The Good: An awesome ending to an awesome show. I’m really not sure what to say about it that wasn’t great. In some ways, it reminded me of The Lord Of The Rings, with El and Hopper going into the Gate to seal it while the rest of the gang takes on the role of Aragorn and company by distracting the evil forces with various forms of fire. And unlike the previous season, we are not left with much of a cliffhanger.

The Bad: If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m a natural quibbler, so before reading this, understand that none of this makes the show less than good. It irritated me from the start that no one tried heat on Will before this. As Joyce says, why were they giving it what it wanted for so long? Also, I wish the tension between Max and El had been more resolved in a more concrete fashion. That just felt as though it was left hanging.
One thing I meant to say in a previous post and forgot to, about Max and her douchebag older brother:

The tension that had been building around their origin and appearance was both weirdly heightened and killed by the appearance of their parents. Brother’s father had the weird effect of making me want to cheer him on by smacking around his son who desperately needed a smacking around, but also to want to shoot him because the odds are that he’s the reason his son is such a douche in the first place. We still don’t know exactly why Brother blames Max for the move from California, and until seeing the parents arrive, I thought these two were actually on their own. I leave it to the writers to wind this up in Season 3, but for now it feels flat.

And oh, gods, please PLEASE don’t really drag us through the stomach-twisting awfulness of an affair between douchey Brother and Mike and Nancy’s mom. Just barf.

Further Questions: Is Brenner alive? How and what is he doing? Obviously, the Thing in the Upside Down s still very much alive and wanting to get back to our world. Can it without some sort of assistance? We’ve met Eleven and Eight, which means there are potentially at least nine other Gifted we could encounter. Will we ever?
And is Steve really okay with where things ended up, or is he plotting something in that mind of his…

Final Thoughts: I’d really love to have some more indication on what the real nature of the Upside Down is. So far, the whole thing really has read as if it were D&D come to life, which is cute, but ridiculous. I keep wanting  better explanation, such as that it is an alternate timeline where Something Bad Came To Earth. I just find it hard to believe in a universe where things are built by no one and are always decayed.
In the course of this blog, I have seen a bit of fan speculation that Mike may be (or should be) killed off. I hope not. I think that would be the absolute wrong move. It would feel like a very artificial way to torture El and make her less human. The love story between El and Mike, and its innocence, is the heart and soul of this story. To delay it is certainly legitimate: it has to be laid on the line to make it worth something. To destroy it is to destroy the work.