Stranger Things‘ series finale has proved divisive for multiple reasons. While there’s plenty to like about the conclusion, the backlash and complaints have ranged from apparent plot holes and leaps of logic to how quickly Vecna and the Mind Flayer were defeated, some characters not being given enough screen time, the abrupt end of the military story, and, of course, Eleven’s ambiguous fate. Among them all, one of the biggest elements that’s faced criticism is the lack of deaths in Stranger Things‘ ending.
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While technically Eleven may have died, Mike’s story about the Mage means that’s not a guarantee. Without that, it leaves the major casualties of the finale as Vecna, the Mind Flayer, and Kali, or in other words, the main villains and a supporting character who was only in a handful of episodes. Where was the long-feared Steve Harrington death? The tragic demise of Dustin? The heroic last stand of Hopper? Stranger Things‘ main characters, and almost all the supporting ones from the final season, lived to the credits and got pretty happy endings, something that’s faced backlash and scrutiny, but is Game of Thrones to blame for that?
Game Of Thrones Is To Blame For Stranger Things’ Death Criticism
While Stranger Things avoided its finale being as hated as Game of Thrones‘ own ending, the complaints over its lack of deaths do perhaps stem from the expectations audiences have because of that show. While it wasn’t the first series to kill off main characters, it did perfect the art, and did so on a level that generated so much hype that it changed both how we watch TV and how TV is made. Main character deaths are much more commonplace and expected in the post-Ned Stark and Red Wedding landscape, for better and for worse.
Killing off main characters is not inherently a good or bad thing, it all depends on how it is executed (no pun intended). Some seasons of Game of Thrones, and similar much-hyped shows with a penchant for deaths, like The Walking Dead, could veer into shock value too much. But the expectation of bloodbaths or that main characters have to die isn’t fair, nor accurate to what Thrones (and before it, George R.R. Martin’s books) were doing.
The death of Ned Stark isn’t done for the sake of it, nor is the Red Wedding. It’s shocking, and it’s supposed to seem sudden and spontantenous to audiences in the moment (in part because it subverts all expectations and tropes), but it’s really about cause and effect: we can see every single choice that leads to those deaths, how they’re about the consequences of many different actions taken by multiple people, and the show has the time and space to explore the fallout and impact of them too, using them to push forward narrative, thematic, and character arcs.
Too often, however, the legacy of those moments is that any character can die and, worse, that they should die, either for a shocking twist and/or to highlight how high the stakes are. The latter, in particular, is part of why Stranger Things‘ final season has faced criticism over its lack of deaths, but that isn’t the only way to create tension, threat, or stakes. That isn’t to say the show did enough outside of those, but it’s not solely contingent on having people die, which, done for the wrong reasons, can feel cheap anyway.
It should be driven by the characters: they could still face defeat, or loss of a different kind (for example, one of the strongest, most emotional storylines of the season is with Dustin and Steve’s friendship, which is not remotely lessened by both of them surviving). Vecna and the Mind Flayer did feel too weak in that final battle, but it could’ve had characters sustain injuries, or have them win, heroes retreat, and then a second battle, as just a couple of examples that increase the stakes without needing characters to die. Failure and struggle can create stakes as compelling (and often more satisfying) than death, when done right.
Stranger Things is also, quite simply, a different sort of show. A criticism that it never killed main characters is different from one that it only needed to do so at the end, but even then, it never really felt necessary (Hopper in Season 3 is the only one, for me, where they could and maybe should have followed through with it). Each season had its own stakes, which felt real and earned even before the death typically happened (e.g. Bob or Eddie), but it was also important to balance that with a sense of fun, and that we’re watching a bunch of kids in what is, essentially, a riff on a 1980s adventure movie, where the main characters did not typically die.
Were there too many characters by the time of the finale? Probably, yeah, but again, good writing can balance that and properly group them, and maybe don’t turn someone who’d been at most a tertiary character into the most important person in the entire season (though Holly was one of the better written characters, perhaps due to the Duffers’ greater comfort and familiarity in writing younger heroes). By not killing main characters in Season 5, Stranger Things actually stayed true to what it’d always been, and while there are plenty of issues, that’s not a bad thing.
All five seasons of Stranger Things are now streaming on Netflix.
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Official art by Bastien Lecouffe-Deharme -
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