The Moment
The final chapter of Stranger Things, titled Chapter Eight: The Rightside Up, dropped on Netflix on New Year’s Eve in the US, rolling into the very first hours of 2026 in the UK. Within hours, the monsters were dead, the portal was closed, and the internet was on fire.
Yes, the show wrapped up the decades-long war for Hawkins. But on X, formerly known as Twitter, a different battle broke out: fans accusing the finale of being too woke, too preachy, and too far from the show they fell in love with back in 2016.
Some angry viewers threw around words like trash, woke, predictable and called Season 5 the worst of the series, complaining it took years to produce what they saw as agenda over story. A chunk of the outrage zeroed in on two big moments: Will Byers finally coming out, and Nancy Wheeler suddenly turning into an action-movie sharpshooter.
Will’s long-awaited speech about his sexuality arrives right before the final showdown. He gathers the group, lists what they share, then finally says he does not like girls. The scene ends in a big group hug, even as the literal fate of the world is hanging in the balance. Some viewers felt the timing undercut the tension, others thought it was a cathartic payoff years in the making.
Nancy, meanwhile, climbs on top of a truck in a military compound, picks up an assault rifle, and takes out multiple armed soldiers in watchtowers. Critics online mocked it as a forced girl-boss moment and said it did not match her history as a driven but very human investigative journalist.
All of that spilled into the ratings. According to Rotten Tomatoes’ public audience score, the show’s Season 5 Popcornmeter dropped into the mid-50s after a wave of half-star and one-star reviews, with some fans calling it straight-up review bombing while others insisted the backlash was deserved.
At the same time, plenty of viewers were devastated that it is over and praised the finale as near-perfect TV. Some called it the strongest storytelling of the series, lauding the emotional arcs, the expanded mythology of the Upside Down, and standout performances from the now-grown core cast, especially Caleb McLaughlin, Sadie Sink, and Gaten Matarazzo.
The Take
Let me be blunt: we are not really arguing about guns and monsters here. We are arguing about feelings, politics, and what people think Stranger Things is supposed to be.
Every huge genre show now seems to hit the same cultural tripwire. The minute a queer character steps fully into the spotlight, or a woman gets an action-hero moment that could have gone to a man in 1986, out comes the word woke like it is a smoke alarm. Sometimes that alarm is reacting to clumsy writing. Sometimes it is reacting to… the existence of certain characters at all.
In this case, the complaints are doing double duty. On one side, you have viewers who genuinely feel Will’s coming-out scene is awkwardly placed. Is it a little wild to pause the end of the world for a heart-to-heart? Sure. Stranger Things has always been sentimental; now it is openly sentimental and explicitly queer, and that is where some people hit their limit.
On the other side, calling a character’s sexuality reveal a woke agenda in a show that has hinted at it for seasons feels a bit like ordering a pepperoni pizza and then being furious there is… pepperoni on it. Will struggling with identity has been baked into this story for years. Paying that off in the finale is not a stunt; it is follow-through.
Nancy’s Rambo moment is a different issue. Stranger Things has always played fast and loose with realism. This is a universe where kids on bikes outmaneuver shadow monsters and government agents. The show has let Steve, Hopper, and others do wildly implausible action beats for five seasons. Is it suddenly unbelievable when Nancy does it? Or is the problem that the execution felt like movie logic turned up a notch too high at the exact moment viewers were already feeling overloaded?
What we are really seeing is a pileup: long delays between seasons, sky-high expectations, a finale trying to juggle horror, sci-fi, 80s nostalgia, social themes, and fan service all at once. That is a lot of plates to keep spinning. When even one wobbles, the crowd is ready to shout woke as a catch-all complaint for anything they do not like.
Meanwhile, the people calling this the best season yet are watching a different show entirely. They are here for growth, closure, and a Hawkins that looks a little more like the real world, where teen boys can be gay, girls can be heroic, and emotional honesty is as important as another CGI monster fight.
Both camps exist. But only one of them seems convinced that a single coming-out speech somehow ruined a decade-long pop-culture phenomenon.
Receipts
Confirmed
- The Stranger Things series finale, Chapter Eight: The Rightside Up, was released on Netflix on December 31 in the US, rolling into January 1 in the UK, according to Netflix’s own release schedule.
- The finale features Will Byers explicitly coming out to his friends in a group scene before the final battle, and a sequence where Nancy Wheeler uses an assault rifle to take down multiple armed soldiers, as shown in the episode itself.
- Audience ratings for Season 5 on Rotten Tomatoes’ Popcornmeter dropped into the mid-50 percent range after a wave of low-star user reviews, according to the site’s publicly visible score on January 1, 2026.
- Social media posts on X, formerly Twitter, show a mix of reactions, including users calling the season woke and trash and others defending it as the best season yet, based on posts widely shared and cited in recent coverage.
- Will’s sexuality has been a long-running thread in the series, with earlier seasons implying his struggle with attraction and identity before his explicit coming out in the final season.
Unverified / Opinion
- Claims that the season has been deliberately review-bombed are opinions from viewers; there is no official confirmation of organized campaigns, only visible clusters of low user scores.
- Accusations that the writers crammed in a woke agenda or created scenes purely to push politics are interpretations, not documented statements from the creators.
- Arguments that Nancy’s action scenes are unrealistic or out of character are fan judgments about tone and continuity, not factual errors.
Backstory (For Casual Readers)
If you have only dipped in and out of Hawkins over the years, here is the quick refresher. Stranger Things launched in 2016 and follows a group of kids in 1980s Indiana as they uncover a parallel dimension called the Upside Down, full of monsters and sinister government experiments. It turned its young cast, including Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, and others, into stars and helped cement Netflix’s reputation for big, bingeable event TV.
The show blends Spielberg-style wonder, Stephen King horror, and a heavy dose of 80s nostalgia. Across its first four seasons, it scored high with critics and audiences alike, pulling in awards buzz and massive global fandom. Season 5 was billed as the final chapter, delayed by production schedules and strikes, and arrived with almost impossible expectations: wrap the story, grow the characters up, and still feel like the scrappy little horror show that started with kids on BMX bikes chasing a missing friend.
What’s Next
The televised story in Hawkins is done, but the Stranger Things universe is not going anywhere. Netflix has already moved ahead with expansion projects, including a stage play set in the same world and an animated spin-off series, so the emotional (and online) hangover from this finale will bleed straight into whatever comes next.
In the near term, expect more think pieces, more YouTube breakdowns of every finale scene, and a long tail of debate as latecomers finally catch up on Season 5. Awards-season chatter will almost certainly circle the cast, especially the actors whose characters carry the show’s heaviest emotional beats in the final episodes.
The bigger question is what lesson Hollywood takes from this finale. Do studios decide that centering queer storylines and female heroics in nostalgia-fueled blockbusters is too risky because a loud minority shouts woke online? Or do they look past the noise to the millions who watched, cried, and quietly accepted that the kids from Hawkins grew up, and the show grew up with them?
However you felt about the last ride through the Upside Down, Stranger Things just gave us a tidy snapshot of the modern TV moment: the story on screen, and the even messier one playing out in the comments.
Sources
- Netflix, Stranger Things Season 5 episode listing and release timing, accessed January 1, 2026.
- Rotten Tomatoes, Stranger Things Season 5 audience Popcornmeter score, accessed January 1, 2026.
- Fan reactions compiled from public posts on X (formerly Twitter), December 31, 2025 – January 1, 2026.
Question for you: Did the Stranger Things finale genuinely go off the rails for you, or do you think the woke backlash says more about the audience than the show?
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