight — might in fact be the Mind Flayer’s five-star general, or vice versa. That seemed like a declaration of formal ambition. Would the Duffer Brothers try to wrestle the series’ many villains into a hierarchy of evil and explain how they were connected, and why they were all in Hawkins? Would the Mind Flayer and Vecna and the Upside Down and Dr. Brenner and the Philadelphia Project and the Abyss and all the rest of it suddenly snap into an orderly, sinister, coherent mega-scheme?

Let’s just say the show went a different way.

“Stranger Things” spent its final season merrily proliferating new forms of horror instead — including exotic matter that liquefies everything (except doors?) until it arbitrarily stops. And a Technicolor wonderland set entirely in Vecna’s mind. It was charming, in that “Stranger Things” way. It was also kind of relentless. The season poked some fun at how unfounded the characters’ explanations for all these things are (even making Dustin being wrong about the wall a plot point). But it also supercharged the volume of speculation — and ambiguous weird phenomena — until the causality of everything became pretty tough to track. (I couldn’t tell you how Holly and Max’s adventures resulted in Max’s epiphany about how to exit Henry’s mind-prison, or why that solution worked for her but failed for Holly.)

It isn’t easy to connect the dream logic and trauma stuff to the physical horror, the wormhole, the exotic matter, the interdimensional collapse. Or to the Demodogs and guns and monsters. I hoped the gang would have a postgame discussion to hash out what exactly it all meant after the final battle. Why, for instance, was a bit of Mind Flayer stashed in a briefcase, and who was the guy Henry killed? What happened to Dr. Kay, and the whole military presence, after El disappeared? Is there a supreme entity planning this, or is it all (as everyone kept repeating) “dark magic”? I’m no archvillain, but if it’s the former, it seems a bit roundabout for the mega-spider to smash two worlds together by recruiting Vecna (via infection by briefcase rock) to harness the gullibility of children in an idyllic re-creation of the childhood home where he murdered his family.

It felt this season like the flavors of horror were finally crashing and clashing, rather than complementing each other. While Jamie Campbell Bower played both the human and spiky-twig versions of Vecna brilliantly, I found his human manifestation far more frightening. And though it was refreshing that Henry rejected Will’s plea to come back from the dark side, his backstory ended up feeling half-baked: His humanity surfaced so briefly. Why not let it breathe a bit? The show didn’t expand, even slightly, on his origin story with Dr. Brenner, or his initial contact with Eleven and how he felt realizing she had his powers. Strange for none of those traumas to find expression in the mind palace Max spent so much time in. (Also, I kept expecting the fact that Joyce and Hopper and the Wheelers knew Henry in high school to come up.) Similarly, Kali and Linda Hamilton’s Dr. Kay both felt like weapons the show never figured out how to use.

Even the show’s emotional literacy, which has always been its secret superpower, felt — much like Eleven — like it could use a bath and some junk food. Eleven’s tragedy anchored the show for so long, but she got short shrift this season. Her relationship with Kali needed more time; the rescue, discussion and disagreement were so compressed that her death didn’t hit quite as it should. El’s reunion with Max, her best friend, barely registered. Even her relationship with Hopper lacked intensity, which made his lightness of spirit after her disappearance register as callous when the show clearly intended to demonstrate that he had finally transcended some toxic old patterns. Will’s marvelous discovery that he had a superpower — suggesting he finally managed to transmute his trauma into agency and choice — got weirdly downgraded into his still being just a vessel for the feelings and perceptions of others. (Also, what happened to Vickie? Did she and Robin ever make it to Enzo’s?)

Still, it felt right for the show to take its time. It leveraged our nostalgia, not just for the ’80s, but for every one of the nine years we’ve been watching as it deployed montages and flashbacks and mega-weapons like “Heroes” and “Purple Rain” and “Landslide.” Dustin and Steve hugging? Tears! Mrs. Wheeler’s scars. Even Nancy’s new hair. And, of course, Mike’s tragic effort to help everyone feel a little better by telling a really good story. Of course the show ends with Holly and Derek starting their first D&D campaign. It’s exactly the right move for that moment. Like Eleven, “Stranger Things” can still pack a punch — even if it isn’t hitting on all cylinders.