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The Best Moments of Stranger Things
Movies & TV
Stranger Things
The Best Moments of Stranger Things
As the series comes to a close, a look back on some of the show’s greatest hits.
By Tyler Dean
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Published on December 22, 2025
Credit: Netflix
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Credit: Netflix
As I said in my recap of season four, Stranger Things is at its best as an in-the-moment watch. It struggles to keep a coherent tone and build compelling character arcs, but excels at crafting individual scenes that elicit tears or screams or shouts of joy.
Below is my personal list of favorite moments from the show up through the end of season five, episode four. They are a mix of big moments, quiet scenes of character development, and weird little detours that have kept me engaged even at the lower points in the show’s tumultuous nine-year run.
Joyce Plays With Magnets
Image: Netflix
(Season 3, Episode 5 “The Flayed”) After giving her the iconic Christmas Light set to play with in the first season, letting her play around with an old camcorder in the second and, perhaps, after seeing her brilliant cascade of facial expressions at the 2017 SAG Awards, the Duffer brothers gave her an enduring puzzle with malfunctioning magnets in season three. There is a lot of good, profoundly weird mugging as a wide-eyed Ryder single-mindedly stares at magnets throughout the first half of the season. This comes to a head in episode five, where she tries to ask lovable Russian operative, Alexei, if the demagnetization is due to his countrymen’s operation.
As the subtitles tell us that Alexei understands next to nothing about what Joyce is asking, Ryder babbles excitably, reframing her paranoid and desperate performance, in previous seasons, as something winningly batshit. A scene later, Hopper implies that Joyce is as unhinged as Murray and her performance sells it. Ryder started as the series’ biggest get and while she was tasked with carrying a lot of the show’s dramatic heft in seasons one and two, season three lets Joyce be as funny and weird as Ryder seems to be. It’s great! Magnets!
Murray Plays Matchmaker
Image: Netflix
(Season 2, Episode 6 “The Spy”) The first two seasons take their time getting their star-crossed teen couple, Nancy and Jonathan, together. Given how much Nancy’s previous beau, Steve Harrington, became a breakout favorite of the first season who ended up becoming more beloved than either of the other vertices of the love triangle, keeping the momentum alive was more difficult than anticipated. They spend most of season two on a road trip, investigating how they can expose the Hawkins Lab as the responsible parties in the death of Barb. This eventually leads them to conspiracy theorist Murray Bauman who gives them a strategy to take down the USDoE. But his major contribution is a leery, grotesque calling out of the sexual tension between Nancy and Jonathan. Brett Gelman, whether it’s in Fleabag or Another Period, always succeeds at playing profoundly sleazy men with the sort of wry verve that lets you know they are (mostly) harmless.
Here, his particular brand of ick is applied to plying teenagers with alcohol, demanding they admit they have feelings for one another and calling attention to how much better the sleeping arrangements would be if they shared a bed. It undercuts the seriousness of the Nancy/Jonathan love story in the best way and Murray is the perfect vessel for reminding audiences that the climax of your big love story doesn’t always have to be maudlin and sincere.
Eddie and Chrissy
Image: Netflix
(Season 4, Episode 1 “The Hellfire Club”) Eddie Munson and Chrissy have a remarkable chemistry across a few scenes in the season four premiere. While we discover that it’s all just a set up for Chrissy’s death at episode’s end, there is a brief window when the show entertains the idea that all the high school cliques are nonsense (it otherwise demands fairly strict allegiance to the norm—see Dustin’s speech about how Erica is a nerd in season three, episode six). But more than that, it’s a great showcase for two actors to display something that feels surprisingly genuine. It’s a fitting homage to all the great John Hughes mismatched romances of the 80s—The Breakfast Club and Some Kind of Wonderful chief among them—with the burnout and the cheerleader discovering that they have more in common than they thought they did. It’s a shame that the show wasn’t particularly interested in exploring this dynamic because it cements Eddie and Chrissy as instant classics and likely went a long way towards cementing Joseph Quinn’s career.
Joyce’s Lights
Image: Netflix
(Season 1, Episode 3 “Holly Jolly”) The image of Joyce Byers communicating with Will through an alphabet of Christmas lights strung up on her living room wall is as iconic a metonymy for the whole of Stranger Things as anything. But it’s easy to forget that it’s undergirded by real senses of menace and wonder and anchored by Winona Ryder’s excellent portrayal of desperation and grief. The turn from a glimmer of hope in Joyce finally making contact with Will to horror as he lights up “RUN” and a demogorgon tears through the wall, more grotesque and pallid than we’ve seen thus far in the show, is the cherry on top of the sundae.
Harrington Pool Party
Image: Netflix
(Season 1, Episode 2 “The Weirdo on Maple Street”) Early in its run, Stranger Things felt like it was angling for something more akin to prestige TV. The weekday party at Steve Harrington’s place, with “Melt With You” playing on the radio, Aqua vapor rising off the surface of the water while Nancy, Barb, and their questionable new acquaintances shotgun beers and Jonathan, half in a trance, photographs them from the nearby woods, feels like something more compelling than mere homage or reference (though it is both of those things).
The vaporwave aesthetic that the show cultivates isn’t really a thing of the ‘80s (even if it has its roots in bands like Goblin and Tangerine Dream), but it so evokes that New Wave, synth-heavy yearning that it’s a perfect fit for an ‘80s nostalgia show. And this slice of life recreation of the mythical past that the show is obsessed with is among its finest encapsulations.
Will the Warlock
Image: Netflix
(Season 5, Episode 4 “Sorcerer”) Okay the internet has made this point over and over and it is, ultimately, a bit of semantic nonsense, but this is a hill I am willing to die on. Will is not a Sorcerer (as Mike dubs him in the most recent episode). Sorcerers, in Dungeons & Dragons, are magic users whose powers come from their genetic heritage or magical intervention in their ancestry. A Warlock is a magic user whose magic powers come from a pact made with a powerful being (like a devil or a genie). Clearly, Will is a Warlock with Vecna as his patron (Warlock pacts don’t need to be consensual). And, given that both Sorcerers and Warlocks as DnD classes postdate the era in which Stranger Things takes place (by more than twenty years in both cases), I feel comfortable saying that, given the choice between anachronisms, go with the one that actually makes sense.
That said, the moment in which Will comes into his psychokinetic powers is one of the series’ most transcendent moments. It is the culmination of a personal arc that has been playing out since at least the second season. It’s unclear if the Duffers planned Will’s sexuality from the start but it has been central to his character since season three and largely mishandled (the show leans into a child molestation lens for the ways in which Will is traumatized; you can read my season three review for a more in depth analysis of it). But season five largely redeemed this arc, pairing Will with Robin, its other queer character, and reframing what makes being queer worthwhile away from finding romantic love, and refocusing on self-care. In that regard, the Duffers find some thematic resonance with sorcery (you are already awesome because it’s intrinsic to you, not because you studied for it—and I understand that they want to hammer home the point that gay people are born not made, especially since they already unfortunately paired coming out with molestation) but the reason this moment—Will, eyes rolled back, arms outstretched, breaking demogorgon limbs in the exact way Vecna tortured his victims in the previous season—hit so hard is that it’s the culmination of Will’s relationship to trauma. Whether that’s the trauma of being kidnapped by Vecna or the trauma of enduring ongoing homophobic bullying (both from his father and kids at school), it has made him more than a weak-link (a spy for the Mindflayer as he is called in season two). It’s made him resilient and powerful. Yes, absolutely, being queer is a quality in need of celebration (especially for a rural midwestern kid in the AIDS-stricken landscape of the mid-80s) but what the show has really demonstrated and demonstrates well is that surviving trauma can make you something more powerful than you thought. Will has psychic powers because he endured Vecna’s abuse and came out the other side. In that way, he embodies a DnD Warlock and the show has something much more interesting and important to say about what it means to be a survivor (especially a queer one) than what they draw out of Robin’s advice.
Snow Ball
Image: Netflix
(Season 2, Episode 9 “The Gate”) There’s a lot of climactic fun minutes earlier in the season two finale with Eleven closing the gate beneath the Hawkins Lab, but the real heart of season two is the Jingle Ball—the middle school dance that sees romantic closure for Mike and Lucas. The real joy of it, however, is Nancy’s sweet gesture to a lovelorn Dustin who, despite a stylish new hairdo, courtesy of Steve, is experiencing nothing but rejection and derision. Nancy picks him up for a slow dance and tells him that he’s always been her favorite among Mike’s friends and that, if he sticks it out through middle school, the girls will eventually go nuts for him.
It’s more than a tender moment of platonic charity. The second season sets up a love triangle between Lucas, Dustin, and Max only to quickly make clear that Dustin is a third wheel. He, painfully, doesn’t realize this until long after the audience has—which feels like a riskier and more honest depiction of the ruthlessness of middle school dating and it makes Nancy’s gesture all the sweeter. The following season Dustin is given a long distance girlfriend and the looming tragedy of his romantic life is tidily dealt with. But there is a great little coda that makes perfect use of “Time After Time”—cheesy and sweet in equal measure and, for once, a moment that doesn’t give in to hollow wish fulfillment.
Never-Ending Duet
Image: Netflix
(Season 3, Episode 8 “The Battle of Starcourt”) It may be the most controversial of my picks and it’s definitely the dumbest entry on the list, but Dustin and Suzie’s rendition of Limahl’s “Never-Ending Story,” from the iconic ‘80s fantasy film of the same name, is, hands down my favorite moment in season three and a strong contender for my favorite moment in the whole series.
Wait, where are you going? Come back! Hear me out: it’s very very stupid. Almost exactly the sort of hollow, referential nostalgia-pandering that critics of the show insist it exemplifies. But, in being so thoroughly odd, such a nakedly mercenary scene and treated as such in-world, it’s maybe the most self-aware the show has ever been. Stranger Things, in its dedication to a nostalgic mismemory, loves to hit its on-the-nose needle drops and references (Lucas seriously compares Carpenter’s The Thing to New Coke instead of, you know, the Thing-esque flesh monster currently chasing him), but the inclusion of this pointless reference, where two young Broadway stars belt out one of the ‘80s fizziest and least dramatic anthems, intercut with David Harbour staring—incredulous and dead-eyed—down the endless hallway of the Russians’ secret base, is the closest thing the show has to a tacit admission that most of its raison d’etre is to ask ‘80s kids “hey, remember this?” and does so in the most delicious, troll-y way.
Robin Comes Out
Image: Netflix
(Season 3, Episode 7 “The Bite”) Another clever subversion of audience expectations, season three introduces Maya Hawke’s Robin, who feels for most of the season like she’s being set up as a new love interest for Steve. In many ways she feels like the perfect Harrington belle—a woman previously ignored by Steve who doesn’t give him an inch and mercilessly mocks his failures while clearly still wanting to bring out the best in him. It’s perfect then, that she reveals that her past problem with Steve is not that he ignored her advances, but that he dated the woman she had been desperately in love with, dashing her romantic hopes.
It’s one of the better coming out moments in recent television and it has the added bonus of forcing the audience to identify with Steve—rooting for the straight boy to get the girl before realizing we had gotten it entirely wrong and a better story was in the works. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Hawke is one of the show’s better actors and, in season three, her autism-coded awkwardness was still being played for genuine pathos and not just for schtick. Stranger Things isn’t typically great about portraying its minority characters with subtlety and clarity, but Robin’s bathroom admission is a rare win.
Hopper’s American Tragedy
Image: Netflix
(Season 4, Episode 5 “The Nina Project”) Hopper recounting the story of his Vietnam service to Tom Wlascicha’s Dmitri might be the best dramatic monologue of the series. It’s not only a welcome ameliorative to season three’s Red Dawn inspired jingoism, but showcases the ways in which the show knows it can’t exist purely as an exercise in nostalgia.
Sarah Hopper’s cancer death is a long shadow hanging over the series—the original death of a child that gives real stakes and sorrow to all the subsequent child endangerment. To explain that its likely cause is the result of American military hubris, its lack of regard for the safety of its own citizens in the face of its imperial aims, is the closest the show has gotten to a real thesis. After all, the Upside Down is the result of scientific recklessness papered over by a callous American government. Lurking underneath the show’s reverence for the ‘80s is the acknowledgement that the veneer of safety and prosperity was built on some of the darkest inclinations of a Cold War that implicated both America and the Soviet Union. Harbour’s gut-wrenching performance weds the personal and political in the tightest thematic moment the famously scattered show has ever had.
But what do you think? What have I left out here? Do you like the “Running up that Hill” moment as much as the whole internet seems to? Am I over-concerned with the quiet moments on the show and not as into what’s obviously kickass? Let me know in the comments.[end-mark]
The post The Best Moments of <i>Stranger Things</i> appeared first on Reactor.
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