Stranger Things Season 5’s exotic matter looks like Dark’s God particle: Are we headed for the same tragic finale?

Netflix’s Stranger Things has spent five seasons gearing up for a showdown with Vecna, while German series Dark wrapped up after three seasons with a finale that hit fans hard. Now, with Stranger Things heading into its last chapter, there’s an eerie feeling that the Hawkins gang could be in for the same kind of heartbreak.

Stranger Things first came out in 2016, pulling everyone in with its throwback ‘80s vibe and classic Spielberg feel. We were introduced to Eleven, a kid with telekinetic abilities who accidentally ripped open a portal to a terrifying, twisted world called the Upside Down.

Meanwhile, Dark showed up in 2017, and it’s in a league of its own when it comes to time travel stories. The show takes place in Winden, a small German town, but it stretches across three centuries, jumping between past, present, and future in extraordinary ways.

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The introduction of exotic matter in Stranger Things and Dark’s God particle

Stranger Things Season 5 Volume 2 gave a major revelation that has been brewing since the beginning. Turns out, everything we thought we knew about the Upside Down was upside down itself. While snooping around a military base over there, Dustin stumbles across Dr. Brenner’s old journals. Meanwhile, Nancy and Jonathan spot a freaky floating orb above Hawkins Lab. At first, everyone is convinced it’s the Vecna shield, but soon, the reality hits.

That orb is not magic at all. It’s exotic matter. It’s the glue that holds all the walls together and keeps the Upside Down from collapsing. Dustin figures out that this changes everything. The Upside Down is not just a mirror version of Hawkins, like they all thought. It’s actually a wormhole, as Dustin calls it “the bridge”, with Earth on one end and some new nightmare dimension (the Abyss) on the other.

The exotic matter is the only thing keeping this bridge together.

If they can blow up the exotic matter, they collapse the bridge, cut off the Abyss, and the Mind Flayer, Vecna, and all the creepy-crawlers get stranded for good.

Now, what’s interesting is that way before Stranger Things introduced the “exotic matter,” Dark built its entire narrative around a strikingly similar concept. The God particle in Dark is the backbone for time travel, the thing that literally gives particles their mass and lets everyone hop around timelines.

You see this dark matter showing up all over the place in the show. Sometimes it’s oozing around as a creepy, thick black goo. Other times, it’s more like a floating blob, unstable until someone zaps it with electricity, and we get a perfect, almost hypnotic black sphere just hanging there.

But the God particle is both a key and a warning sign. Every time someone tries to mess with it or bend it to their will, things spiral out of control. That’s how you end up with apocalyptic chaos ripping through both worlds in the show’s tangled multiverse.

Both series rely on theoretical physics as a basis for their supernatural features, especially in wormholes and spacetime manipulation. The main idea that both shows share is that human beings are dangerously curious about going beyond reality’s normal rules, thus leading to the formation of connections between different times, dimensions, or worlds that should never have been linked. People in both Stranger Things and Dark cannot resist pushing those boundaries, even when it’s a terrible idea.

In Stranger Things, the Upside Down thing is a wormhole that came into existence when Eleven banished Henry Creel (a.k.a. Vecna) into the shadow realm. Dr. Brenner, in his endless quest for “progress,” made Eleven connect with Vecna, which led to the creation of the wormhole. The exotic matter is the one that keeps this unstable connection alive and prevents it from collapsing right away.

Now, Dark is playing with the same deck, but it’s all about time instead of space. The God particle turns into a floaty orb, and if you zap it with enough electricity, you get a wormhole. You can use it to hop through history and, eventually, into parallel universes.

Then there’s the “abyss” running through both stories. Stranger Things has its literal abyss, the Upside Down, where all the nightmare fuel, like the Mind Flayer, resides, just waiting for someone to open a door. In Dark, the abyss isn’t a place; it’s this endless cycle of pain. Both are about getting trapped, whether it’s by monsters or by fate.

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Is Stranger Things heading towards Dark’s finale?

In Dark, Jonas and Martha had to confront a brutal truth: they are basically glitches in the matrix, born out of two totally messed-up timelines. The only way to stop all this endless pain and time-loop is that they have to make sure they never exist in the first place.

Turns out, in the real world, H.G. Tannhaus, a scientist, loses his family in a car crash and spirals into grief. Instead of making peace with it, he invents a time machine to bring them back. But his experiment backfires, rips reality a new one, and spits out two parallel worlds where Jonas and Martha get stuck in a cosmic disaster.

In the finale, Jonas and Martha have to sneak into the “origin” world and stop that car accident before it even happens. If they pull it off, Tannhaus never builds his time machine, which means no paradox worlds, no time loops, and also no Jonas and Martha. They literally choose to erase themselves so everyone else can have a shot at a normal life.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting: this whole theme totally bleeds into Stranger Things, especially with Eleven and her long-lost “sister” Kali, aka Eight. The parallels are glaring. In Stranger Things Season 5 Volume 2, Kali plants a seed that grows increasingly ominous as the finale approaches. She keeps on insisting that the only way to stop the madness is for both of them to die with Vecna and torch the Upside Down for good. Because as long as their super-blood is around, the military is going to keep trying to create more psychic kids and keep the misery train running.

The showrunners aren’t subtle about Kali’s role. There’s a loaded look between her and Eleven at the end of Episode 7, and you know these two are about to make the big sacrifice. It’s the same flavor as Jonas and Martha: erasing themselves to put an end to the nightmare cycle. If this happens, there will be no more super-powered kids, no more military experiments, and no more Upside Down.

In Stranger Things Season 5 Volume 2, the thematic overlap is kind of hard to ignore. Both shows dig deep into the “creation and consequence” thing. Eleven didn’t mean to open the Upside Down. She was just a kid being pushed by some mad scientist, but she still has to clean up the mess.

Jonas and Martha’s whole existence is a paradox. In both stories, the main characters are entangled with the disasters that they are desperate to undo. So the only way out is to pull the plug on themselves.

The series finale of Stranger Things is around the corner, and fans are faced with the scenario where the show might not give us a happy ending.

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Stranger Things is now streaming on Netflix.