Just a Small Suggestion....

I watched the Stranger Things finale last night, and a few thoughts....

The final battle played out like most any 5E fight: the party runs around spamming attacks, no one dies, and the big bad boss goes down in seven minutes flat with someone's mom delivering repeated final blows that never get the job done each time.

Keep making attacks, mom, and rolling that d20, and stop rolling low damage!

I rolled another one. Is that bad?

No minions in that fight? That was a terrible DM. No wonder the boss got rolled.

More characters should have died. There was minimal sacrifice for what they did, and it makes it all seem meaningless. Also, the epilogue was far, far, far too long. By the time I was satisfied with the ending and felt the series should end, I had another 25 minutes of the show to get through, which is longer than some Star Wars streaming shows' episodes.

If this were 1989, they should have been playing GURPS by now. Or WHRFP. Or Cyberpunk 2013. Or the Star Wars d6 system. Or Shadowrun. Or Robotech. Or Paranoia. Or Rolemaster. Or even Battletech.

And AD&D 2nd Edition came out in 1989; the new kids should have gotten the latest books as a gift.

They should have gone to the party with those girls after graduation. Stop playing those games, grow up, and live your life. Find a girl and start a family. That hit me the wrong way, since I wish I had. Playing D&D after you are 20 does not set you up for a fulfilling life. That moment hit me like a bad toothache.

Where was the original Nintendo NES? And the Genesis? Come on, this was 1989! SMB3 was released this year. The Game Boy, too. Sim City. The C64 was still around, too, and one of the most popular home computers. It is a sin not to highlight how video gaming started to push D&D out of the mainstream.

Did the final episode do anything for D&D? Not really. It leaned too hard into the game at the end, and it felt like the series put the game metaphorically on the shelf for good. This wasn't a D&D show, but in the end, that is what it turned into. It is weaker for not being itself first, and turning into a D&D nostalgia throwback show.

Some of the characters disappeared.

No more of this "hugging the bad guy" stuff, please. Every superhero movie in 2025 had a misunderstood villain in there that just needed a hug. One of the bad guys ended up like that, and then he was gone, never to be seen again. What? Did I miss something?

The military should have been the Terminator, and if they caught a character, it should have been the end of that character. The military was used for too much cheap suspense that never amounted to anything. We only had one military-related character elimination, and I saw that one coming. The assassins in the first season were far more tonally terrifying and threatening.

It wasn't a terrible final episode, but films like Super 8 did this concept better and in a tighter timeline.

After this was finished, I watched a few Blake Edwards films to reset my palette.

It wasn't bad, but it didn't live up to the moment for me.