First things first, I think the show sticks the landing. There's no flagrant last-minute swerve that confuses or confounds, the characters remain true to themselves.
My immediate point of comparison is with Game of Thrones, whose ending (the last two seasons in general, but in particular the final wrenching heel-turn for one of its core protagonists) took a wrecking ball to the good will it had built up over the previous 8 years.
Stranger Things, while it has had fewer episodes and seasons, was nevertheless "running" for even longer, nine years, and so there was a lot of pressure to live up to its expectations.
I literally finished it just a few minutes ago, so these are my raw impressions, but broadly speaking, I think the show manages to end in a satisfying way. I'll get into specifics beyond a spoiler cut.
Spoilers Ahead:
There's a certain bloodthirstiness in the online discourse about Stranger Things' hesitance to kill off major characters. While beloved single-season figures like Sean Astin's Bob or Joseph Quinn's Eddie die tragically in climactic moments, there's almost a rule that if you live through a season, you're basically going to be ok.
And that's... sort of true in the end.
Let's talk Eleven.
The show leaves us with a bittersweet ending: Vecna/Henry is dead, as is the Mind Flayer (also it's a lot clearer now how the two are related), but it appears that, at the advice of 8/Kali, Eleven/Jane decides to stay behind as the Upside-Down is collapsed, dying as she's sucked into the void when the wormhole is destroyed.
It's only at the very end of the finale that Mike presents an alternative, more hopeful theory: that Kali wasn't dead yet after being shot by the soldiers, and was able to hold on long enough to shroud Eleven as she escaped the soldiers and then create a decoy who would seem to have died.
The show presents this vision, including Eleven finding somewhere in, like, Iceland, where there are those fabled three waterfalls Mike talked about finding once this was all over. Is it just Mike's theory, in denial about how his girlfriend died in the void outside of space? Maybe. But while the show clearly means this to be an ambiguity, I also think it leans harder on the "yeah, Mike's right" side, especially because of the way that Eleven vanishes so instantly when the Upside-Down collapses.
She's alive, but it's not clear, and maybe even unlikely, that she'll be able to see any of the Hawkins Party again. That's still pretty darn bitter for our sweetness.
The finale is two hours long, so it's basically a feature film even after all that came before it. The final battle against Vecna and the Mind Flayer is fought in the Abyss, with Eleven confronting Vecna directly in the abdomen of the Mind Flayer (where the kids have been taken to power his world-merging master plan).
It's a fun sequence: Nancy Wheeler gets to be a total badass, luring the Mind Flayer into a canyon while the rest of our heroes pelt it with fire, guns, and even spears. Will is able to use his "sorcerer" powers to thwart Vecna and allow Eleven to impale him on one of the internal spikes of the Mind Flayer, but while he's probably dead anyway, it's Joyce Byers who gets the killing blow, avenging all the pain that this man has brought upon her and her family by chopping (with many swings) his head off with an axe. Visceral and gross, but satisfying.
The epilogue takes place 18 months later. The older kids, Nancy, Jonathan, Steve, and Robin all compare notes on their post-Hawkins lives, with Nancy dropping out of Emerson to work for the Boston Herald, Robin off at Smith, Jonathan at NYU as a film student (hey, I guess we're fellow Tischies!) and Steve sticks around as the high school baseball coach/sex ed teacher, living quite comfortably given how the events of the previous six years made housing very affordable in Hawkins. (Truly, this is the millennial dream, to be able to afford a house.)
Hopper handles losing Eleven better than he thought he would, accepting it after he struggled so hard with the loss of his first daughter, Sara. And he and Joyce get engaged, so that's nice.
Also, as some have pointed out, somehow Max manages to graduate with her classmates despite having missed two years of school in her Vecna-induced trance, so I can only assume she did very well in summer classes.
Mike runs some more D&D for his friends (apparently Ravenloft, as they fight Strahd von Zarovich - though there's another anachronism, as they talk about going on to the town of Vallaki, which I don't think was introduced until 2016's Curse of Strahd, a remake of the original Ravenloft module) and reveals this theory he has, that Eleven is still alive.
They finish up their game, closing the chapter on this tale, only for Holly to burst into the basement to take over the space and run what appears to be her first D&D campaign with some of the fellow former Vecna vessels (including Dipshit/Delightful Derek).
There's no question that Netflix is going to milk this IP for all it's worth, and I think they've already announced an animated spin-off. But the show's complete now, and I think this is the right way for it to end (though I'm surprised that they're not in more trouble given all the US soldiers they've killed... eh, we'll just pretend that there's a convenient cover-up or something).
After season two in particular and to an extent season three suffered a bit from diminishing returns compared to the first season, I do think that this one has kept the momentum (even after like two and a half years) from season 4. I'm not sure how I'd rank those 4 and 5 against each other, but if you enjoyed 4, I think you'll probably enjoy this one as well.
It'd be interesting to see this show all in one big batch - flashbacks to the first and second seasons are genuinely kind of shocking given how young the stars were (even the younger kids in this season seem older than the main crew was at the show's start).
The show has plenty of flaws, and once again, I think that it doesn't trust the audience to keep up with it, which requires a lot of reiteration and flashbacks that I would prefer they cut out (though sadly I don't know if the producers are wrong to assume the audience is barely paying attention). Still, this has always been one of the coolest-looking shows, with a really strong aesthetic.
And again, for all the people who will be disappointed that the show didn't kill off any of the core characters: that was never what this show really wanted to do. To extend the D&D metaphor: I'll tell you, as a DM, it's really hard to actually (permanently) kill player characters without flagrantly cheating or overtuning the challenges. In that game, sure, you want to be challenged, but you want to see your characters triumph. And I felt very much the same here: I like these people, even if it's a huge and unwieldy cast.
You could come up with a laundry list of all the things that the show has done wrong over the years, but at the end of the day, it's been a fun journey, and I'm happy to have gotten it.
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