Grieving Stranger Things is grieving my inner child

Warning: This article contains spoilers for the Netflix series, 'Stranger Things'

Mike, Lucas, Max, Will, and Dustin playing the last D&D campaign. Screenshot from Netflix, Stranger Things, Series 5, Episode 8

It’s time to accept it, Stranger Things is finished.

El is alive, trekking in a remote place with waterfalls. Mike is a successful writer. Will enjoys his life in New York. Max can walk again, and she and Lucas are still together. Dustin is an academic. I am planning my retirement. We have all become a little bit more adult since Episode 8, which aired on New Year’s Eve.

Why is it so difficult to accept that it is over?

This is not a rhetorical question. Thousands of fans online have, for weeks, argued that Episode 8 was not the end. According to the viral “Conformity Gate” theory, fans believed that there should have been a new episode coming out on January 7^th. Then on January 17^th. Netflix crashed because so many people visited the site looking for an episode that never existed. In the end, perhaps because of the strong rebuttal from Netflix, this hope has faded, too.

The Conformity Gate theory could be seen as a response to collective disappointment with the series’ ending, as many felt that the happy ending was too happy. All the protagonists return to a normal, conformity-based life, which is an impossible ending for them. Aren’t they a group of rebellious young heroes who have fought with interdimensional evil and saved our universe? How can they possibly settle into adulthood? It must be an illusion. A surprise will come. More adventure. More fights, with an even worse evil. There are so many clues left by the Duffer brothers that anticipate this. Haven’t you noticed that a doorknob shifts from left to right between episodes? It is certainly a signal for a mirror reality.

I am sorry, my friends. I am sad, too. I, like you, cannot imagine a life without El, Mike, Will, Dustin, Lukas… without Max, on whom I have written before. Because life without Stranger Things is simply sadder.

But no new episodes are coming. The story has finished. The supposed hidden clues are just technical mistakes. It’s time to understand the real motivation behind the Conformity Gate theory: we do not want to grow up.

At the end of episode 8, the Duffer brothers show, within the story itself, what many of us find difficult to accept. As Mike leaves his basement after what may be his last Dungeon & Dragons campaign with his friends, his 8-year-old sister, Holly, storms down the stairs with her friends of similar age. Having all just lived an incredible adventure, captured by Vecna, they start playing their own D&D campaign.

Holly and her friends playing their first D&D campaign. Screenshot from Netflix, Stranger Things, Series 5, Episode 8

Mike looks at them, between a smile and a tear, as he realises that he is leaving this world behind as others step in to continue it. He turns and leaves the basement. He closes the door. The end.

And this was when I thought – yes, Mike, I am with you. I am you.  

I am also grieving the child in me who remained in the basement, as I became (just a little bit more) an adult at the end of Stranger Things. The child in me who watched E.T. and Ghostbusters and The Neverending Story and Back to the Future; who listened to Kate Bush and Diana Ross, played on local radio stations; who wanted to be James Bond or Indiana Jones or the Man with No Name cowboy. I left him playing in the basement when I closed the door with Mike, sharing his sadness. And as I am grieving Stranger Things, I am also grieving that part of me, who could save the world by fighting evil because he could believe that the Upside Down world really exists.

I am not the only one with this view. My Italian friend and psychoanalyst, Laura Fonzi, whom I interviewed in preparation for this piece, is also a Stranger Things fan. She confessed to having cried throughout the last episode, because of the nostalgia for her childhood that the series powerfully triggered through continuous references to her favourite movies. Moreover, she observes,

“E.T. and The Goonies are movies where the children know more than the adults and save the world through their incessant ingenuity”. And then Stranger Things ends, and suddenly she is an adult again, with “the suffering that comes with growing up, when our child’s eyes, which could see (and believe in) the invisible, lose the spark, and we leave the epic adventures of our fantasy life for the ordinary of reality”.

As I remember my sadness, I can understand the people pursuing – hoping for, dreaming of – one more episode. Dreaming that the story is not finished, that the characters are still alive in the Duffer Brothers’ minds. Unfortunately, this is also not true. Yes, it is a disappointment, a painful emotion that is yet so important for growing up. 

Indeed, I believe that this tension between fantasy and disappointment that I felt while watching Stranger Things is what keeps us alive and creative. While I was watching, I could almost believe it was real –fleetingly, ambivalently, romantically, knowingly and unknowingly, consciously and unconsciously, fluctuating between my inner world and the real world– I almost could.  And then, at the end of every episode, every season, and now at the end of the story, I experienced the disappointment that comes when the bubble bursts. But isn’t this disappointment, as sad as it is, better than never experiencing these emotions? It is like when I wake up from a wonderful dream. This rude awakening is a price that I am happy to pay for the emotional aliveness that I feel when I completely yield to my imagination.

Mike leaving the basement and closing the door. Screenshot from Netflix, Stranger Things, Series 5, Episode 8

By coincidence – or maybe not; as both the psychoanalyst Carl Jung and Kung Fu Panda’s Grand Master Oogway say, there are no coincidences – I am reading The Book of Dust, the follow-up trilogy after His Dark Materials. The story, arguably so similar to Stranger Things, follows a young girl hero who saves the universe while travelling between worlds and meeting talking bear-kings and flying witches who can live for thousands of years. In this reality, humans have animal-shaped demons, a magic knife can cut between dimensions, gryphons dominate the sky, and a sentient dust permeates the universe.

And so, here is my advice for all of you, fellow Stranger Things mourners. Stop wasting time and energy fantasising about impossible scenarios where a new mysterious episode is lingering in the darkness. Instead, embrace reality.

Well, embrace a reality. Embrace a new reality.

For me, at the moment, that reality is the Book of Dust.