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It changed. The eerie and life threatening Mirror Realm where every false step could lead to the end of your existence, the frightening silhouette in the sky – not only seen in the Shadow World, but also on tape accidentally recorded by a VCR camera and the mysterious, top secret government operations not even known by other government agencies. They’re gone. They’re gone like the kids who were fighting against a hand full of bad guys, the chief of police of a small suburban town who uncovered a conspiracy involving the vanishing of a young boy and the teenagers who were unknowingly hunting a monster that wasn’t from this world. As I said, it changed.

And I think this was inevitable. The Duffer Bros had to do it like they did. Of course there’re character developments I really don’t get; what happened to Jim Hopper? In the first season he was the broken man, that got back on track, because he now had something to fight for. In the second season he got overprotective of Eleven – I get that; It makes sense. But what’s his deal in season 3 and 5? First he became an angry, toxic macho and later a mad man on a suicide mission. Why wasn’t his character not allowed to learn from his failure and work on his flaws? Maybe it’s because we have too many characters and not enough room for their development.

Overall, there’s too much. To dissect a world is to destroy it’s mystery. Don’t get me wrong – I’m fine with how it is explained. I was worried about the end, about Vecna, about the Upside Down. But I’m so glad, it’s not just Henry/Vecna/One. An otherworldly entity like the Mind Flyer is so much more frightening, than any angry-sad teenager could be. And I’m also relieved, that we didn’t get a Vader ending for Henry; he plainly wouldn’t deserve that (and Vader didn’t too).

So I do have problems with how things went. But for me the fly is too small for not just flicking it out of the ointment. Stranger Things was the single most influential tv show on my life by opening a door to the past – a past I’ve never witnessed as a 17 y/o back in 2016. But I was born early enough to remember a time, where we had no Internet at home, took photos on film and videos on VCR. I remember a time where the computer was turned off most of the time, where we engaged with the world outside when leaving the house and talked to strangers instead of listening to podcasts the whole day. I know I’m romanticising and the adults did sit in the metro with the newspaper covering their faces, so no one will talk to them. But as tinted as my glasses are – I’m pretty sure thirty or forty years from now nobody will romanticise the time and how we interacted with each other today. At least I hope we don’t!

Also it inspired me as an amateur writer, hobbyist film maker and wannabe interior designer – or, as I call it, set decorator (the set being my apartment). I won’t go into detail about the latter. It’s not really Stranger Things directly that inspires my creative work but the source material that inspired Stranger Things. Yes, there are great films getting released every year, no doubt about it. But what happened to family films? Films like E.T., The Neverending Story, The Goonies, Back to the Future, Indiana Jones and the Star Wars Trilogy? Those films have a specific magic to them, that is unmatched by almost every film that released in the past ten years. Even Stranger Things itself couldn’t quite replicate this feeling; they got close, though. I agree – realism does kill art. I wanna see a misty, poorly (with blue moonshine) lit house, when the friends group broke in to investigate a spooky mystery. I don’t care about the perfectly lit right eyebrow captured in 4K.

To wrap it up (because it needs to be): Stranger Things was a great show. Not the best, but still really good. Will I watch it again? Yes. Of course. I’ve watched the every episode, every time a first trailer for the next season got released and a couple times in between. I love the music, I love the fashion, I love the decor. I love the romanticised version of the 1980s. And I choose to create a world around me, that is inspired by it. Because as Ferris Bueller once said: „Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.“ And I think sometimes you should also look back, to see what we had, forgot about and could be taken from us, when it sinks into oblivion.