‘Stranger Things 5’ Finale Review: Duffer Brothers Achieve the Impossible With Epic Ending

Predictable? Anticlimactic? Unfair to its most iconic character?

These are among the complaints that can and are being voiced about the conclusion of “Stranger Things,” Netflix’s most popular series yet.

Terms I prefer to use, though, are thematically coherent, unerringly character-based and pretty damn gripping, even if all the exciting stuff was over 40 minutes before the final, two-hour episode ended.

Matt and Ross Duffer’s magnum opus came to a satisfying enough...