What Stranger Things Means To Me

In the weeks since Stranger Things aired its final episode, there have been articles about the show’s cultural impact and its effect on the industry. This will be an article of a different sort. It’s a story about the impact of Stranger Things on just one person.

It’s a testament to how shows can shape the lives of people in ways that their creators never really think about. I seriously doubt anybody involved in the creation of the series will ever read this, but in the event they do…here’s how your work affected just one fan. This is just one story out of millions out there.

It was sometime around June of 2016 when I read a short news article stating Netflix was going to have a new show soon that deliberately mimicked the feel of an 80s movie. Interesting gimmick, I thought, but didn’t ponder it beyond that and went about my day. At the time Netflix had a small but growing library of original content and were mostly known for swiping the HBO “prestige and mature” format to some success. Their biggest show was House of Cards which they had to eventually bury the existence of due to the all-presence of Kevin Spacey throughout.

No one could have predicted what was about to go down. There had been buzzworthy streaming shows before….but there had never been a streaming HIT before. And it somehow went beyond a hit. There had never been anything that hit culturally like this was about to. Stranger Things was a one in a billion, overnight smash that instantly hit with EVERY demographic, EVERY age group, EVERY subculture. It held an extremely rare form of cross-generational appeal that was impossible to duplicate. It was Fox finding The Simpsons. It was Pixar finding Toy Story. It was THE show; the very thing that would define its parent company. Netflix has existed for ten years since and managed to establish hits, but they’ve never had another Stranger Things.

Matt and Ross Duffer had done the same thing George Lucas did with the pulp theater serials he grew up watching. They took the elements from these decades-old stories they loved, and remixed them in such a way as to make them feel fresh and new again. At some point past 1977, any sci-fi space movie idea stopped being compared to Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers and started being compared to Star Wars. And at some point past 2016, any story about kids having independent adventures on bikes stopped being compared to The Goonies and started being compared to Stranger Things. It had supplanted its inspiration.

The sun rose on July 16 to a different world than it had set on. The fervor was all over social media. There were people who latched onto those meager eight episodes and became obsessed with the show immediately. Me…I was a jaded viewer who had been burned before and tended to guard his heart.

After three days of inescapable chatter, I gave in and watched the first season. And I was very impressed — it was like nothing I’d ever seen before. This was the first show that I felt would not work anywhere but streaming. It wouldn’t be as effective on broadcast or cable, because the commercials would take you right out of the time warp – the show was deliberately shot to evoke the feel of an 80s movie and modern interruptions would dull that effect. It wasn’t just a great show, it had proven the worth of the format. But could it be done again?

A second season was announced almost immediately, and my immediate expectation was that it wouldn’t be as good as the first. Though there were loose ends, those eight episodes told a complete circular story and felt satisfying. Trying to pick it back up and artificially extend it could be a mistake, I thought.

I was thinking of Heroes. Ten years prior, it had caused a similar stir with a similarly large cast and a satisfying, closed first season. Then it got a second and immediately pooped its bed. Creator Tim Kring had intended to make an anthology but felt he had to keep the popular Season 1 characters, even though he didn’t know what to do with them anymore, and it just never recovered. I had been into the first season, and then….the thing let me down, man.

I was certain Stranger Things would do the same. When Season 2 premiered in October of 2017 I feared the worst, but instead it wound up impressing me again. They had figured out how to continue the narrative in a way that felt natural and not sequel-y. I was most impressed by the fact that Eleven had a complete arc already, they undid it, and it DIDN’T feel like a cheat. In fact they gave her the happy ending (for now) she was denied the first time and that felt satisfying. I didn’t know you could do that!

All that said…I was now certain the bed defecation would happen with Season 3. When you summed it up, the conflict in Season 2 was simply a bigger, larger version of the conflict in Season 1. You couldn’t do that kind of thing forever without becoming repetitive. Stranger Things exploded in the following year to become inescapable. Merch was everywhere and so were parodies and pop culture references on other shows. Everyone was in love with it. Me, I still guarded my heart.

It took longer than expected, but Season 3 finally arrived in the summer of 2019, after a full YEAR of promotional teases that began with a cheesy viral Scoops Ahoy ad that no one remembers (it was the first time anybody saw Robin too). The very second the season became available on the midnight of July 2 (Pacific time zone), I started it up. NOW the show’s gonna suck, right?

As Robin would mark via dry-erase board, it didn’t suck, it ruled. I unexpectedly LOVED this season and this show like I never had before. Its spirit of adventure and wonder was infectious. Its ability to create instantly appealing characters was envious – they made it look effortless! And that MALL — WOW! That frickin’ mall was glorious! I wanted to go there NOW! Why didn’t the complex that housed it keep that remodeling job in place? They passed up endless tourist money there.

That was the breaking point. After I saw Season 3, I was lost. My heart leapt right out of my chest and jumped into the TV.

…So the next thing the show immediately did was break it. The season ended with half the cast moving away from each other. What — that was it? No more adventures? No more fun? That was so sad! How gloomy was Season 4 going to be? I wanted everybody together one last time! I wanted one more season, set before this one!

That desire for ONE more adventure was strong enough that, as I laid there, I started dreaming one up. It got bigger and bigger and grander and louder until it became impossible to ignore…not that I didn’t try. My brain was screaming to me, “Start writing this stuff down! It’s good!”

“No, I don’t want to write a Stranger Things story. Go away,” I thought back.

The story refused to go away. It haunted my every waking moment and disrupted my sleep. It was the most intense brainstorm I’d ever experienced. “Okay FINE,” I said, “I’ll write it but I’ll use original characters.”
“NO,” my brain rebutted. “IT WON’T FEEL THE SAME. It has to be THOSE EXACT CHARACTERS.”

I had barely been able to sleep since this idea entered my head. My body was physically beating me up and holding me hostage to write. But the reason I was so reluctant was because I’d been through this before. Twenty years prior I was enough into Pokemon to create my own ongoing comic book based on it, and I discovered the perils of diving into the fandom that much.

I go into this in much greater detail in the longform article specifically about the series, but I discovered writing Pokemon stories made me grow attached to its characters. I got inside their heads and connected with them on an emotional level. Consequently, when things happened to them that didn’t match my own depictions –like, say, Ash and Misty NOT falling in love — it would bother me. When you’ve been writing a romance and really getting into it, really FEELING that love, and then in the canon universe it doesn’t actually happen, or it ends badly…well, it hurts.

I knew if I started writing Stranger Things stories, the same thing would happen. The show had a central relationship that was unavoidable. Despite their youth, Eleven and Mike were portrayed in a flawless, storybook romance as pure as snow. I recognized the trap. I knew what the Duffers had in mind. It had been obvious from day one. “You CANNOT write this story,” I told myself, “because you will get wrapped up in that romance and you KNOW DARN WELL this show ENDS WITH EL’S DEATH!”

So I had two options from this point: write the story and have the show wreck me someday, or not write it and never sleep again. I decided…I needed my sleep. I turned on the Cintiq and booted up Clip Studio.

What follows is a summary of the story that haunted my dreams. You can read the entire thing by heading to this link.

It opens on a stormy night in front of the still-under-construction Starcourt Mall, where an old lady is hauling a bag full of groceries to the bus stop. Two women who are acting and talking bizarrely approach her, and ask her if she’s depressed. She admits she isn’t feeling great, and they tell her they will take her to a place that will make her feel better. They fling her groceries into the street and walk away with the old woman, and in the foreground, we see the image of one of the girls on a Missing poster.

A few days later, a new student arrives at Hawkins Middle, a suave black-haired teenager in sunglasses who bears an intentional similarity to Tom Cruise in Risky Business. All the girls are going wild over him, but Mike and the crew are skeptical of him and don’t get his appeal. When the teen seems to take a sudden interest in Eleven, Mike freaks the heck out! He’s convinced he’s in grave danger of losing her. He hides in a bush and spies on their conversation, where the teen has something he wants to confess…

He pulls down his sleeve to reveal an “004” tattoo. El is shocked; Mike is horrified. He can’t possibly compete with another lab experiment. He takes it as a given that El will pick Four over him, and is very depressed now.

Later that day by chance he spies Four at a sandwich shop. He quickly hides and eavesdrops. The workers seem to be obeying Four’s every command, and then the two women from before approach (whose names are Amber and Eloise) and tell him they found “lots of new recruits.” Mike races home in a panic to where the other boys are, and gives them the drastic news: he knows what special power Four has now, and it’s MIND CONTROL.

It’s Will that puts it all together. If there’s someone new in school, and he has mind control powers, and he’s evil, and he’s after El….”do you realize what’s about to happen?”

Lucas manages to find El before Four can go any further and pulls her away. He explains to her the situation. The kids all realize there is no one in Hawkins they can trust now — Four could have enthralled anyone. El spies on Four with her powers and discovers his ultimate plan is to find all the experiments (he doesn’t know the truth, but I didn’t yet either) and use them to conquer the world, starting with her. They have no idea what to do about him, and no one can help them, but for the time being, it’s imperative that they keep Eleven away from Four, or she could be weaponized and he would then become unstoppable.

From this point forward, the story is one long, tense, frenetic chase sequence (with a stop to rest at Murray’s). Hopper is under Four’s control and chases their bikes until they fall down a ravine. Lucas is forced to learn how to drive, and manages to get the hang of it (for a time). Eventually, our heroes are whittled down and captured until just Mike and El are left, and they have to whip up an improvised plan together to somehow defeat Four once and for all.

My instincts were right on. Once I started I couldn’t stop. With every page completed, I loved the story more. I’d never had so much fun creating something. I excitedly announced to the readers of my website that I was about to debut one of the best things I’d ever written. In the days leading up to its release, vines starting appearing on the background of the main page. Days later, buttons on the site started appearing upside-down. On August 6, about a month after the release of Season 3, the first chapter of Stranger Things Season 2 1/2 went online.

And that’s how I found out half my reading audience didn’t watch the show. I had a hard time getting any feedback. Further chapters were completed and released throughout 2019, and I had no idea if anybody was even reading them. Feeling massively discouraged, I put the story on hiatus after the release of the sixth chapter. It ended on a massive cliffhanger, where Four and El finally met face to face in the final panel…and then I just stopped drawing webcomics altogether for two years. It was just that crushing to me. If this was my best and no one cared, what was the point?

It’s also worth noting that this sixth chapter went up on March 8, 2020. Something else might’ve been happening around that time that I’m sure affected my mood. But at that point I pivoted to learning something new with the pandemic down time: how to make video games. 8-bit NES games, to be specific. I crafted the Allison of Astra series throughout 2020 and 2021, the first episodic NES game, and began releasing the episodes on a monthly basis in 2022.

The pandemic also put Stranger Things itself on hiatus, and 2022 was when it woke again. Even though I hadn’t drawn a new page in a while, I was nervous about the upcoming season, for one reason: there were rumors El would turn evil. Such a heel turn would invalidate my entire comic, which I still loved.

The first batch of episodes was released in early June, and I watched in horror as the show flirted with El turning evil for NEARLY THE ENTIRE RUN TIME before revealing the true bad guy at the last minute and going “JUUUUUST KIDDING.” Thanks a lot, guys, Thanks a lot.

But the return of the show made me feel like starting my Stranger Things comic back up again. I said on Twitter I might be considering it. And surprisingly, I got a positive response! People were enthusiastic about it! They WANTED it back! That was so relieving to see…and it sealed the decision.

I unpacked the incomplete pages I’d abandoned two years ago and started working on them again. And it was like I’d never left. The feeling of joy returned. I was able to take the remaining pages and make them even better. Chapter 7 went live on June 14, 2022. Two more chapters followed and when the story wrapped for good in August, weighing in at 114 pages, I thought to myself, “what you have here is so good, I bet you could pitch it to Dark Horse.”

Dark Horse Comics has held the Stranger Things license since 2018. And their headquarters was right down the road from where I lived. It was perfect. It was destiny. All I had to do was figure out how to make this pitch happen and I could be there in five minutes. …Then I found out despite its location, it was an impenetrable fortress.

It said in plain text on the Dark Horse website that they “DO NOT ACCEPT UNSOLICITED MANUSCRIPTS FOR OUR LICENSED PROPERTIES.” So how does one solicit something? That was also impossible, according to Jody Houser, who had written Stranger Things for Dark Horse and had a Comic-Con table that year. She told me when it comes to licensed IPs, Dark Horse simply plucks a name off a Rolodex, calls them up and tells them “you’ll be writing this IP.” Whether they’re a fan of that IP or know anything about it before that point isn’t part of the deal.

The results of this method spoke for themselves. Very few of the official Stranger Things comics pleased me. I’d written a thrill ride, because that’s what I wanted, but DH published stories about Dustin making a sandwich or Joyce shopping for oranges. “In-between” stories filling gaps in time where the Upside Down wasn’t currently a problem and nothing was really happening. Eleven was barely in these. I assumed there was some legal issue with Millie’s likeness or something, but hands were tied in a different way. Jody told me the hired writers are actually very limited in what they can do, and the only time she’d been allowed to contribute to the lore in a real way was when she wrote “Six,” a story about most of the other experiments. What they didn’t tell her was that she was allowed to stretch her mind because they planned to kill them off anyway.

It’s crazy that I can go down to the Dark Horse building at any time, and stare at their Stranger Things sign on the side anytime I want, but I CAN’T give them this story even though it’s way better than what they’ve been publishing. Anyway, I figured it would be my only one.

The story’s final scene was El and Mike sitting together in the back of a barn, taking stock of their entire lives up to that point and wondering where it could all be headed. The story mostly didn’t change since 2019, but this end scene went through revision after revision up to the end. It was too important. I wanted it to be impactful. It was also, I figured, the last scene I would ever write for them. I’d have to let them go and return them to Netflix, where I could no longer control their fates. Where they might face…an unhappy ending.

My fears about forming an attachment were right. It was too late. After spending months with them, dreaming up adventures and getting inside their minds, I was now concerned for them. And the feeling of unease and melancholy I felt permeated the air in that barn. El wept as she told Mike she wanted more than anything to promise she would always be there for him, but…she couldn’t. Some poorly preconceived notion of “El represents the magic of childhood, so El has to die” would probably get in the way.

Most drafts ended with the pair being uncertain for their future but hoping for the best. It was the very last draft, the one that probably wouldn’t have happened if I’d finished this on time, where it changed. Mike suddenly SLAMMED his hand down and told El she was wrong.

It may not have been sellable, but I was still attached to it. I didn’t want to say farewell to my version of Hawkins, but I couldn’t think of any way to continue the story…until I realized one thing. Toward the end it was revealed Four’s assistants, Amber and Eloise, weren’t actually under his control — they were that loopy in real life. Everyone else in the city had been under Four’s thrall and had no memories of what they did while under it. But Amber and Eloise walked away knowing everything — including the truth about Eleven. “I wonder what they’d do with that knowledge,” I thought.

And once I asked that question, it was like a dam burst.

THE HAWKINS CHAINSAW MASSACRE
Date of script: unknown
Dare of production: August 13, 2022 to October 29, 2022
Premiere date: January 1, 2023
Pages: 39

Amber and Eloise were very vaguely defined in the opening story — Four needed some wacky assistants to make things interesting and that was all there was to it. But once I figured out who they were, they formed the missing puzzle piece I needed. Hawkins opened up. Story ideas that seem obvious to me now did not occur to me until after the crazy pair were part of that world.

The day after I wrote this script, I wrote another. And another the next day. And then they just kept coming.

ELECTRIC NIGHTMARES
Date of script: June 20, 2022
Date of production: November 16, 2022 to July 22, 2023
Premiere date: April 30, 2023
Pages: 58
A mysterious new game has arrived at Hawkins Arcade…a game that seems to change whoever plays it for the worse. The only one immune to its evil hypnotic powers is Eleven — but this isn’t a situation she has an advantage in! El is terrible at games and bombs at them. Max agrees to teach her, but can she learn enough to conquer the game and save everyone?

The summer of 2022 was one of the most creatively fruitful times I’ve ever experienced. My mind was a volcano. Ordinarily a story needs multiple drafts and a fair amount of time to be completed. But Stranger Things stories would pour out of me in one piece, fully formed. The third story, “Electric Nightmares,” was actually written in three hours with minimal edits made after that. Every morning I’d wake up, sit at my computer and my brain would gift me a new Stranger Things story. It felt amazing. By the time the summer had ended, I’d written over 20 scripts. Those scripts are still being produced as comics to this day, in the order they were written, and I’ve since written many more.

Writing Stranger Things stories was improving my mood. It was boosting my self-confidence. It was pushing my writing abilities to their limit and letting me experiment with things I hadn’t before. And it was improving my art skills — all things that were transferable to other projects of mine as well. The series was constantly surprising me, with stories building upon other stories, and after a while it just started writing itself. It had become one of the best things I’d ever done.

There was just one problem. One looming, inevitable problem. A problem that now had the potential to make a much harder impact than it ever had before.

Can you guess what it was?

CALLING GLORIA
Date of script: June 19, 2022
Date of production: August 16, 2023 to September 1, 2023
Premiere date: September 4, 2023
Pages: 12
Through Gloria, a carnival fortune teller, Mike and Eleven examine the possibilities that await in their future — for better or worse.

Every time I heard about another delay for the fifth season of the series, I was just fine with it. Actor’s strike? Writer’s strike? Filming is going to take a YEAR? Post-production is going to take ANOTHER year? Great! Take as long as you want! Anything to delay seeing that final episode! Anything to avoid learning the true ultimate fate of El.

You don’t know how awesome El is until you’ve written several dozen stories about her. She’s this little thing but she’s stronger-willed than people twice her size. She stands up to authority figures without blinking. She’s literally the most fearless teenager in the entire world. In an age where we need and crave heroes, El is very appealing. And El is actually very intelligent — the smartest person in town. She’s just more subtle about it. Why doesn’t El use her powers to take over the world? Because El isn’t STUPID!

El was the focal point of nearly every story. The kid characters showed up a lot, but the older teens often just tended to appear for a scene or two. I found the further characters were away from El socially, the harder they were to work into stories. There was a lot of Hopper since he was her adopted father. But there wasn’t much of Murray since he and El rarely crossed paths.

The other reason El was my favorite was because even though it was never stated as fact, and public knowledge about it hadn’t come nearly as far at the time the series is set, I was certain she was on the autism spectrum. I don’t know if Millie meant to play her that way, but she got it spot on. El has no filter and neither do I. El doesn’t feel like she belongs anywhere. Neither do I, and we’re both right! When El confesses her love for Mike at the end of Season Three, despite the emotional sincerity of the scene, she has an expression on her face like she’s ordering off a McDonalds menu. That’s how I’d look too!

Exhibiting traits of autism doesn’t make El any less cool. She’s very inspiring in that sense. She’s way better than any of the actually labeled autistic characters that appear on television, but that goes without saying. El was not only my favorite character on the show, she was one of my favorites from any show. Thanks for the lack of actual comics about her, Dark Horse! I guess it’s all up to me.

And I thought to myself, “oh man, if they kill El NOW, I’m not gonna be able to pick myself up off the floor for several weeks.”

BROKEN WINGS
Date of script: July 3, 2022
Date of production: July 9, 2024 to December 2, 2024
Premiere date: July 30, 2024
Pages: 90
An experiment turns Dustin into the smartest man in the world; El learns a shocking bit of knowledge that sends her into an emotional tailspin.

As the months went on and the dreaded day crept closer, I tried to slam out as many Stranger Things comics as time would allow. I feared getting the unhappy ending I was predicting would kill my enthusiasm — and the most fun series I had worked on in years. What would it do to my muse? I’d never been prouder of some of the things I was writing. What if I never wrote like this again? I NEEDED this series now. It was announced that the show would return on Thanksgiving with half the season, premiere three more on Christmas, and debut the finale on New Years Eve. I now had a countdown clock hanging over my head.

There were snarkers who claimed it had been too long and no one would care about the show anymore, not even for a farewell tour. There were people who complained that the “kid” actors looked too old now (boy, did I get sick of hearing that). But as the promotion machine kicked into gear, it started taking over just like it always had. Casual references to the show started popping up in various media again, likely for the last time. I relished it while I could.

Target put up a gigantic impressive display devoted to the series and promised to stock it well with merch, but whenever I went, it’d always been picked clean. Target is terrible at restocking their shelves, so the Upside Down gate was always nearly bare. I figured “it’s now or never, so is there anything you want?” I didn’t want a WSQK vinyl record, so I walked away with nothing.

As I headed into the holiday season I knew it was going to be a weird Christmas. I was in a very different place mentally for Season 5 than I’d been for Season 4. The hype over the show’s return was fanning the flames of my own mania. My fan series was constantly on my mind. I lived, breathed, ate and slept Stranger Things. I went to PRGE and won a drawing to receive a Mario encyclopedia autographed by the voice actors, but when I went up to meet the voices of Rosalina and Peach I had nothing witty to say to them because a new ST storyline was vividly playing our in my brain. They probably didn’t want to hear about THAT.

The wildest thing that happened was finding out about an anniversary party for Dark Horse founder Mike Richardson — the very day it was to happen. It was open invitation, so I just went there and heard him speak, and won ANOTHER contest for an autographed book of his. “This is insane,” I thought, “I’m a couple yards away from the #1 gatekeeper to the actual Stranger Things comic business….and there’s nothing I can do about it.” If I’d felt I could get away with it, I’d have yakked his ear off with plot ideas. But they’d be unsolicited, and I didn’t want to get kicked out, so I never said anything about it.

By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, I had written over fifty scripts, and I was in the middle of drawing up my twelfth (I write way faster than I can draw). The twelfth story was about a buxom Soviet assassin named Natalya who had discovered the existence of Eleven and was now trying to hunt her down and kill her. She had knocked out the entire town with gas so she could pursue El alone, and worse yet, El’s powers didn’t seem to work when she was near Natalya. Only Mike was awake, and he and El were now trying to keep each other alive. I called it….Natalya Dire.

It had been so long that getting a new batch of never before seen episodes just didn’t feel real. I chugged the first two the night they became available and had a blast. The mystery of who was going to be taken in Episode 2 had been teased for months, with its title partly obscured. Holly, a very bit player up to that point, was the last person I would have guessed but I was still pleased. Newly revealed bits of lore, like El’s weakness to blasted sound, inspired new stories on their own. Karen finally learned the truth and IMMEDIATELY stepped up into the warrior I always knew she could be. They hadn’t lost the touch for coming up with memorable characters; the Turnbows were a great addition, especially Derek. I had stopped worrying about the show sucking, because it seemed like it never would.

There WERE people who were displeased and they made their opinions annoyingly known. I heard nitpicky complaints the next few days about “too much exposition in the dialogue” and “the plot armor is too strong” and of course, “the kids look too old.” Why couldn’t they just shut up and enjoy the show? Why couldn’t they enjoy life?

“Winona’s eyes are too big” and “Millie’s lips are too plump” are two actual complaints I read. Ms. Ryder revealed on Hot Ones that month that when she gets told her eyes are too big, her response is to make them BIGGER.

The only thing I didn’t like was Steve’s contrived fight with Dustin over…Dustin mourning Eddie. Steve is jealous of a dead guy? How pathetic can one get?

But overall, I enjoyed Season 5A, and that was good because I wanted to. I still feared that finale like an approaching hurricane. This might be the last time I actually COULD enjoy the show.

Recent theories in the air had dampened that fear, though. The prevailing belief among fans was that it was not El who would die, but Will. Will had a connection to the Upside Down, and to Vecna. And Will had a scene in the opener of the series back in 2016 where he sacrificed himself to save his team in Mike’s D&D game. The Duffs kept talking about how everything would come full circle and everything would wrap up. Will could mirror his opening scene and take himself out along with Vecna to save the day. It seemed logical, especially when Will had that amazing “sorcerer” scene at the end of 5A. Surely there was more coming. Surely that wouldn’t be the only time he’d do that, right?

One of the reasons I believed and feared it would be El was that a true definitive ending would wipe that world of anything supernatural. But Will getting powers, and then Kali popping back up, muddied that a bit. There were now THREE mages on the field. The Duffs didn’t kill people (to the complaint of some). They said “there will be no Red Wedding.” Killing three people was a Red Wedding. Kali would probably die. Everything was pointing to Will being the sacrificed one. I started to feel better and more optimistic about El’s chances. And I started to. y’know, enjoy Christmas a bit.

Until the day Christmas actually happened. We got three more episodes that day, and while I liked them enough, the foundation of the whole show was starting to feel…wobbly. The problem started with the Big Fat Reveal that the Upside Down wasn’t a dimension, but a bridge to another dimension, and that was where all the monsters including the Mind Flayer truly came from. They gave this place the ominous name of “The Abyss.” The problem was, from the few scenes we got of it, it didn’t feel appropriately Abyss-y. The Upside Down was this big foggy scary dangerous place full of toothy monsters and grabby vines and lightning and everything. The Abyss was a brightly lit canyon mostly made of rocks, the kind of place Spaceman Spiff would explore in Calvin and Hobbes comics. It was nearly completely devoid of life, and anything interesting, aside from the fact it was where Vecna liked to hang out. It’s not better.

Apparently this reveal was planned all the way back in Season 2. I think they should have never revealed it at all. The time had passed. The Upside Down had become one of the most iconic parts of the series. Most of the merch is based around it. The Duffers named their entire production company after it. To claim at the last minute that it’s now second banana to such a boring place just doesn’t work on any level. You’re telling the audience “You know this cool place the entire show is built around? It’s not cool at all; isn’t that GREAT? Also it has a giant red glowing self-destruct button, so that’s how we’ll destroy it. This is not hacky.”

In addition….it’s not a BRIDGE in the traditional sense. When Holly tried to get from the Abyss to the Upside Down she wound up plummeting 50,000 feet. When the UD was apparently created on November 6, 1983…Will was abducted by the Demogorgon only a few minutes later. You’re telling me the Demos, the vines and everything else somehow got all the way down there and formulated their plan that fast? You did not think this through. YOU HAD NINE YEARS TO THINK THIS THROUGH AND YOU DID NOT.

I hadn’t used the Upside Down much in my stories because they kept saying we didn’t know everything and I didn’t want to end up contradicting something. Now it appears to tell any kind of competent story in there I’m going to have to. They left me a fine mess to clean up.

Oh, and the batch ended with El teasing her own sacrifice, because of course it did. But I wasn’t too worried, because they wouldn’t tease such a thing this early without some kind of swerve in mind. I was certain the dead one would be Will. I slept soundly the next few nights.

On December 30, the night before the finale was to go live, I stumbled onto a news item about the season’s official soundtrack. Within was a list of every track on the album and their titles. I suddenly realized: THESE TITLES COULD SPOIL THE FINALE! Ha ha, they messed up! I could learn her fate 24 hours early! I examined them closely.

Matt Caracappa once told the story of the day he went to see Transformers: The Movie. He had heard rumors that Optimus Prime bites it in the film, but he didn’t believe it. While his friends were in the bathroom, he peeked at the giant movie poster in the lobby. He didn’t see Optimus anywhere on it, and he got the worst feeling. This was that moment for me.

When I looked at the list of soundtrack titles, I couldn’t find anything that suggested Will was going to be the sacrificed one, or even anything that suggested he would fight. I did, however, see a track with the foreboding title “Make Sure This Never Happens Again.”

I did not sleep well that night.

My last written script before December 31 was called “Twilight At The Quarry.” It was a short script, a simple scene of El and Mike sitting together at the quarry and pondering their own lives, life in general, and the world. There was a lot of anxiety about the finale baked into it. I liked a piece of the conversation well enough to draw it up way, way ahead of time and share it on social media.

I was going to miss her.

I spent December 31 trying to finish up the last few pages of Natalya Dire. It was clear by now I wasn’t going to make it. Parts of it would have to be drawn post-finale, but would I even be able to? What if this last episode just crushed me so much I couldn’t draw at all?

The last panel I was able to ink before 5 PM Pacific was this scene where El is lying on the ground, post-battle, exhausted, and she realizes Mike isn’t dead after all. Then, like it or not, I had to turn on the TV. It was going to be spoiled for me if I didn’t. Better to find out from the show itself.

I was incredibly nervous. Six years — six long years from the point I started drawing Stranger Things Season 2 1/2 — had led up to this exact moment. Was I right or wrong? And what would it do to me if I was right? I tried to watch the episode in linear time, but after eighteen minutes I realized I was just too nervous to enjoy it. I had to skip ahead and spoil myself before going any further.

I scrolled the thumbnails all the way to the end. And I saw…a D&D game. Well, that was ONE of the theorized endings. But where was El? Where was she? Please tell me she was at that table!

There was a thumbnail with El, but she was…not in Hawkins? Some exotic foreign country? There were the waterfalls the show hinted at. What did this even mean? It made no sense.

I scrolled backwards, through the thumbnails, searching for answers until in the middle, I finally saw it.

It was El’s sacrifice scene. No twist. No mercy. The very thing I’d dreaded, served cold.

Maybe it wouldn’t have been so hard to take if I hadn’t been given false hope. There’s a saying that if you give a small child a present, and then take it away, the child will be much more upset than if you never gave him the present in the first place. One of life’s cruelest tricks — which it pulls ALL THE TIME — is to suggest things will get better, then leave you worse off than you were before.

Well, I went back to where Id left off and continued from there, but I can’t say I was in a mood to enjoy it. And even if I hadn’t done what I did, I doubt I’d have been impressed anyway. The big giant fight this show had been promising for seasons amounted to a boss battle from Zelda. The Mind Flayer was a giant spider and they just attacked his weak points until he croaked. (I’ve since learned it literally WAS inspired from a game, Baldur’s Gate III….maybe they should have looked elsewhere for ideas.)

Meanwhile in his belly, El was fighting Vecna, which should have been a lot harder than it was. Vecna has a lot of intimidating powers but he didn’t use a single one — he just traded physical blows like a chump. The conflict between him, El and Max from Season 4 was way more tense. All that buildup was for nothing. In the end, Vecna went down like a bug. He was one giant overrated viney mess of spaghetti. The one thing I did like was Joyce delivering the final blow.

Note: to give people a little hope, that WASN’T the Mind Flayer’s true form….according to interviews, he’s actually the shadow monster we saw in other seasons. Perhaps he’s still out there and waiting to antagonize somebody else in a spinoff series.

Then everyone grabs the Idiot Ball and drives back happy and content, for some reason NOT expecting the military army they just shot at to still be there, NOT expecting any kind of ambush. It feels the whole point was to get to that ambiguous sacrifice scene and it didn’t matter logically how you set it up. I later learned they shot many of these scenes without a finished script. Wow, no kidding?

The scene in question was absolutely horrid. After seasons of portraying Mike and El’s romance as epic and awe-inspiring, it was now being trashed in fifteen seconds, and worse yet, in an incredibly rushed, sloppy and badly directed manner. Purple Rain? How does Purple Rain make sense here? It has no significance to either of them! Worse yet, this was one of only THREE scenes Mike and El had together in the ENTIRE SEASON. She spent 95% of her time with Hopper, and while I’d always wanted to see El and Hopper team up to kick butt together, I didn’t want it at the expense of everything else! If you hadn’t been writing fanfics for the last three years, how were you supposed to feel anything here?

It took until the end, but Stranger Things finally did it. It served up a lemon. It gave me an episode I really, truly hated. But at least it waited until the end to turn sour. Many shows go south before then.

The fact that El probably DIDN’T actually die is of little solace. This was intended to be a mystery forever unresolved, but like everything else, they botched it. Mike’s theory is pretty airtight — how COULD she be standing there with those blasters aimed at her — but even if you took that away, there’s this: every other time El’s visited the Void, she’s needed some kind of sensory deprivation. A blindfold, white noise, sometimes a water tank. She usually has to be sitting down. She can’t simultaneously contact Mike and stand there staring ahead…and her nose wasn’t even bleeding.

Some have also noted in this scene, El has no “011” tattoo. I’ve been told Millie got this tattoo done in real life, so it would have to be deliberately removed. This was likely “the one hint we’ll put in to see if anyone picks up on it.” We didn’t even need the hint! Ya messed up! But I’m glad they messed up….I’d rather know for sure. The Duffers say the only one they told the truth about the scene to was Millie. If any of them ever comes out and says she died, I’m going to demand an explanation, because it makes far less sense to believe she did.

It’s of little solace because…what kind of life is that? It’s the opposite of her goals; the opposite of her dreams. The opposite of her arc; the opposite of a true payoff! All her life she dreams of friends and love, and in the end — after all that struggle — gets nothing? Don’t tell me she’s in any danger from the government. That’s the same government that couldn’t find her for five years and STILL couldn’t find her within a locked down city with cameras everywhere. Mike was NOT going to be shot. Her friends have plot armor as strong as titanium. I wish Kali hadn’t come back and put that idea in her head. Kali was dead wrong, as usual.

I could go on — I could gripe about the military just fading away with no consequences for anyone, or Dr. Kay never receiving the onscreen punishment that we were owed — but this is long enough.

The finale had the effect I had always dreaded it would. It had me down in the dumps for days. It was relieved a bit, though, by the fact that most people seemed to agree with me that it was bad. Everyone else was sharing my pain to some degree. Especially the crowd that was now hysterically believing in a secret ninth episode!

The very next morning (after, again, I got almost no sleep) I dragged my half-awake body out of bed and groggily made breakfast. Then I booted up my computer, turned on the Cintiq and stared at my unfinished page, the one where Mike and El happily reunite. “Maybe they don’t make it” had been the ominous question hovering over the comic from the beginning. Now I had my answer. Canonically, they do not.

Did knowing for sure that they don’t change anything?

Whelp.

What else could I do. I kept working on the page.

And as I kept working on it, I started to feel better. It turned out to be a good thing these pages were incomplete. The characters needed to have a good hug, as did I.

Then I started to work on a new script, “The Influence.” El is recovering in the hospital from a previous adventure. The nurse comes in and puts painkillers into her IV, ignoring Hopper’s concerns. They prove to be correct as El starts acting loopy and doing crazy things with her powers, forcing her friends to frantically run around the room trying to cover her behavior up. It was hilarious and I was really enjoying myself.

The disaster I just saw on television hadn’t killed my muse. The characters had survived in my head. They were all still here, having adventures. And I now believed they would for years to come.

The Duffers were wrong. The magic of childhood doesn’t have to die (or move to Iceland) just because you grow up. You don’t have to shut the basement door forever on the things you love just because society says so. There will always be a home for the Elevens of the world.

Despite how it crash-landed in the end, I will always love the show. Stranger Things isn’t about 80s nostalgia or riffs on Stephen King tropes. Those things are part of it but you do not have to be into them to enjoy the story, and that is not the core of its appeal. It is about its characters. It’s about people who would do anything for each other, and often have to. It’s about hope and love, and the struggle against all odds to achieve your dreams. This is what Stranger Things means to me.

I don’t just choose to believe. I choose to know.

You can read the full Stranger Things webcomic through this link. New episodes are added sporadically.