Sadie Sink as Max Mayfield and Nell Fisher as Holly Wheeler in the fifth season of Stranger Things, which wraps up with high fan expectations on Dec. 31.COURTESY OF NETFLIX/Netflix
The final episodes of Stranger Things arrive on Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve, and in some corners of the internet, fans are worried.
On the Stranger Things Reddit board, which has nearly 2.5 million weekly visitors, fans post musings such as “Team Steve or Team Jonathan?” and who is “the one character whose death would shatter you the most?” Alongside this speculation is the biggest question of them all: Will Stranger Things end well?
Stranger Things Season 5 starts off as strong as ever, with plenty of action and high stakes
“I hope the Duffers stick the landing and don’t do another Game of Thrones,” one Reddit poster wrote, referencing the wildly popular fantasy saga notorious for its divisive finale. Below the post, hundreds of commenters weighed in on other show endings that angered them most. The speculative fiction genre is filled with series endings that left fans unsatisfied, including Lost, The 100, The Umbrella Academy, The Walking Dead and Westworld.
Fan favourite Lost divided viewers with its season finale, which included the death of main character Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox).Mario Perez/Supplied
More recent entries in the genre, such as Yellowjackets, Severance and newbie Pluribus, have viewers fretting over how creators will untangle mysteries and work out tricky plot lines by the end.
Nalo Hopkinson, the Vancouver-based author of the award-winning, postapocalyptic novel Brown Girl in the Ring, says that the roots of many of these fandoms are in the comic, sci-fi and fantasy convention worlds – communities that have grown accustomed to willing things to happen through the power of devotion to their favourite books, shows or movies.
“In the beginning, these books weren’t given a lot of respect, so people made forums to be able to talk to each other about the literature that they loved that nobody else did,” says Hopkinson. “Science fiction and fantasy conventions popped up, and they were essentially reader-run.”
One of the joys of fan conventions is that you can meet your favourite creators and let them know what you think about their shows. Once the Internet arrived, “suddenly we can talk across countries. You realize it’s not just you and your best friend, there are thousands of you.”
In the 1960s, Star Trek fans organized letter-writing campaigns to bring back the show after its cancellation. In the early 2000s, Firefly fans flooded Fox with petitions, e-mails and letters, and bought DVDs in such numbers that Universal Pictures funded a movie, Serenity, to conclude the show. Other programs such as Roswell, Quantum Leap and Farscape were saved, in part, by fan action.
Elaine Chang, an associate professor specializing in film and media cultures at the University of Guelph and a Stranger Things fan, says one reason fans may feel they have control over this show in particular is that it’s rooted in role-playing games. The kids, or the Party, play Dungeons & Dragons in Stranger Things – a pastime that is all about interactivity. She notes that The Last of Us, another popular speculative fiction series that drew the ire of fans in its second season, is based on a video game. “There’s a way in which it’s like you make up the story as you go along and the investment is more intense,” she says.
Since many shows have large time gaps between seasons, social media steps in to “fill in those gaps” and keep the passion alive even when a show is on hiatus. Chang expects it’s a fine line for creators to give fans what they want while not pandering. “I think the question for creators is how to keep these very knowledgeable and invested fans guessing,” she says. “You want them to feel satisfied, but it’s a balancing act between what they might expect and what they would never have expected.”
After all, a bad ending can taint the entire experience of watching a show.
Tatiana Maslany starred in Orphan Black, a Canadian sci-fi show that ran for five seasons. It had an active fan base known as the Clone Club.The Canadian Press
John Fawcett felt the weight of fan expectations as the co-creator of the Canadian sci-fi thriller series Orphan Black, which first aired in 2013 and ran for five seasons. The show’s fan base, a.k.a. Clone Club (named after the multiple clones portrayed by Emmy-winning actor Tatiana Maslany), was hyper-engaged and active on social media, which Fawcett says was “very intense, very exciting” and not something he and co-creator Graeme Manson were expecting.
“There was this intense feeling of ownership,” Fawcett says. “People were really happy to express what they liked and what they didn’t like, and what they expected and what they didn’t want.”
While Fawcett says he and his co-creator largely wrote plot points based on instinct and intuition, fan reaction did sometimes have an impact. “I can’t say that we didn’t read Twitter comments and weren’t sometimes swayed by ideas and were like, ‘Oh, that’s not a bad idea.’”
But knowing fans were so invested made Fawcett want to keep surprising them. “It has to be a roller coaster,” he says. “We wanted to make that kind of show where you’re up at 3 a.m., and you’ve just finished an episode, and you have to work the next day but you can’t not watch the next episode.”
Fawcett says there was one instance where fan anger reached a new level: when the character Delphine, who was the partner of Cosima, one of the main clones on the show, was shot off-screen and presumed dead in Season 4. Fans felt the creators had fallen into the “bury your gays” trope, where beloved LGBTQ+ characters seem to always be killed off in TV shows and movies.
“That was a brutal response. We had no clue that we had just fallen into a trope, into something that people just hated so much,” Fawcett says. “When that went down, that definitely made us feel like we had to be a little bit more in tune with the fans.” (Delphine returned to the show, very much alive, in Season 5.)
Fawcett says he has learned something important about fan expectations and series endings: “With Orphan Black, we wanted to make a kaleidoscopic rabbit-hole mystery thriller that always ended on a cliffhanger,” he says. But by the end of Season 2, Fawcett and Manson started to realize what fans really cared about “was the characters that Tatiana created. There had to be an ending that was somewhat satisfactory with regards to the plot, but the most important thing was landing the ship with some really strong emotional closure.”
They created what he sees as a “hopeful, emotional send-off” and it was generally well received by fans.
Jamie Campbell Bower as Vecna in Stranger Things.Courtesy of Netflix/Netflix
As for Stranger Things, the Duffer Brothers recently told Britain’s weekly Radio Times that they had been studying their favourite finales, including Six Feet Under and Breaking Bad, to figure out what worked well. “There are probably more whiffs and misses than there are people that have stuck the landing, because I think it’s hard when you’ve been running for a long time – there are so many expectations,” said Ross Duffer.
Matt Duffer added: “We want it to feel very much in line with the show and the endings for each of the characters to feel inevitable.”
Chang says while she always feels nervous for series endings, she feels in good hands with the Duffers. She doesn’t think the problems that plagued shows such as Lost (which didn’t tie up loose ends) and Westworld (which became too convoluted) will arise here.
“All I can say is, I can’t wait.”