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.
