After almost ten years, five seasons, and 42 episodes, Stranger Things has ended its run with a final season that attracted decidedly mixed reviews. The Netflix juggernaut, following the mysterious happenings in the Indiana town of Hawkins, borrowed heavily from ’80s movies and culture to tell a story that felt like a homage to everything from Stephen King to The Goonies. The show debuted in 2016 and slowly became one of Netflix’s pillars, arguably its biggest hit and the one most closely associated with it.

A large reason behind its success was the cast, initially led by Winona Ryder and slowly expanding to include more actors. This insistence on introducing more characters with each season was a double-edged sword; some of the show’s best figures were late additions, but by the final season, the cast was so vast that many had nothing meaningful to do. These issues date back to the early seasons, though, as every season of Stranger Things has at least one character that feels wholly unnecessary and badly developed. This list will declare the worst character in every season of Stranger Things; it often has nothing to do with the actors themselves, who always did solid work with the material, but rather with the character’s role in the story, their development across the seasons, and their role in the overall story.

Season 1: Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine)

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Creating a compelling antagonist is hard enough, but attempting to create one while keeping most of his background and motives a secret is particularly difficult. Sadly, Stranger Things does not pull it off with Dr. Brenner, played by ’80s icon Matthew Modine. Introduced as an elusive figure leading the search for Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and investigating the gate at Hawkins Lab, Brenner is the season’s main antagonist. However, you’ll find it difficult to engage with him in any meaningful way because he remains wholly uninteresting throughout all eight episodes.

Modine does his best with a paper-thin role, and for the most part, he succeeds. Brenner is effective enough for what the show asks of him, but that doesn’t make him a good antagonist. He’s not particularly interesting, and his relationship with Eleven is not well-developed enough to make it as compelling as other dynamics in Season 1, mainly Joyce (Winona Ryder) and Will (Noah Schnapp) or the main friendship between Eleven and the party. Indeed, Eleven and Papa’s relationship doesn’t become truly interesting until Season 4, when Modine is actually allowed to show Brenner’s motives and sink his teeth into the role. Season 1 makes an active choice to keep Brenner’s intentions in the dark to preserve the mystery surrounding Eleven and Hawkins Lab, and while it ultimately makes the whole storyline more urgent, it also makes him less captivating as a character.

Season 2: Sam Owens (Paul Reiser)

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Season 2 introduces Brenner’s replacement, Sam Owens (Paul Reiser), and tries to cast a shadow on his intentions: is her another mad scientist like Brenner or is he a government agent sent to weaponize the Upside Down? Ultimately, Owens turns out to be neither; instead, he’s a genuinely good guy trying his best to protect Eleven and save Will from the hold the Upside Down has on him.

Reiser was an inspired choice for the role, and like Modine, he does his best with what he’s given. Owens is not a bad character per se, but he’s kind of useless, not to mention a rather basic take on the “smart scientist” trope. In a Season where pretty much every main character shines, Owens is just there, contributing very little to the overall storyline. He’s an ally for sure, but he isn’t particularly valuable. In fact, if you were to remove him from the action, very little would change. Like Brenner, Owens would become a more useful character later on, especially in Season 4, but his debut season gives him very little to do to prove his worth among a cast that was already starting to get a bit too big for its own good. Sadly, Owens’ fate would ultimately be left uncertain, one of the many questions Stranger Things left hanging.

Season 3: Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard)

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Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard) was always the de facto male lead of Stranger Things. For the first two seasons, he lived up to that role, acting as the party’s leader and creating a truly compelling and emotionally resonant romance with Eleven. However, Season 3 makes the cardinal mistake that many movies and shows make when transitioning their child characters into adolescence: it takes a hard turn into more rebellious territory, with ultimately detrimental results.

In Season 3, Mike is in an odd position: he’s a bad boyfriend to Eleven, a bad friend to Will and the rest of the party, and an overall bad character for the larger narrative. The arrival of new characters also meant he had a diminished presence in the action once the fight against Billy Hargrove (Dacre Montgomery) goes into full gear. The shift is even more noticeable considering how supportive and meaningful a character Mike was during the show’s first two seasons. In one fell swoop, Mike went from hero to zero, and while the narrative kept going, his character never really recovered from the damage Season 3 inflicted on him.

Season 4: The California Crew (Noah Schnapp, Finn Wolfhard, Charlie Heaton, and Eduardo Franco)

Stranger Things Season 4 is uneven. It features some of its all-time greatest moments — mainly everything happening at Hawkins and Eleven’s backstory — while also wasting time with one of the all-time worst storylines, Hopper’s (David Harbour) detainment in Russia. However, even Hopper’s Soviet detour ultimately serves a purpose; the same cannot be said about the entire California plot featuring Mike, Will, Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), and new character Argyle (Eduardo Franco).

Although they purportedly serve as the rescue crew meant to save Eleven from Brenner, this ragtag foursome is more tiring than helpful, and each of their scenes feels like a giant waste of time. In a season that features the arrival of Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower), Max (Sadie Sink) literally fighting for her life, Eleven confronting her traumatic past, and the Hawkins teens making a major excursion to the Upside Down to confront Vecna head-on, the small-time desert adventures of four outcasts bring the plot to an abrupt halt. What’s worse, their contributions amount to nothing because, in all honesty, Eleven never needed them to save her from Brenner. Instead, this team just drives around aimlessly for three episodes before arriving once Eleven has done all the work; basically, they are the Stranger Things equivalent of that Tuxedo Mask meme that the internet loves. As funny as Argyle is, his presence just added yet another underdeveloped character to a cast that could no longer sustain all its major players, and Mike and Jonathan receive little to no development throughout the season.

Season 5: Jim Hopper (David Harbour)

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Hawkins’ loyal and badass sheriff, Jim Hopper, starts the show as an exhausted but ultimately courageous unwilling hero who steps up to save Will before becoming Eleven’s foster father. Season 3 ends with his apparent sacrifice while closing the new gate to the Upside Down, while Season 4 sees him detained in a Soviet prison. Arguably, Hopper should’ve stayed dead after Season 3, adding a heavy emotional toll to the group’s fight and keeping the ever-growing cast in check.

Alas, Hopper returns with arguably the worst storyline in Stranger Things (I would truly be surprised to learn that anyone likes the Russia plot in Season 4). By the time Season 5 arrives, his character is as narratively tired as he is. To put it simply, Hopper serves no genuine purpose anymore in Season 5 and is only there to repeat familiar plotlines with Eleven and to fire the occasional gun. Unsurprisingly, he’s outright sidelined during the final battle, with Joyce ultimately being more helpful in the battle against Vecna. Hopper’s role in Seasons 4 and 5 was one of the show’s worst aspects, and it’s particularly egregious during the final hours. Even Harbour himself seems disinterested in the last episodes, and honestly, we are too. At least Hopper got his happy ending with Joyce.