Netflix Goes Woke with “Stranger Things” Series

There is a very popular streaming series on Netflix called “Stranger Things” which is about to conclude. While the target audience has been Gen Z (born 1997-2012) and Millennials (born 1981-1996). My wife and I stumbled on this series last year and came to enjoy it very much. We watched all of the episodes going back to Season 1 of 2016. We are both Babyboomers born between 1946-1964. I guess our demographic is less than 3% of their market which makes us kind of unusual.

The series is now in its Season 5 finale. It is set in the 1980s when my wife and I were raising our own children. Each season has been 8 or 9 episodes long with each episode running just over an hour. “Stranger Things” centers around the residents of a fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana. There, a young girl with psychokinetic abilities, named Eleven or El (aka Jane) who opens a gateway between Earth and a hostile alternate dimension known as the Upside Down accessed at a nearby government experimentation facility.

The reason why this series resonated with a few of us Babyboomers is we recalled actual government experimental programs during our generation that were leaked out to the public and not science fiction.

“The Secret Government Projects in Stranger Things Aren’t All Fiction—Here Are the Surprising Initiatives the U.S. Actually Tried” – Readers Digest

One such aspect of this series is it is seemingly mirrored the Montauk Project which is a conspiracy theory that alleges there were a series of United States government projects conducted at Camp Hero or Montauk Air Force Station in Montauk, New York. The said purpose of these experiments was to take youth and develop their psychokinetic abilities for psychological warfare techniques such as mind reading and exotic research including time travel. The story of the Montauk Project originated in the Montauk Project series of books by Preston Nichols which intermixed those stories with stories about the Bulgarian Experiment.

The “Montauk Experiment” was featured in a Season 8 television episode of Discovery Channel’s Mysteries of the Abandoned on October 23, 2003. The episode, titled, “The Montauk Conspiracy” documented the conspiracies around an abandoned military base (Camp Hero) on Long Island. In 2015, “Montauk Chronicles”, a film adaptation of this conspiracy featuring Preston Nichols, Alfred Bielek, and Stewart Swerdlow, was released online and on DVD and Blu-ray.

Some of the cast of “Stranger Things” include Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Finn Wolfhard, Millie Bobby Brown, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Cara Buono, Matthew Modine, Noah Schnapp, Sadie Sink, Joe Keery, Dacre Montgomery, Sean Astin, Paul Reiser, Maya Hawke, Priah Ferguson, Brett Gelman, Jamie Campbell Bower, and Linda Hamilton.

While much credit is deserved by the Duffer Brothers who were the producers, directors and writers of this series, the cast really deserves credit for pulling off their difficult acting roles of seemingly living on edge and petrified all the time in an uncertain world with an uncertain future.

CONCLUSION:

In Stranger Things Season 5, Episode 1 titled “The Crawl”, which dropped November 26, we see radio D.J. Robin Buckley (played by Maya Hawke) and candy striper nurse aid Vickie Dunne (played by Amybeth McNulty), sneak away to an empty hospital room to steal a first lesbian kiss.

“Robin and Vickie Kiss Scene – Stranger Things Season 5” – Netflix

However, episode 7 titled “The Bridge”, which dropped Christmas Day, set off a bigger LGBTQ firestorm. The bigger controversy was due to the out of place further injection of the homosexual agenda in this episode as character Will Byer comes out to his friends and family as gay in a dramatic public speech. Of course, unlike real life, they all embrace him and his new revelation.

“‘Stranger Things’ Season 5 Gets Review Bombed Amid Will’s Coming Out Scene” – The Hollywood Reporter

Variety magazine also noted statistical drops in approval and popularity on social media platforms as noted by this poster on “X”.

So the very last episode 8 of Season 5 is set to drop today, December 31, 2025. It will be interesting to see how much their viewership drops after Netflix “Bud Lighted” or “Disneyed” themselves, as Americans are calling it these days.

It is really a shame that such a small segment of our population gets such prominent exposure and air time that is so void from reality. It seems fake and out of place. In the case of “Stranger Things”, most writers would agree this did not even fit the plotline. Some have found mistakes in the series like a girl character wearing Under Armor apparel when that company was not even around in the 1980’s. But to me, this coming out scene with Will was their biggest mistake thus far. I was a high school teacher in the 1980’s and I had to aid both homosexual and lesbian students to keep them from suicides. In that time period, there was still shame in being sexually different.

Is it no longer possible to make television and movie entertainment without woke concepts like always focusing on mixed race relationships, illegal drug use, and LGBTQ characters?! Is somebody paying production companies under the table to do this?! Is this more evidence of the communists influence in undermining this country from within? 

Like they say, go woke, and go broke. It will be interesting to see how much Netflix subscribers and their stock drop next month. At our house, I will let my wife decide whether we are staying or leaving Netflix but I am just about done!

This will be my last article of 2025. Happy New Year to all of my readers!  

© 2025 by Mark S. Schwendau

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Thinking Conservative.