It's wild to be able to say this twice in one month, but indeed we can: Stranger Things is over.
Fresh off from returning for its long-awaited fifth season - which was released in two separate installments at both Thanksgiving and Christmas - the critically-acclaimed Netflix series has made another comeback to the streamer to air its long-awaited series finale. The new episode arrived on New Year's Eve, and that means that we finally got to see how the adventure in Hawkins, the Upside Down, and the Abyss comes to an end. Spoiler alert: It was an emotional rollercoaster for fans of the Netflix series.
It did many, many things in order to wrap things up in a satisfying manner. But there was one thing it didn't do, and that's a damn shame.
Stranger Things finale didn't reveal Dr. Owens' fate, essentially confirming fan theories about his death
"What happened to Dr. Owens in Stranger Things?" It's all that fans of the show have been asking since the fourth season premiered on our screens back in 2022. It's also a question that fans were hoping that the final season of the show might answer. With the finale now out there in the world, "The Rightside Up" has unfortunately not provided audiences with those answers.
Portrayed by Paul Reiser, the former doctor at the Hawkins Lab was a fan-favorite, who returned in that season to help Eleven get her powers back. Although he had to work with the dangerous Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine) to make it happen, he came through for her - constantly giving her a choice in all of the trials she had to partake in and standing up to Brenner when he was stepping out of line.
However, when Brenner retaliated and had his men assault Owens - chaining him up in a nearby room - their base was attacked by Lt. Colonel Jack Sullivan. Sullivan and Owens had history, as the former threatened him to reveal Eleven's location earlier in the season, so being found chained up in Dr. Brenner's bunker wasn't the place to be seen. He begged Sullivan not to attack Eleven, but the colonel ignored his pleas.
This was the last time we saw Owens. Although Sullivan didn't harm him there and then, the fan theory is that one of two things happened: First of all, the colonel may have just left Owens there, likely sentencing the good doctor to a slow death (as everyone else in the facility had been killed). Or he might have been taken away for questioning after Eleven escaped their grasp. That probably didn't end well either.
The fact that there wasn't enough a reference to Owens throughout season 5 is pretty disheartening. It was one of the questions fans have wanted answered since the season 4 finale, expecting that the Duffer Brothers would answer it at some point throughout the final season. But now fans understand that, unfortunately, the lack of an answer is likely an answer in and of itself.
Dr. Kay is now doing Brenner's work as part of the military, outranking even the colonel it seems. So, clearly, Owens no longer has any involvement in the government - which you know he would have done if he thought there were more threats to Eleven's life. And with that, it sounds like he might actually be dead.
It would be a shame if that were the case, but right now it doesn't seem like there is any other explanation for his sudden absence from the show. We know that a Stranger Things spinoff is in the works, so we might get a definitive answer some day - which we hope we do because Dr. Owens was one of the good ones, and he deserved a better fate than that. In the meantime, though, fans are presuming him dead until actual proof of life.
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Stranger Things 5 is now streaming in its entirety on Netflix.