One of the more befuddling elements of the “Stranger Things 5” finale, which also served as the finale for the entire series, was the fact that – spoiler alert! – when our band of plucky heroes reaches the nightmare world of The Abyss there aren’t any of the monsters we’ve come to know and love throughout the series.
No Demogorgons. No Demodogs (which took down Sean Astin’s fan-favorite character Bob). No Demobats (who offed Eddie in Season 4, an event that reverberates through the new season). No new monsters, which would have been cool and very appropriate. (We’re sure the consumer products folks at Netflix would have been thrilled too.)
Instead, The Abyss was just a vast, empty wasteland, save for Vecna’s (Jamie Campbell Bower) Pain Tree, which was revealed to be the ultimate iteration of the Mind Flayer, a character that has been threatening our characters since Season 2. What’s even weirder is that, earlier in the season, it was explained that all the creatures in the Upside Down originated on this other world.
Many viewers found this to be an odd decision; there were countless memes on social media about where the Demogorgons were during the big battle with the Mind Flayer.
And Ross and Matt Duffer, creators of “Stranger Things,” have shrugged off the complaints in the post-finale press tour, comparing the gang’s attack to “Lord of the Rings” and saying that Vecna simply didn’t expect that the kids would confront him head-on. They said that they once considered a sequence where the kids stumble upon a nest of Demogorgon eggs, a la “Aliens” (a key touchstone for this season, look no further than Nancy Wheeler’s Linda Hamilton-ish transition to gun-toting action hero) but decided against it. It just wasn’t in the cards, is the general vibe.
But “One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things 5,” a new documentary that has just premiered on Netflix, does offer an alternate narrative, as one writer in the “Stranger Things 5” writers room brings up the idea. We don’t hear the Duffer brothers’ response, but it’s proof that more monsters in the Abyss were at least discussed. Clearly, it was a real possibility.
Not only does this walk back some of the narrative that the Duffers have put forward over the past few weeks, since the finale streamed on Netflix and played in theaters beginning on New Year’s Eve, but it also serves as one of the more honest moments of the documentary, which is often entertaining but rarely illuminating.
Throughout the feature-length documentary, the Duffers are presented as anxious, at times anguished, over their inability to crystallize the finale script, well into production of the season. When scheduling forces them to shoot a scene from the finale earlier in production, they look particularly unsettled, worried that the scene won’t fit into what they will eventually write. They always knew that the final scene of the finale would be in the basement of the Wheeler house, with the kids playing Dungeons & Dragons one final time and Mike weaving his story of where they’re all headed and what could have happened to Eleven. And when you think about the finale, for all its super-sized, effects-laden glory, it’s the quiet moments of the epilogue that land the loudest. Still, it would have been nice to have a few more monsters.
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