There are television finales that merely switch off the lights, and then there are finales that feel like the extinguishing of a small cosmic force, a constellation fading from the cultural sky. Stranger Things Season 5 belongs to the latter. It arrives not as another installment of genre entertainment but as the last tremor of a story that has grown up alongside its audience, shedding innocence, gathering shadows, and finally admitting the truth that all coming-of-age tales must one day face: the world does not remain unchanged simply because we loved it when we were young.

When the show debuted in 2016, it felt like someone had cracked open a forgotten VHS tape and found buried inside a geography of memories, creaking bicycles, blood-red sunsets behind pine trees, friendships tethered b

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