The final season of Stranger Things has officially kicked off on Netflix, with four episodes available now, with the remaining four coming later.
Aside from what you may have missed in the first set of episodes, the new series has been breaking viewership records on Netflix, as expected. Stranger Things began as an unlikely sleeper hit way back in 2016 and has since become one of the most popular shows on TV, and everyone wants to see how it ends. (We have our theories.)
As it happens, there’s another popular genre show that’s also getting ready to air its final season: The Boys, Amazon Prime Video’s gleefully gory superhero series. And while I don’t expect it to be anywhere near as big as Stranger Things, I’m a lot more excited about it.
The Boys vs. Stranger Things
Two shows enter, two shows leave
You might think these two series have nothing in common, and you’re mostly right. Stranger Things is a sci-fi adventure series modeled off ’80s movies like The Goonies and E.T., while The Boys is a superhero show loosely based on the comics by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, repurposed for TV as a sort of response to the last decade-plus of Marvel mania, with a healthy dollop of political commentary to go along with it.
The Boys is much more violent and vulgar than Stranger Things, although both series can get pretty gnarly. And both are long-form, serialized sci-fi dramas that emerged in the 2010s, when TV shows were starting to look more like super-long movies that just happened to be broken up into dozens of hour-long chunks. So the similarities are there, if not overwhelming.
Plus, the fact that The Boys will air its fifth and final season within months of Stranger Things doing the same thing got me thinking about which one I was looking forward to more, especially after The Boys dropped a new trailer.
There’s more at risk in The Boys
Characters are going to die; it’s just a matter of when
There are some Stranger Things season 5 plotlines belowI’m a fan of Stranger Things and fully expect to enjoy this final run, but there are some things about the show that annoy me, including its habit of pulling punches when it comes to character deaths. At the end of season 3, Jim Hopper (David Harbour) appears to sacrifice himself in a heroic moment, only for us to later learn he’s alive and well in the Soviet Union. In season 4, the malevolent Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) kills plucky teenager Max Mayfield (Sadie Sink) by levitating her off the ground and breaking her bones in all kinds of uncomfortable places, just as he’d done with his past victims. But the show can’t let go of Max, and in season 5, she’s fighting to come out of a coma.
When Stranger Things does kill off characters, they’re usually folks introduced that season (Barb, Bob Newby, Eddie Munson) or antagonists (Billy, Dr. Brenner). If you’re in the main cast, you’re pretty much safe, which makes things a little less exciting. A show doesn’t have to kill off characters to have high stakes, of course, but Stranger Things sets fans up for disappointment by regularly putting its characters in mortal danger and then not following through. It feels like the show wants to go to dark, gritty, disturbing places (did I mention that Vecna breaks all of Max’s bones?), but still remain kid-friendly. So we get half-measures that feel half-satisfying.
On the other hand, I have a hard time believing that The Boys won’t go for blood in its final season. Outside of characters like Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) — who died in season 4 after getting torn to shreds by super-tentacles, RIP — it’s true that not many main characters have died, but they do feel at risk. At the end of season 4, the megalomaniacal superhero Homelander (Anthony Starr) has effectively taken over the U.S. government and kidnapped a bunch of our heroes. The writers regularly come up with grisly, disgusting ways to kill people, and it would amount to creative malpractice for them not to give the same treatment to some of the lead cast in season 5.
At minimum, you know that the awful Homelander is going to die horribly, and that we’re going to love every minute of it.
Stranger Things is the show of the moment, but The Boys is a show about the moment
You can’t live on nostalgia alone
From the start, Stranger Things has been very upfront about its influences: creators Matt and Ross Duffer love 1980s genre fiction. They love Stephen King, they love Steven Spielberg, they love people who worked in the ’80s who aren’t named Steve, and they’ve infused that love into their show, turning it into a tribute to a bygone era, made with all the money Netflix can spare.
That may be selling the show short — you can definitely still enjoy Stranger Things even if you’ve never seen any of the stuff that inspired it — but the series does feel cocooned in a warm, protective layer of nostalgia. Stranger Things is excellent escapist fantasy, and that’s terrific.
But something I find particularly thrilling about The Boys is that it engages with our current cultural moment in a way that many other shows, no matter the genre, don’t. Over its first four seasons, The Boys has taken jabs at conspiracy theorists, protest movements, and political divisions, as well as made some pretty unmistakable allusions to very powerful politicians. I want to see the end of Stranger Things because I enjoy the show, which is true of The Boys as well. But with The Boys, I also want to see where they land on these issues. The hot-button topics the show takes on are as relevant as ever, and there’s a good chance the final season makes a lot of people VERY angry. Don’t pretend you’re not intrigued.
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The ends of an era
Another three episodes of Stranger Things will drop on Netflix on December 25, Christmas Day. The super-long series finale will drop on New Year’s Eve, both on your TV and in theaters. As for The Boys, its final season will begin streaming on April 8, 2026.
Stranger Things and The Boys aren’t exactly companion series, but they both rode the wave of prestige genre shows that started in the 2010s, and their finales may mark the end of something. I give the edge to The Boy, but I’m eagerly looking forward to seeing how both of them wrap up.
