[Ed. note: This article contains full spoilers for the series finale of Stranger Things.]

Something has seemed wrong since, let’s say, some time in 2016. Whatever your political, economic, or religious affiliations, there’s no denying our world has veered down a polarized path in the last decade, one that most people never saw coming in the optimistic, post-recession era of the early 2010s. To quote a much-memed sentiment, we’re all living in the “wrong timeline” — but there’s no easy, dimension-hopping way to fix it.

That’s not the case in Stranger Things, which offers exactly that solution to a decade of trauma and horror in its movie-length final episode. After launching on Netflix in the summer of 2016 as a taught, science-fiction thriller best-described as E.T. meets The X-Files, the show........

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