By Pax Bilinski / Opinion & News editor
If you’ve been online in the past month or two, you’ve heard about season five of Stranger Things. Volume One and Volume Two were separated by a month, leaving watchers, including myself, curious about how the show was going to end after such a strong start.
However, the second volume was a major letdown. The writing got significantly worse and had so many more plot holes than Volume One, and even in previous seasons.
Recently, a documentary about the creation of season five was released and it confirmed many suspicions that the watchers had.
In the documentary, when the Duffer Brothers are showing their Google Doc with the season five script, you can see that there are three ChatGPT tabs open beside the open tab. The use of AI in the world’s most influential show of our time is honestly disappointing. They had a budget of around 480 million dollars and instead of using it on good writers, they put it all towards the outrageously inaccurate Mind Flayer in the finale.
On the topic of inaccuracy from past seasons, Eleven has been the main character for the past nearly ten years. Then, all of a sudden, Holly Wheeler and Will Byers are the main characters? Holly gets more screentime than both Will and Eleven in the entirety of the final season.
Will is also a main character alongside Eleven, but more in a “haunting the narrative” way, not in “I’m going to save the world for the tenth time” way. Introducing his powers was cool, but why did he suddenly gain them? Realizing he was gay? It just seemed off. He had always been the mysterious cause for the Upside Down, with his disappearance causing the whole show to kick off, but he had always been just that, a cause. He wasn’t ever portrayed as a hero, Eleven always had been. Even in the series finale, Eleven was the hero. So why did Will need powers?
While I enjoyed Holly’s plots, they felt so extra and unnecessary. Yes, Max being able to leave “Camazotz” with her help is important, but that should’ve been held in less episodes, or maybe been in longer episodes than what was put out. It felt rushed and unfinished, like the writers were grasping at straws trying to find a reason for Max to be included in the end.
On the topic of Max, it doesn’t make sense to me how she was able to just walk around after being in a coma for two years. She was in a wheelchair for maybe five minutes and then was fine. How would she have graduated on time after two years? It simply isn’t plausible. Not to mention, she could suddenly see after going blind in the previous season with no explanation.
The graduation colors are another inconsistency. The pamphlet Ted Wheeler is holding has a green hat on it while they’re in orange uniforms. Orange was a taboo color in the 80’s because of its relation to prisoners. A small town in Indiana would not allow anything taboo to be shown like that.
In a popular internet theory, lovingly titled ConformityGate, netizens believed that the orange graduation robes represented the characters being held prisoner in Vecna’s mind. ConformityGate was rooted in fixing the inconsistencies and “coincidences” within the show, it was also named that way because the ending fell into conformist ideas in media and deviated from the otherwise rebellious and outcast-driven story. Dustin, in his graduation speech, talks about conformity, and Lucas looks directly at the camera in an earlier scene and says “I don’t believe in coincidences, not anymore.” There are so many examples proving that the world of Stranger Things is trapped inside Vecna’s mind that it is truly mind-boggling how the Duffer Brothers did nothing with it.
The series finale could’ve gone down as the most insane end-of-series turnaround in our generation. The entire internet was convinced that ConformityGate was real, with the official Stranger Things social media accounts, as well as the actors, feeding into this mass delusion. As the days ticked by and every theory revolving around an episode coming out after the finale was debunked, the fans became more disappointed and angry at the Duffer Brothers and Netflix.