{"id":153548,"date":"2025-11-26T08:43:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-26T08:43:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/153548\/"},"modified":"2025-11-26T08:43:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-26T08:43:08","slug":"stranger-things-season-5-is-the-last-chance-to-redeem-the-shows-biggest-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/153548\/","title":{"rendered":"Stranger Things Season 5 Is The Last Chance To Redeem The Show’s Biggest Failure"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stranger Things<\/a> Season 5 has an unenviable task; to bring a satisfying end to all the countless plots and character arcs from the first four seasons. Stranger Things has defined the last decade of streaming TV, and it\u2019s essential the Duffer brothers stick the landing. As Game of Thrones proved, a poor final season has the chance to completely change the way even the best TV show is remembered. The pressure on Season 5 is intense.<\/p>\n

To be fair, the Duffer brothers have made some smart calls. Vecna has been retconned as Stranger Things\u2018 true villain<\/a> all along, meaning the entire show has really all been about trying to drive back Vecna\u2019s invasion from the Upside Down. A powerful psychic, he also his powers were used as to explore grief and consequences, continuing other characters\u2019 stories; Season 5 can continue that trend. But there\u2019s one great misstep from Stranger Things\u2018 past that isn\u2019t tied up in Vecna, and it needs to be resolved.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Lost Sister\u201d Is Still Stranger Things\u2019 Biggest Mistake<\/p>\n

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Looking back, it\u2019s easy to see what the Duffer brothers were trying to do with Stranger Things Season 2. They wanted to further explore Eleven\u2019s powers and history, and they did this by giving her a counterpart in another Hawkins Lab survivor, who called herself Kali. Season 2, episode 7 shone a spotlight on Kali, positioning her as the Magneto to Eleven\u2019s Professor X, leader of a group who were very different to the Hawkins kids. Kali had come to hate Dr. Brenner, and sought revenge on everybody who\u2019d ever worked at the lab.<\/p>\n

There are a lot of good ideas in Stranger Things Season 2, episode 7, \u201cThe Lost Sister.\u201d The Duffer brothers tried to invert the Luke Skywalker formula from The Empire Strikes Back, with Kali serving as an unlikely mentor to Eleven. They were also keen to expand beyond Hawkins to show the wider world they wanted to build. Unfortunately, viewers weren\u2019t impressed; the bottle episode deviated from the show\u2019s overall tone and style in too abrupt a manner. Kali has been largely forgotten (although there\u2019s a nod to her in Dr. Brenner\u2019s crossword puzzle in the Season 4 premiere).<\/p>\n

Appropriately enough, Stranger Things Season 4 repeated the experiments seen in \u201cThe Lost Sister\u201d \u2013 but rather better. Like \u201cThe Lost Sister,\u201d Season 4 sent Eleven on a quest to a mentor who would teach her how to access her powers at a higher level. Meanwhile, various subplots took the cast and characters away from Hawkins, with Joyce, Hopper, and Murray even winding up in the USSR. This time, though, it was done as part of an overarching narrative told at the same time as the Hawkins story, and the tone and style was consistent. It was a remarkable success.<\/p>\n

Can Stranger Things Season 5 Fix The Show\u2019s Kali Mistake?<\/p>\n

\t\t\tPlay video<\/p>\n

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Season 5 isn\u2019t quite the end of the road; an animated Stranger Things spinoff<\/a> is in the works. But this, too, will be focused around the Hawkins kids. But the Duffer brothers are leaving Netflix<\/a>, eager to head to the big screen, which means Season 5 is their last chance to fully redeem their past mistakes. Season 4 already proved they\u2019ve figured out how to fix the formula, but they also need to deal with Kali as a character. She has to make her return.<\/p>\n

What role would Kali take? It\u2019s entirely possible she\u2019d become an antagonist, perhaps part of a \u201cCult of Vecna\u201d teased back in the Season 4 premiere. That would certainly feel like the logical direction for her character to take, continuing to make her the yin to Eleven\u2019s yang, the Magneto to her Professor X. Alternatively, to continue the X-Men parallels that have been part of Stranger Things since the beginning, Magneto has often sided with the X-Men against greater threats \u2013 so it\u2019s possible Kali will team up with Eleven in the end.<\/p>\n

One thing\u2019s for sure, though. Stranger Things Season 5 needs to tie up all the show\u2019s various loose ends, and Kali is the biggest one of all. To ignore her would be to implicitly admit that she was too big a mistake, too great a misstep. It would be so much more satisfying for the Duffer brothers to find a way to weave her into the final season.<\/p>\n

What do you think? Leave a comment below and\u00a0join the conversation now in the\u00a0ComicBook Forum<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Stranger Things Season 5 has an unenviable task; to bring a satisfying end to all the countless plots…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":153549,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[146,85,46,53235,52092,411],"class_list":["post-153548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-regular-feature","tag-stranger-things","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153548\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/153549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}