The One Thing the Stranger Things Finale Gets Wrong — And It Isn’t the Plot

Stranger Things stuck the landing for a lot of folks because, hey, we just watched these kids grow up and got tidy epilogues to boot. But the show did the Mind Flayer dirty. And I don't just mean the part where its origin and connection to Henry Creel are still fuzzy (some of that gets filled in by the stage play). I mean the visual downgrade. What we saw in season 4 is not what we got in the finale, and that shift flattened a villain that used to feel genuinely unknowable.

So... what actually happened to the Mind Flayer?

Quick refresher, because the timeline is a little twisty:

• Season 2: Will starts seeing a massive, storm-swallowing entity looming over Hawkins. It's huge, it's abstract, and it radiates dread.
• Season 3: The threat shows up in a smaller, squishier, body-horror form that literally chases the kids around. Still scary, just more tangible.
• Season 4: Eleven blasts Henry into The Abyss, and we see the entity again, echoing Will's early visions. Big, alien, cosmic. That feeling of scale is back.
• Season 5 finale: Suddenly it's basically a giant spider thing. Less unknowable god, more boss fight. After years of buildup, that final form felt... nerfed.

What the Duffers are (and aren't) answering

The show wrapped with character goodbyes, but the Mind Flayer remains mostly a question mark. Matt Duffer told The Wrap that the answers aren't really coming in the new spinoff either:

"No, I do want to emphasize, just to not set up false expectations, the spinoff will connect and it will answer some of these lingering questions that were not actually answered fully in the finale, but it is very much its own story and its own mythology. So it's not about the Mind Flayer per se. We've explored that about as much as we want to."

Translation: the spinoff might touch the edges of this stuff, but it isn't going to be the Mind Flayer origin story. If you're hungry for connective tissue between Henry/Vecna and the entity, some of that exists in the stage play, not the show. The larger Stranger Things universe may drip a little more lore over time, but don't expect a big info dump.

Why the redesign stings

The best version of the Mind Flayer lived in negative space: a silhouette in a red sky, a pressure system swallowing Hawkins, a presence that didn't need a face. By the end, giving it a leggy, arachnid body stripped away the cosmic horror vibe and made it feel literal and smaller. After seasons of hinting at something beyond comprehension, we got something we could count the limbs on.

The basics, if you're catching up

Stranger Things is created by the Duffer Brothers and stars Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Noah Schnapp, Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Sadie Sink, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Maya Hawke, Joe Keery, and Cara Buono. There are 5 seasons on Netflix. The show sits at 8.6/10 on IMDb and 90% on Rotten Tomatoes as of now. It's streaming on Netflix.

Maybe you loved the finale anyway. Totally valid. But if you felt that switch from vast and unknowable to big spider with an agenda, you&aposre not alone. Did the Mind Flayer work for you in the end, or did the mystery get sanded down too much?