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This article contains spoilers for the Stranger Things series finale.
Though it’s never gotten as much attention as its creative monsters or colorful alternate realities, romance has always been a key element of Stranger Things. After all, it’s first and foremost a coming-of-age tale, and falling in love is a big part of growing up. The show has featured everything from one-sided crushes and mutual pining to school dances, first kisses, and uncomfortable regrets. Break-ups and make-ups span seasons, as characters part, find their way back to one another, or realize their relationships weren’t what either party involved truly needed. For some, love is about duty and memory. For others, it offers validation, strength, and a jumping-off point to new adventures.
Over the course of the series’ finale, love means both sacrifice and possibility. A love triangle concludes with everyone essentially choosing themselves. A pair of long-suffering adults embraces the hope of a fresh start. Heck, even a science teacher and a conspiracy-minded journalist might be making a go of things, if that random shot of Mr. Clarke and Murray at Hawkins High graduation is anything to go by. (Why are they sitting together, anyway??) And two teens unexpectedly prove that, sometimes, real love can be about growing together instead of growing apart.
Max and Lucas may not have ever been the true marquee couple of Stranger Things — their relationship was frequently overshadowed by Mike and Eleven’s frequently cosmic-level drama, Will’s crush on his bestie, or the seemingly unending trauma Joyce and Hopper were asked to endure — but they are probably its most realistic. Sure, they face their share of problems, but they’re relatively human ones: Communication issues, grief, shared loss, a devastating illness (albeit supernaurally caused). Max’s socioeconomic and family background are vastly different from Lucas’. He’s hungry to fit in in a way that she’s not.
Both Max and Lucas go through some difficult experiences over the course of the show’s run. They spend swaths of the series apart or at odds, barely speaking, in different friend groups, and/or trapped in a hell-like dimension inside a psychopath’s mind. But even when things seem bleakest, the two of them never give up on one another, whether they’re technically together romantically or even sharing the same plane of existence. Sure, the show makes a big deal over Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” being the key to bringing Max home — we certainly hear it enough! — but the final season makes it clear that it’s Lucas who is her true anchor, the boy who never stopped believing that she’d find her way back to him.
It makes a certain amount of sense that the Stranger Things finale not only gives these two the happy ending they earned long ago, but also uses their relationship to illustrate how they, and their compatriots, are moving into a new stage of their lives. And it’s one that’s decidedly more grown-up. Max and Lucas finally get to go on their long-promised movie date, bringing things back full circle to the path they’d started on before she was taken by Vecna. But what makes it so special is that while neither is the same person they would have been back then, it’s not an erasure of what they’ve been through, but a promise that they’re going to get past it. To make things even better, according to the Duffer Brothers, the movie they’re seeing is apparently Ghost, complete with Patrick Swayze and sexy pottery. But rather than focus on that bit of nostalgia (for once, the film isn’t revealed onscreen), Max and Lucas’s own love story supercedes the one that’s playing in theaters.
Their graduation day scene not only establishes that they are absolutely that high school couple that’s staying together and probably going to be oh so obnoxious about it, but confirms that their relationship has entered some new territory. Lucas calls Max sexy — in what I’m fairly certain is the first time anyone has ever uttered that word on this show — and pulls her into the kind of embrace that definitely implies things have gone well past PG-13 between them.
Despite the apocalypse, near-death experiences, and heartbreaking goodbyes that have taken place throughout this episode, it is this moment that somehow draws a line between the world that was and the one they’re entering now. It is romantic in every sense of the word, thoroughly grown-up in a way that the series has largely had to avoid up until this point, and so, so earned. Because if anybody deserves a chance to find genuine peace with one another, it has to be these two, who’ve been there as Stranger Things’ quiet heart all along.
All of Stranger Things is now streaming on Netflix.
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