The five-season saga of Stranger Things ended with the core group of kids moving on from their childhoods, but a new behind-the-scenes video reveals that Caleb McLaughlin made some time to help the children on set to have a good time while filming a gruesome sequence. Joe Keery's Steve earned himself the reputation for being Stranger Things' resident babysitter going back to Season 2, but McLaughlin now has me wishing we'd seen more of Lucas looking after some youngsters. Take a look:
Assuming you watched Stranger Things Season 5 with a Netflix subscription just ahead of the 2026 TV schedule picking up, it may still be fresh in your memory that the finale definitely didn't include Lucas leading the kids in a clapping game when they were fresh out of their pods in the ribcage of the Mind Flayer! Most of his scenes with the kids involved trying to save them from being taken by Demogorgons, so it's fun to get a glimpse of Caleb McLaughlin interacting with his young co-stars behind the scenes of the finale without any monsters in the mix.
Episode 8 of Season 5 was of course the genuine finale, with #ConformityGate theories about a secret real finale not coming to fruition, and the One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things 5 documentary was a deep dive into the production of the season rather than filled with payoffs on any unanswered questions. I'm not expecting debate over the quality of the ending to fizzle out any time soon (and even the CinemaBlend staff is conflicted over Eleven's ending), but I hope we can all agree that Caleb McLaughlin making a bid for Stranger Things' #1 babysitter is pretty delightful.
Fans in the comments of Netflix's TikTok post don't seem to see McLaughlin (or Lucas) coming for Joe Keery's (or Steve's) crown as babysitter, as Steve has evidently been elevated to parental status after how the series ended. Check out just a handful of comments, edited for clarity:
- @𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐞ꨄ: "Mother Steve had to put babysitter Lucas in charge for a bit."
- @Brandon Max: "STEVE IS PROUD."
- @˚⋆𐙚。𝙼𝚒𝚔𝚎 𝚠𝚑𝚎𝚎𝚕𝚎𝚛˚⋆: "Steve is def proud 🥹✌️."
- @Not_christopher67: "Steve would be proud."
- @sam 💕: "The babies became the babysitters 🥺."
Considering the open-ended nature of the divisive finale, viewers can technically speculate that Lucas goes on to become a babysitter between classes in college just as easily as they can speculate about Eleven and her waterfalls. There's no need to theorize about Steve continuing to work with kids, however, after his epilogue fate revealed that he was coaching a baseball team and working as a very lenient sex ed teacher to the youth of Hawkins.
For now, it remains to be seen just how long Stranger Things remains a hot topic to keep people commenting. The video with Caleb McLaughlin was posted just shy of two weeks after the finale released and a day after the documentary premiered, and already accumulated more than 132k "likes" on TikTok as well as more than 1.6k comments. Sure, some of the comments are still about #ConformityGate, but it's clear that plenty of people still care.
At the time of writing, Stranger Things has dropped to #7 on Netflix's Top 10 TV Shows in the U.S., while the One Last Adventure documentary is currently at #2 on Netflix's Top 10 Movies in the U.S. It's only being beaten by People We Meet On Vacation (which drew some interesting takes from critics), so that places it as the #1 documentary on the streamer. If you're not ready to move on from the world of Hawkins, the Upside Down, and/or the Abyss, you can always revisit the earlier years of the series on Netflix now.
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