‘Stranger Things: The Experience’ gave me the catharsis the show couldn’t

Warning: Extremely big spoilers ahead for not only Stranger Things Season 4 but the immersive experience. If you want to bail, as our guy Eddie Munson put it, “Don’t try to be heroes. There is no shame in running.”

Look, I’m aware it’s been weeks. You can lower both of those eyebrows. But frankly, I’m not over the Stranger Things Season 4 finale for one big, legitimate reason: I need to know what’s going to happen to Max Mayfield. 

We’re slowly making peace with losing our beloved Eddie Munson…well, we’re getting there. Baby steps. But as longtime consumers of fine Hawkins punch-in-the-heart chaos, we’ve been left with one of the biggest cliffhangers for one of the best characters in the entire Netflix series. It’s Hopper over-the-edge all over again — but Max’s emotional journey through Season 4 hit me hard for various reasons. Viewers spent a season running up that hill of guilt, trauma, and grief with Max, outrunning psychological demons, embracing vulnerability, and letting our friends in — and now this? 

Luckily, there’s a soothing balm for my apparently fierce investment in the wellbeing of a fictional character: Stranger Things: The Experience. Finally opened in London in August after runs in New York and San Francisco, the event produced by Netflix and Fever has taken over Troubadour Brent Cross Studios and my weirdly dedicated heart.

London’s ‘Stranger Things’ experience opened in August.
Credit: Shannon Connellan / Mashable

The storyline of the immersive experience is thematically linked to Stranger Things, though not something you’ve seen in the Duffer Brothers’ series. You’ve been summoned to the creepy Hawkins National Laboratory, where you’ve signed up as a test subject in a sleep experiment. This means very ’80s introductory VHS tapes to watch in faux wood-panelled rooms, flanked with bleak corporate coffee stations and general sense of unease.

When pandemonium ensues, as it tends to at Hawkins Lab, you discover your own power in more ways than one, meet the cast in pre-recorded segments, escape into the Upside Down, and strut into the afterparty, a neon paradise of real Surfer Boy Pizza and Scoops Ahoy treats to inhale and a veritable shitload of merch to spend big on.

If you’ve read this far, and still want to go the Stranger Things: The Experience unspoiled, this is your last warning before you’re surrounded by 🚨spoilers🚨 faster than Eddie Munson was surrounded by…wow, still too soon. But safe to say you might enjoy this more than the ending of Season 4.

Before you reach the neon-emblazoned fun zone, the production’s finale gives one of the better fan experiences I’ve had, in terms of comparison to the onscreen finale we just lived through.

Cast your mind back into Max’s mind.
Credit: Netflix

A quick reminder of the agony you just went through: In the Stranger Things Season 4 finale, when Vecna attacks Max in her school-dance memory, Eleven beams in from her pizza-kitchen bathtub and uses her powers to battle him. Vecna drags them both back to his “red soup mind world” and restrains both Max and Eleven with mind tentacles. With Mike’s encouragement, El frees herself from the tentacles and sends Vecna flying, but not before he begins his fatal bone-breaking process on Max. Watching our favourite Kate Bush fan reach this horrifying point of Vecna’s signature murder procedure was a distressing moment of the finale. It couldn’t be happening.

In the Creel House attic, Max wakes up in Lucas’ arms unable to feel or see anything, terrified, and slowly fading. One thing is clear in this scene: Max wants to live. But it’s too late. The performances from Caleb McLaughlin (including his heart-stopper of an improvised line), Sadie Sink, and Millie Bobby Brown in this moment are truly devastating. Max’s death scene is tragic and enraging — hadn’t she won? Max had outrun her psychological captor before, fighting her way through a scene that Mashable’s Rebecca Ruiz expertly unpacked as resonant with people who’ve experienced mental health crises and depression, particularly navigating grief. In this moment, we all lost. Vecna won.

Devastating.
Credit: Netflix

When Eleven decides that Max isn’t going anywhere, she digs into her happy memories to somehow use her powers to bring her back — but Max’s heart had stopped for over a minute, so she remains in a coma as the season ends. 

If all of this left you in a state of despair more destroyed than the town of Hawkins, you’re in good company. Luckily, the immersive experience offers an alternate version of events that left me with the catharsis I craved. 

At the finale of Stranger Things: The Experience, after you’ve battled Demodogs running amok in the Hawkins Lab (with a little help from Eleven, Lucas, Dustin, Erica, Will, and Mike), been tested for telekinetic powers in a very familiar rainbow covered observation room, your group escapes by opening a portal to the Upside Down. In here, you encounter Max, alive and well, and way more friendly than you’ve ever experienced this character — she seems genuinely happy to see a group of strangers wearing dorky 3D glasses (extremely easy burn fodder for the Hawkins burn queen). As the Demodogs close in, the Demogorgon emerges, and Vecna shows up, Eleven arrives just in time. Max is tied to a tree with mind tentacles by Vecna — like in the Season 4 finale — and it seems we’re going to have to watch it all go down again.

But instead, the audience is invited to use your newfound telekinetic powers (literally holding your hand out El-style while the production team ‘move’ objects with the click of a button) to blast that slimy bastard outta here. Max is saved, El closes the portal, and the gang gathers to celebrate. Here she was! Safe and sound, ready to fight in the Upside Down another day, smiling with her friends, and thanking the bespectacled audience for doing such a great job. I almost lost it. Moving toward the exit and the looming wave of merch awaiting beyond, I dropped my glasses in the bucket and punched the air, Breakfast Club-style.

We did it! Now, can I work here please…
Credit: Shannon Connellan / Mashable

Sure, I’d make my way to the experience’s neon-sprayed hangout area, The Mix-Up; over to the Family Video store, where the counter heaved with old Milk Duds and VHS copies of Back to the Future; then the Hellfire Lounge, where I’d strongly consider paying an exorbitant amount for a denim vest emblazoned with an outstandingly muscular homage to Eddie Munson. I’d wolf down Surfer Boy Pizza reading a copy of The Hawkins Post, inhale a sundae from Scoops Ahoy, and wash it all down with a “Yuri Gonna Love This” cocktail.

We need two “Friends Don’t Lie” and one “Demogorgon” please.
Credit: Shannon Connellan / Mashable

Yes, I may be semi-sloshed trying on a Thinking Cap and about to drop more ridiculous coin on a Rink-O-Mania bomber jacket — but folks, we saved her. Max was OK! Not only OK, but free of Vecna’s curse and back with her pals, not lying in a hospital bed.

Yes, I may be semi-sloshed trying on a Thinking Cap and about to drop more ridiculous coin on a Rink-O-Mania bomber jacket — but folks, we saved her.

Ranting about this to my partner over a bucket of Stranger Things scrunchies, I realised that beyond the photo opps and the merch hauls, a pop culture themed experience like this is meant to generate this kind of ownership and satisfaction for fans, satiating an often fierce choose-your-own-ending viewership that demands things turn out differently. There are always things we want to change. In Secret Cinema’s wonderful 2019 Stranger Things experience, based on Season 1-3’s narrative, the production stuck like glue to the show’s story, using actors and impressive special effects to recreate some of the Netflix series’ biggest moments — all while letting you freely roam a fully immersive environment recreating Hawkins locations. But in Netflix and Fever’s event, it’s a thematically linked, parallel story entirely that includes this change of ending.

Where we left Max in Season 4.
Credit: Netflix

We don’t know if Max will be OK in Season 5, and not even Sadie Sink has said anything about that. For now, she’s in her hospital bed, with her friends reading Stephen King books to her, and little chance of recovery according to the doctors — we’re going to have to rely on El to find her, it seems. But there’s at least one place where Max is probably off having a Scoops Ahoy sundae, having watched a bunch of strangers kick the crap out of Vecna. 

Stranger Things: The Experience is running in New York, San Francisco, and London.