Spoilers below for the seven people or so who still haven’t yet watched Stranger Things’ series finale via Netflix subscription, so be warned!
2025 may be in the rear view, but Stranger Things’ final season is still very much atop the zeitgeist, largely due to a series finale that further polarized the extremely vocal fanbase. (The two-hour episode’s theatrical screenings, which helped make things more emotional, brought in a whopping $25 million, though none of it technically counted towards the weekend box office.) Vecna and Eleven’s respective fates are dominating the conversations, and since I’ve already shared my thoughts on why Mike’s theory is bogus, I’d like to shift the focus to Will’s flash-forward sequence.
Continuing his role as Dungeon Master for the epilogue’s D&D campaign, Mike went completely off-book and shared optimistic prognoses for the next stages of his BFFs’ lives. He talks about Lucas and Max getting their big movie date, while foreseeing Dustin and Steve continuing to develop their bond. But it was Will’s future vision that had me double-taking a visual detail that was either created by AI or was a genius side-joke about Mike’s age.
The Bar In Will’s Future Features A Neon Beer Sign That Probably Doesn’t Exist
As Mike hints at Will making a romantic connection in his post-Hawkins life, viewers see Noah Schnapp’s character sitting in what appears to be a random bar, where he happily chats up another attractive younger dude, and all seems well. Will seems to absolutely love this version of events, even if some part of him probably wishes that his future cuddle buddy would be Mike himself.
More On Stranger Things’ Final Season
In any case, look at the left-side wall of the bar, where a questionable neon sign is hanging. The phrasing is absolutely familiar to people of all ages, though mostly those of drinking age. Coors Light has been using “Silver Bullet” as a nickname for its aluminium cans since the brand’s conception in the late 1970s, and the descriptor has indeed been utilized for presumably hundreds (if not thousands) of neon bar signs that are very similar to the one seen in Mike’s forecasting.
Except wait, this sign doesn’t even say “Silver Bullet.” It says “Silver Bollet.” True, a lot of neon signs have oddball lettering, and the “U” in Coors Light signs does look a little misshapen. But it’s not nearly as closed off as it looks in this sign, to the point where anyone mistakes it for an “O.”
Also, instead of showcasing the silver beer can signifying a bullet in motion beneath the words, which is the case for many of Coors’ neon signs, this light bizarrely showcases an anchor, an object that has zilch to do with Coors Light.
In fact, it’s not even a traditional anchor design, as it’s missing the horizontal stock bar near the top that adorns nearly every illustrated example of an anchor out there. I realize that there are exceptions here, and that not all anchors look the exact same way. It’s even possible that the words are meant to represent the stock. Still, any imagery used for neon bar lights is generally the most traditional, and brands like Anchor Steam do indeed feature anchors with stocks for its bar lights.
So this decoration probably shouldn’t exist in the real world, and while there’s a way to make this work for a theory about the Mind Flayer still having control of the teens’ brains in some way, I have to assume that the sign was actually created using artificial intelligence, and inserted into the scene during post-production after someone realized how dark and bare that side of the screen was. Just look at how bright it is compared to literally everything else.
If It Wasn’t AI, Then The Bar Sign Is A Genius Joke About Mike’s Age
To be clear, I’m fairly convinced that the “Silver Bollet” sign only ever existed as a digital creation, and was never physically manufactured as it was seen in the series. But I’m willing to grant the show the benefit of the doubt here, and there’s ONE scenario where I could believe this wasn’t a lazy use of AI: if it’s actually a joke about how Mike is too young to know what the inside of a bar looks like.
Let’s not forget that outside of their heroic efforts to save Hawkins (and possibly the entire world), Mike, Lucas, Dustin and Will are all still pretty dorky dudes who never seemed to take a shine to drinking and drugging. So it’s feasible to think that, outside of movies and TV, Mike might not have the clearest idea of how bars are decorated, and so in this foreseen future, his imagination is what crafted the neon sign and the Christmassy lights on the right. The other flash-forwards don’t feature details that Mike wouldn’t already be aware of at 17 or 18, so maybe Mike’s brain just fudged what he didn’t know about bars.
Okay, yes, I fully realize how totally stupid and wall-breaking this idea is, since it implies that the Duffer brothers and the rest of the creative team purposefully designed a neon sign as a non-obvious joke about everyone being non-drinking teenagers. But given the theories that a secret finale will reveal everything seen in Episode 8 never actually happened, and that the protagonists are still under the Mind Flayer’s spell, this bar sign idea isn’t THAT wacky.
Stay tuned to Netflix to see whether or not we’ll actually get a ninth episode, and if we do, I’ll buy every single person a case of Silver Bollet beer to celebrate. Except for the Mike-aged fans, obviously.
