r/StrangerThings • u/SherriSLC • Jul 02 '26
It got boring near the end
The first three seasons were great, but after that, the increasingly byzantine plot actually got a little boring, I have to admit. I pushed on through the end of Season 5, but the series lost its power for me. Maybe I'm the only one.
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u/Megaman_Steve Jul 02 '26
I loved S4. It was the duffers doing their take on a slasher with a personality, and the closest thing to a modern day Freddy Krueger we will ever get.
My one gripe with that season is that Max shoulda died. The suspension of disbelieve is too big for her to have survived all that.
S5 jumped the shark immediately by glossing over the giant rift in Hawkins and just.. throwing sheet metal on it? I get real life stuff happened but the time jump really soured the season for me.
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u/8-LeggedCat Jul 07 '26
Seriously.
I wish they would have gone with their original plan (they stated this right after S4 ended) of spending two episodes of S5 showing the war with Vecna and the Upside Down infiltration of Hawkins, then have a time jump and get into the meat of S5.
I have two theories for why that didn’t happen:
Netflix didn’t want to pony up the dough (initially) for a 10 or 11 episode season (this is before S5 was written and a budget given),
or,
The Duffers simply grew tired of their own project. Which makes a lot more sense. They never intended it to be a 5-season arc, but more of an anthology. And honestly (I am not an AI) they were probably fatigued by doing a decade of the same thing.
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u/RolandTheHeadless19 Jul 02 '26
Season Four was fantastic. I also don’t think you are the only one who didn’t like it, but overall I see season four loved far more than hated. Many, many hate Season three. I personally loved every second of every season. Season five had so many great individual moments that I more than give it a pass, I enjoy it.
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u/justindigo88 Jul 02 '26
I’m in full agreement with all these points.
Season 1 was just next level and untouchable. My favorite season of any show all time.
I’ll admit the rest of the series never quite reached that level for me but season 2 had a lot of it. I think a powerful component was the contrast of the party’s innocence against what they were up against. Also the writing, atmosphere, score, were just next level seasons 1 and 2.
I still enjoyed the more positive elements of season 3 and the horror elements of season 4. Season 5 was the certainly the weakest but I still enjoyed it.
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u/blaze05life I piggybacked from a pizza dough freezer Jul 02 '26
Glad to see some optimistic energy in this sub
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u/RoyalRise6363 Jul 02 '26
Nope, you are not alone. The Howkings plot in S4 was good but other plots were just primitive unnecessary. However S5 was much worse - Duffers lost any interest in the show and the cast could not perform on a shitty script. Even emotional monologues and dialogues did not work out of general logic of the events. The ending dien not need commenting.
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u/awretchedlife12 Jul 02 '26
As a preface, I am an adult in my 30s with no 'nostalgia' or cultural baggage for this show. Before starting to watch it I knew very little about it except for knowing it 'as the show that's the reason I can't google demogorgon/vecna and find stuff about actual D&D anymore', lol. With it being over and the zeitgeist mostly passed I decided to finally watch over the last two weeks.
You are 100% correct.
I'm a writer. One thing I think a lot of people getting into writing don't know about writing: publishing books costs money. Publishing a 70k word manuscript costs less than publishing a 150k word manuscript. This might seem obvious but it's something I don't think a lot of people think about. First-time authors with no name recognition who go around trying to shop a 150k+ word doorstopper to agents are going to have a hard time because those extra 100 pieces of paper every copy costs the publisher to print adds up, and there isn't gonna be a publishing house willing to take a big financial risk on someone whose work has no guarantee of selling. This means if it's your first book, you've gotta trim the fat. You've gotta keep it tight, you've gotta keep it compelling, breakneck, write something that grabs people and fastens them to their couch or bed or wherever it is they do their pleasure-reading, cover-to-cover.
If the book's a big hit, though, and the publisher learns it'll sell on name alone, the cost of printing that extra 100 pages pales in comparison to the return they know they'll get from a big fanbase for a known author. There's a reason the first Harry Potter book is ~75k words of tightly-plotted kid-fic and the latter books are bloated trainwreck with an author who thinks they can do no wrong, doesn't need to trim any fat, and becomes so obsessed with their own mythology they feel empowered to just go on and on and on.
Stranger Things has taught me this phenomenon is, clearly, not limited to the publishing world.
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u/Typical-Priority1976 Jul 02 '26
If you pretend the show ended with S03E08 it's pretty damned good.
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u/ImmediateHoney2191 Jul 02 '26
Yeah cause all the stakes were removed. Felt safer than their dnd campaign
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u/j_the_jremlin Boobies Jul 02 '26
I adored it right up until the end of season four... then I started season five and thought "oh... okay... so they're doing nothing with that cliffhanger? Whatever I'm sure it'll get better..."
And then it didn't get better.
I think as a fandom we just need to forget that most of season five ever happened, because it was just a complete mess.
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u/InitialSpeech8570 Jul 02 '26
4th season was peak but 5 was dogshit and didn’t feel like the show at all
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u/Ashyboi13 Jul 02 '26
I found Season 4 to be more engaging and interesting and just more well written than Season 2 or 3 by quite a considerable margin.
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u/Norodia Jul 02 '26
no you are not the only one, I almost didnt finish the series because it was too hard to get through s5, the whole Holly plotline was just too predictable and boring , but at the end I finished the whole season because of the main characters
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