Review: Stranger Things, "The Rightside Up" | Season 5, Episode 8
"How do we know it's true?" / "We don't."
Happy New Year, Episodic Medium subscribers. Netflix has gifted us a true TV—and cinema—event to begin 2026, and so here's a preview of Lily's take on the finale of Stranger Things. To keep reading and follow along with all of our reviews this year, you can get 10% off a yearly subscription at the link below. You can also become a monthly subscriber, but that's just not as good a deal, I promise.
It's 10:45 a.m. on the first day of 2026, and I have arrived at the big, grimy AMC at the world's first modern shopping mall to watch Stranger Things' series finale in theaters. This screening, I know, is one of the last remnants of the much-eulogized American monoculture, and it is my solemn duty to observe it.
Due to a weird condition of AMC and Netflix's ongoing turf war (tied to guild rules), tickets to the screening are technically free with the purchase of a $20 concessions voucher, which means the line for popcorn and drinks, thick with teens in pajamas and exhausted parents in quarter-zips, stretches across the lobby to the doors to the snow-covered parking lot. Tensions are high: a dad gets into a screaming match with a woman who he thinks cut his place in line, then—after getting scolded by his wife and daughter—goes out to the parking lot to walk some laps.
In the theater with my armful of horrible concessions, I'm unnerved to find just how bad the seats we've gotten are; they're both right at the front and off-center, distorting the picture such that Steve Harrington's upsettingly wrinkled forehead will appear trapezoidal and King Kong-sized when we see him in close-up. Some kids near us are whining about their own seats, to which one of their parents snaps, "You know, we paid $80 for these. We could just watch this at home. You want to go home?" (Midway through the episode, they do, in fact, go home.) The theater plays ads for ten minutes past the advertised start time, one of which is a lengthy Target commercial starring Ted Wheeler. Another is the fucking AI-generated Coca-Cola ad. I get a throbbing headache from craning my neck two trailers in. The vibes, suffice it to say, are not great. I am ready to be a massive grouch about this episode.
And I am, for a while. There's no real scene-setting for the final episode; we just jump right back into our ragtag band of twenty to thirty protagonists' grand scheme from "The Bridge" in media res. For much of the episode, it feels like the Duffers are content to remind us that we're watching event television simply by showing us endless snippets of things that have already happened in the show; I write clip show in my notes no less than four times, only stopping when my pen dies partway through the screening. Even moments that should have felt appropriately grand in scale, like Joyce chopping Vecna's head off like she was the freakin' Green Knight, were severely undercut by the show not trusting us to remember the many reasons our heroes hate our villains. As the gang slogs across the still pretty cheap-looking Abyss and my headache gets worse, I'm writing a version of this essay in my head about the sad spectacle of a show that only has nostalgia left to offer its viewers.
But I soon find I'm being unfair. Stranger Things, despite it all, still has a heart.
