As 2025 drew to a close, everyone was eagerly awaiting the holidays and festivities that would soon begin. Yet, the end of the last year marked another important event: the fifth and last season of Stranger Things was released.

It would be an understatement to say that many were looking forward to this more than to waking up to Christmas presents – over the last decade, Stranger Things has had an unbelievable impact on us, and the three-year wait for the new season intensified the suspense, ultimately making season five a global blockbuster.

Social media were flooded with interviews, spoilers and theories about the new season and its cast. TikTok was full of clips with theories about the upcoming volume, and YouTube’s algorithms bombarded users with interviews with cast members.

It happened despite the fact that the streaming service decided to split the release into three volumes – four episodes were released on November 26, the next three on December 25, and the final, two-hour-long episode became available on January 1, 2026. This makes the outage even more surprising, because the split disincentivised some viewers from visiting Netflix before all episodes were released.

The Duffer Brothers, who created Stranger Things, explained that the reason behind the split was the plot of the final season. Ross Duffer said that the first volume was created as a complete story, with an intense climax adding emotional weight, structuring the story and adding dramatic weight to it.

At the same time, the split release was almost certainly also a planned marketing move – the release dates throughout the span of the winter holidays (new parts arriving on Christmas and the New Year) did not aim to enhance the plot, but to transform the festive season into a Stranger Things event.

This strategy proved very successful – for over a month, Netflix dominated streaming and social media, capturing the attention of people precisely when they were sitting at home and looking for things to watch. Various theories from fans fuelled the excitement for weeks, making the release of the final episode of the series a huge event.

Changes and controversies

As Stranger Things came to an end with the fifth season, it is worth noting how the show’s finale changed in comparison to the earlier parts. The first three seasons were firmly set in the 1980s nostalgia, something the fourth season slightly moved away from.

The fifth season continues the change – it is much darker, more violent and definitely less light-hearted than the earlier seasons.

Although these autumnal and newer trends applied by Parris seem relevant and understandable, this is a somewhat controversial decision – to us, it took away some of the original atmosphere of the Stranger Things.

While it could be argued that the clothing in Season 5 lacks that charm that Stranger Things had in the beginning, the music remained phenomenal – something the show is renowned for since the beginning. 1980s classics like Diana Ross’s Upside Down, ABBA’s Fernando and Tiffany’s I Think We’re Alone Now” keep the nostalgia for that era in music alive.

And, even though Season 5 has a very different character to its predecessors (Season 1, after all, was filmed over ten years ago) the plot is engaging, especially when compared to Season 4, which at times felt slow and not too gripping.

The most problematic is the lag between the speed of the show’s development and the progression of the time presented – most visible in how significantly differs the age of the actors and the characters they play. In Season 5, for example, the show’s main star, 21-year-old Millie Bobby Brown steps into the role of 16-year-old Eleven – which for some was quite problematic and resulted with a string of memes and at times rude comments.

What was more important to us was watching the actors grow up and become adults. As we grew up with them, the end of the ten-year Stranger Things saga created a sense of nostalgia and sentiment.