It’s been roughly a decade since the first Stranger Things season launched on Netflix and changed television forever. The first season was by far the best, and it’s been a bit of a weird decline since then. The fifth and final season took literally forever to arrive, and it’s a good one… somewhat.

Taking place a good bit after Season 4, things have changed drastically for the citizens of Hawkins, Indiana. The entire town is quarantined by the United States military and will never be quite the same. Characters like Dustin Henderson have changed dramatically, especially after his experience with the death of his buddy Eddie Munson at the end of Season 4 caused by those Upside-Down bat creatures.

Vecna is still alive at this point, but at the beginning of the season, you start to wonder where he actually is. His location may be ambiguous, but his plans certainly are not. He has an elaborate scheme to basically kill everybody and destroy the world. I aspire to be this kind of salty.

I was surprised to see Linda Hamilton join the cast for the final season as Dr. Kay. She was basically sent by the U.S. Army to replace Dr. Brenner, and she has absolutely no love for Eleven at all. Instead of a desire to protect the young Jane Hopper, she seems determined to capture her for dark motivations.

Hopper and Eleven are still badasses this time. But some of their survivals are a bit less believable. Especially as they get way too close to highly trained and equipped military soldiers.

Will Byers is about as notable this season as he was in the first. One of the things that happens to him in this final season genuinely surprised me, but the other moment (that got memed all over the internet) was not shocking at all. As it has been heavily hinted at ever since he wore that weird wizard costume and got all sad that none of the boys wanted to play Dungeons & Dragons when they could “play” with girls instead, lol.

Nancy Wheeler had one of the strangest character shifts from Season 1 to Season 5 that I can think of. Since I was talking about Linda Hamilton, Nancy starts to feel a bit like her character from Terminator, Sarah Connor. Part of that sours for me, because she does something incredibly stupid during the season that’s hard to forgive.

Probably the most notable protagonist this season is actually Holly Wheeler. You know, that character who was a baby in earlier seasons but existed mostly in the background, often forgotten. She was definitely the curveball this season needed, especially since the overall story is a bit more predictable than you might think.

Same with Dipshit… I mean Delightful Derek. Take a few of these factors away, and we would have had one of the most plain, vanilla Netflix seasons of all time. I heard the Duffer Brothers originally planned just a single season with the possibility of doing a Stephen King’s It–style time warp as a conclusion to the story. Honestly, I kind of like that idea better. But whether the Duffer Brothers are actually finished with Stranger Things or not, Netflix certainly isn’t. I’ve heard there are two more spin-offs planned, and they definitely plan on milking this cow.