Been trying to articulate why I haven't cared much for Stranger Things seasons 4 and 5 and this says it pretty well. It's also applicable to so many television shows and films in the modern era.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2026/01/15/stranger-things-how-vecna-ruined-netflix-hit/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2026/01/15/stranger-things-how-vecna-ruined-netflix-hit/
Quote:The Stranger Things Feature Creep
But with great success comes feature creep. The simple story had to be expanded, because the Duffer Brothers needed another season and then another season, and Netflix loved the attention and success of this surprise hit. The cast ballooned, adding more kids and more teens and more adults, some of whom were great characters like Max and Billy and Murray, but the cast kept piling up like bodies for a Mind Flayer. And other than one heroic guest star bucket-kicking per season, nobody else died (and the show’s best death, Jim Hopper’s heroic season 3 sacrifice, was a fake-out).
As the cast grew, so did the scope of the series – and its problems. All this expansion led to cracks in the foundation. Now we didn’t just have one terrifying monster lurking in the shadows, we had demodogs, which were less frightening but more plentiful. The scariness of the first season began to leak out around the edges. Then demo bats for poor Eddie. (Though all these minor monsters were mysteriously missing for the big Mind Flayer/Vecna showdown in Season 5).
The Mind Flayer was certainly a fascinating monster, and Season 3 did a lot of neat things with it, but the story just kept getting bigger and more complicated as it shifted away from its premise – scary monster from another dimension capturing a young boy – and became something more epic in scope and messier in execution. That scary monster was just a minor bad guy, we later learned, in service of an even bigger and more deadly master.
Of course, Season 3 was also not the end of the show, so in order to keep going, the Duffer Brothers had to create an even bigger, scarier and more diabolical villain in Season 4. This is when the show truly went off the rails. Perhaps Stranger Things should have ended after Season 1, which was perfect, but if it had to continue, the creative choices in Season 4 led directly to the creative bankruptcy of Season 5. And the show just kept runnin’ up that hill until it ran out of anything even remotely resembling a good idea, let alone a finished script.
How Vecna Ruined ‘Stranger Things’
The character who bears the most responsibility for the decline of Stranger Things is, of course, Vecna / aka #001 /aka Henry Creel. Creel fundamentally changed everything about the story we thought we knew, and none of it for the better. Now, all the bad things that happened because of the Hawkins Lab experiments were actually Henry’s doing. Indeed, Eleven and the children, we discover, were merely byproducts of Henry’s blood transfusions. In Season 5, we learn that his blood is itself the byproduct of a space rock that he finds in a mine, in a briefcase belonging to some random guy he ends up killing.
To make all of this work, the show’s writers had to change the very nature of Eleven, the Upside Down and the Hawkins Labs. Eleven didn’t actually open the rift to the Upside Down at all. Dr. Brenner was behind that, and he created the Upside Down as a wormhole to connect to another planet that our heroes dub “The Abyss.” Will, meanwhile, wasn’t captured by a scary monster that snuck into our world from a place nightmarish and inexplicable. He was chosen by Vecna because he was “weak” and Vecna needed kids to, um, power the Mind Flayer to crash-land The Abyss through the Upside Down into Earth . . . .
As you can see, at this point the elegance and simplicity of Season 1 have been erased entirely and replaced by a convoluted and goofy plot that goes in a million directions at once, made much worse by the fact that our cast of heroes has expanded into an impossible logistical disaster. The unwieldiness of the story is only matched by the unwieldiness of its burgeoning cast. Even with increasingly long episodes, few of the remaining characters are given a chance to really grow or shine, with Season 5 sidelining even characters like Eleven – while Holly, of all people, becomes one of Season 5’s core protagonists
This is the very definition of feature creep, or scope creep. Worldbuilding gone wild. This is what happens when you take a great story and instead of letting it end organically, you churn out more content for content’s sake. Bigger content. Just not better content. Vecna changed the arc of Stranger Things, but also the vibe. What was once a story about mysterious horrors from beyond became something more personal, a Dark Lord’s vendetta, but they had to retcon past seasons to make it work.
Vecna was not planned as the series Big Bad from the beginning. There is no whiff of him in Season 1, and Season 5’s CGI-laden bits, with a de-aged Will being dragged by the demogorgon to Vecna, just cheapen the events of Season 1.
1 user liked this post: