Goodbye, Hawkins

I finished the Stranger Things finale yesterday, and I still don't quite know what to do with myself. It's hard to imagine how anyone who has been watching this show for ten years, or even just a few seasons, is supposed to walk away from an ending like this. I don't know if it's because I recognized so much of myself in what happened on screen, or because I simply refuse to accept that Hawkins is over.

I grew up alongside this cast in a strange, parallel way. I'm roughly the same age as the party, their faces changing in real time the way mine did, their voices dropping, their haircuts shifting within the years, until suddenly the "kids" are all in their twenties, and soon I will be too.

I got to be there for every one of their milestones with a kind of intimacy you rarely get with fiction. I watched El go from a girl who could barely speak to one who can finally say "I love you too" without flinching. I watched Lucas, once destined to be the town's basketball star, choose instead to stay in Hawkins and live an unremarkable, peaceful life. I watched Dustin, the group's nerdy glue, flip off his own principal at graduation, a gift to Eddie's memory, unafraid of the consequences or what anyone else thought of him, for maybe the first time. I watched Max, who once needed a Kate Bush song just to survive her own mind, finally find her person, stepping onto solid ground. I watched Will, who spent so much of the show hating some quiet part of himself, find a place, a whole new city, where he is finally free to love and be loved exactly as he is. And I watched Mike, the one who used to lead all of them into every basement adventure, become one of only two people who chose to keep their roots in Hawkins. I was there for all of it, too specifically, too closely, for every one of their turning points, every victory, every heartbreak.

So watching them age from kids hiding in a basement to adults walking out of it has felt less like following a story and more like living beside one. And now that their lives continue off screen, I have no way of following them any further. It's a strange kind of grief, mourning people who technically got their happy ending.

There's a theory going around that I can't stop thinking about, that Mike might be the one narrating the whole show, that everything we've watched for five seasons is filtered through him, remembered and told by him after the fact. It would explain something I haven't realized before, that every other character's arc is fundamentally about moving towards happiness and growth. Will finds belonging. Max finds love and anchor. Dustin finds courage. Lucas finds peace. But Mike doesn't get an arc like that. If he has one at all, it's the opposite: a slow, steady erosion. It starts with Will vanishing in season one, and ends seasons later, with catastrophe landing on his own family. He's the only one of them who spends the whole show losing, not gaining. And maybe that's exactly why we never get inside his head the way we do with everyone else's, because he's positioned as the storyteller, the god's eye view looking down at everyone else's healing. He can write beautifully about what happened to all of them. He just can't write about what's happening in him, because only he knows how much it actually costs.

And then there's that final image, the one I don't think I'll forget the feeling for a while: the last of this generation walking out of that cluttered, familiar basement, the site of countless campaigns, countless nights of pizza and dice and plans to save the world, and closing the door behind them. Underneath, a new, younger group moves in to take their place, picking up the same game, continuing a story that was never really about the game at all. Mike is the last one to leave. He shuts the door. And we, the audience, are left on the wrong side of it, watching from outside as the legend passes to somebody else, feeling like our own childhoods just got closed off along with theirs. It's such a precise, devastating piece of staging, because it's not really about Dungeons & Dragons continuing. It's Hawkins itself becoming a memory instead of a place, something they carry with them rather than something they can return to. There's a reason people keep comparing this show to Harry Potter for their generation, it's less about the monsters and more about realizing, all at once, that the door to that particular childhood has quietly closed, and you weren't ready for it either.

Maybe that's the whole point the show was making, underneath all the Demogorgons and Cold War conspiracies, that growing up is a goodbye nobody announces in advance. It doesn't come with a scene, a speech, a moment you can point to later and say, that's when it ended. It just happens. A friend stops texting back, a group chat goes quiet, a person you once trusted with everything becomes someone you check in with twice a year, if that. That's honestly the part of this ending that stings the most, not that these characters are becoming adults, but that becoming an adult usually means losing your people without ever getting the closure this show insists on giving its characters. Real life rarely lets you know it's the last time. Real friendships mostly don't get a montage. They erode, they drift, and one day you realize with a start that you haven't spoken to someone in years and didn't consciously choose that, it simply happened while you were busy living somewhere else.

Which is maybe why the finale's imperfections don't bother me as much as they probably should. Yes, the ending might feel rushed in places. Yes, some of the plot resolved a little too neatly, a little too fast, given everything it was supposed to be carrying. But then there's that scene, a year later, on a rooftop. The four of them, all grown, meeting up again, and Robin through tears just saying, I really missed you guys. That's the moment the whole show earned its ending for me, imperfections and all. Nancy and Jonathan finally stop performing a relationship that had quietly become a habit rather than a choice, and go their separate ways gently and honestly. Steve is scraping together money instead of chasing glory. Someone becomes a coach, someone becomes a journalist, someone leaves to chase a director's dream far from home. They promise to meet up once a month, and even as they say it, you can feel the show quietly acknowledging that promises like that rarely survive real jobs and real rent and real distance. Nancy starting her career, Jonathan worrying about a New York lease, Steve counting every dollar toward a future that has nothing to do with Hawkins anymore. It's not naive about how friendships fade. It just insists, gently, that even if the monthly reunions eventually stop happening, what these people were to each other will never be replaceable. You can make new friends your whole life and never find people who fought, literally, for their lives and for each other the way this group did. That kind of bond is closer to what soldiers describe than what most of us mean by friendship. Nothing replaces it. Nothing has to. It just has to be remembered.

There's one more thing about the final battle I keep turning over. A lot of people online felt the Mind Flayer went down too easily for a threat that had haunted this town for five seasons. But I don't think that's a flaw, I think it's the point, just not in the literal sense. The show isn't saying that real monsters can be defeated by telling the truth, that would be absurd. What it's saying, I think, is that the real monster was never only outside of them. The Mind Flayer and Vecna fed on fear, on shame, fed on everything left unspoken and buried for their power, which means the show was always using them as a kind of externalized metaphor for the parts of ourselves we refuse to face. Will spent years hating a piece of who he was. Henry became something monstrous specifically because he never learned how to survive his own difference without turning it into rage. And the walls between all of these characters, the secrets, the performances, the things they wouldn't admit even to the people closest to them, those were their own private Upside Downs, dragging them down quietly, the same way the real one dragged down Hawkins. So when everyone finally starts telling the truth, when Will comes out, when the group stops pretending everything is fine, and when Henry, however briefly, faces the fear that made him dangerous, they begin tearing down the walls between themselves and others, as well as the walls within themselves. That's what allows them to stop quietly hurting each other out of fear, or pride, or a kind of unconscious self-righteousness that comes from never confronting what you're actually afraid of. Only once that happens can anyone actually grow. While inside the show, every act of self acceptance was already quietly draining the monster before the final fight even started. The show is admitting that the hardest fight was never the one with brute force. It was the one nobody could physically see.

I didn't start watching this show back in 2016, I came to it in 2022, so I never lived through it season by season the way some people did. But going back to the beginning now, after everything, you can feel how different that world was. 2016 had a particular kind of sound to it, bright, synth heavy, unafraid, the kind of soundtrack that assumes the future is something to run toward. It was a time that still believed, more or less, that things trended upward, that tomorrow would look roughly like today, only slightly better, slightly bigger, slightly more connected. Nobody watching that first season could have known what the next decade actually held. Then came the years none of us were prepared for, a pandemic that shut entire countries down, quarantines that, in some places, weren't so different from the one soldiers threw around Hawkins in this final season, streets emptied out the way Hawkins' streets are emptied out on screen. Some people made it through those years mostly intact. Others didn't. I think about the cars, the ones left behind in parking lots outside hospitals, offices, airports, belonging to people who never made it to come back for them, sitting there for months, sometimes years, gathering dust and leaves and silence, until someone finally decided to move on and had them towed, the space pressure washed clean, like the owner had never even existed at all. That image has stayed with me more than almost anything else from that period, how quietly a life can be erased from a physical space, how efficiently the world moves on to make room for whatever comes next. The sense that the future is automatically better than the past quietly disappeared for most people, maybe for good. None of that fits into a single sentence, and I don't think it should, it deserves to sit there, heavy and unresolved, the way it actually is.

Somewhere in all of this, the show manages to close a loop with the real world, one I didn't expect to feel so personally. The show started in the world of 2016, the one that still believed almost blindly in tomorrow. It ends now, in a very different world, the one that has since learned, the hard way, that tomorrow is slowly getting extremely unsettling, it means something different to me than it might to people who watched it from the very start.

I joined partway through the decade, in the middle of trying to figure out what was left standing after everything shifted. And this show, in its own strange way, gave me somewhere steady to return to while I did that, it gave me a group of people to grow up alongside with, even when my own life felt like it was moving too fast or not fast enough. It let me keep believing, the way its characters keep believing in each other right up to the last frame. I don't think I've fully walked out of that basement yet. Maybe I don't need to, not right away. But I'm grateful, genuinely, that this story chose to say a real goodbye, carefully, warmly, and deliberately, when real life so rarely offers us the same courtesy.

Goodbye, Hawkins.

And I believe.