For better or worse, everyone’s been talking about the final season of Stranger Things, and its finale in particular. Reactions have been mixed across the board, but for creators Ross and Matt Duffer, things more or less ended as intended.
Leading up to the finale, fans made a petition convinced there was unseen footage held hostage by Netflix, or even a secret episode. But the brothers told Variety that no such interference or hidden episode exists, with Matt saying they’ve made the show “[we] wanted to make. […] There’s no interference or direction at all from Netflix. They are, and always have been, incredible, and they really trust us. That’s been true since season one.”
If the Duffers had their say, they’d just let Stranger Things speak for itself from now on. Unfortunately, they can’t: from Joyce and Hopper discovering their classmate was Vecna to Robin and Vickie still being together, their post-finale talk has partially been about why they didn’t touch on things in the final episode, or why they made the choices they did. With Vecna, for example, they basically wrote the season like the First Shadow musical laying out his origin just didn’t exist, since they didn’t want to confuse anyone who hadn’t watched the musical. But don’t worry, they’re “sure” Joyce and Hopper talked about their Vecna connection offscreen, which…is something, right?
Likewise, they’d like audiences to determine for themselves whether young Henry embraced his own darkness or was ultimately manipulated by the Mind Flayer. At one point, though, they were interested in putting him in what Ross Duffer called “a Darth Vader-type situation” where he’d have reneged on the Flayer. As explained in a Netflix Q&A, that idea was scrapped after they talked with the writers and Vecna’s actor Jamie Campbell Bower and settled on Vecna having to “justify everything he’s done with, ‘I chose this, and I believe in this still.’ Where Henry goes, it doesn’t matter because he chooses the side of the Mind Flayer at the end of the day.”
The idea of ambiguity is something the Duffers really want to push for several characters—even with Eleven, they said there was “never a version” of the ending where she’d live a normal life with the others, so Mike and everyone else has chosen to believe she’s alive in the other dimension rather than truly gone after sacrificing herself. And by having them believe in what could be a lie, “it was such a better way to end the story and represent the closure of this journey and their journey from children to adults,” continued Ross.
Obviously, some Stranger Things fans don’t think that onscreen coyness is actually intentional or even works in the finale’s favor. But until (or if) a sequel series happens, it’s on them to craft their own theories and fill any holes in the Duffers’ narrative that they see fit, or at least until the Duffers go and explain or rationalize something else from it.
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