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The show is and has always been a nostalgia-fest.

From outside Hawkins, though, from the distance of 2019, Hop’s message about the importance of letting go of the past so that we can embrace the future feels at odds with the series’ whole identity.

Within the world of the show, life does go on. Hawkins is changing, too Nancy’s idea for a newspaper piece about the death of small-town America in the face of the new nearby megamall is a classic example of “things change … but should they?” storytelling. The kids are older, they’re struggling with new adolescent tensions, and they’re worrying about their futures. Time has moved forward a bit in Stranger Things 3. If the show still brings Hopper back after his plea that everyone move on, his farewell message is going to feel more than a little contradictory.Įven without the specific reversal of the post-credits sequence, though, Hop’s speech feels out of place inside of the broader mood of the series. Hopper begs El to come to terms with the past, to try to accept the hurt that comes with inevitable change. The odds are overwhelming that Hopper is in that cell, and if so, Stranger Things is pointedly not taking its own advice. Hopper’s disappearance and the swift, flag-waving signaling of the post-credits sequence in Stranger Things 3 is too close to El’s return in the second season to be a coincidence.

But Stranger Things already seemed to kill El and then brought her back after a pointedly reassuring post-credits sequence in its first season. The whole logic of narrative consequences starts to unravel, and the emotional stakes are never quite as big afterward. It’s not that I want that to happen, necessarily although David Harbour is in undeniably fine Dadbod form in the show’s third season, it’s troubling when major-character deaths feel potentially reversible. If that unseen, unnamed “American” is not Hopper - if Hopper does not come back in a miraculous return for Stranger Things 4 - I will eat my hat. But before the doomed man is taken from his cell, the Russian officer pauses in front of a different cell door. At a Russian facility in Kamchatka, an officer drags a prisoner out of his cell and into a different cage, where he’s attacked (and presumably killed) by a demogorgon, a monster from the Upside Down last seen in the first Stranger Things. It’s also a message Stranger Things seems unlikely to heed.Īt the very end of Stranger Things 3, just after the credits start to roll, the show returns with one final scene. It’s a message about coping with grief and then continuing on. The note is a poignant sentiment for the ending of Stranger Things 3, and the idea that Hopper is unintentionally helping his daughter move past his own death is especially moving. He tells El that she needs to grow and learn, and that he can’t try to keep her stuck in the past, even though moving forward will inevitably hurt. It’s moving, always moving, whether you like it or not,” Hop says. The original purpose of his speech, Hop writes to El, was to “turn back the clock,” to “make things go back to how they were.” But he knows that’s “naïve.” He knows time can’t go backward. It’s the message the show gives us as an ending takeaway, and it’s meant to soften the blow of Hop’s death (while also making us weep because he’s gone). Hop’s big speech to his daughter becomes the voiceover framework for Stranger Things 3’s closing montage. But after Hopper’s presumed death in the finale, Joyce Byers finds his note and gives it to El to read. In that early episode, Hopper chickens out before he can deliver his prepared words, instead taking the relatively easy route of threatening Mike and hoping for the best. Warning: Major spoilers for the end of Stranger Things 3 lie ahead.Īt the end of Stranger Things 3, El reads a note her adoptive father Jim Hopper wrote earlier in the season, his prep work for the speech he planned to give Mike and El about feelings and boundaries.