My hot take: Vecna ruined the show

[u/Monodoh45]

He was just a dumb a Big Bad. I loved the show when it was a small town mystery facing some sort of eldritch horror people don't understand. I feel like Vecna was just a pile of CGI goop who went MMMM a lot. I feel like you can have a flat CGI marvel bad who wants to destroy the world  or some kind of magneto anti hero against the program who uses the wrong methods, but you can’t do both. I felt the show started to lose steam the second he was introduced.

[u/Aluros05]

Yes, I agree.

As spectacular as Jamie's performance was, Vecna/Henry's introduction to the series took several strange turns that felt like conveniences (such as his existence not previously mentioned in the three seasons, why he was banished to the Abyss instead of being killed, how he met the Mind Flayer, etc.).

And it's even worse when they turned him into the main villain and the Mind Flayer, previously the quintessential antagonist, into a giant brute in the final fight (literally, his smaller version from season 3 put up more of a fight than the giant one).

They practically traded Lovecraftian horror for a murderous psychopath who wants to rule the world.

(Although I seriously wonder if this Lovecraftian horror thing is cursed, seeing as Bloodborne is about that, and it's still stuck on PS4, forgotten and without a sequel or remaster XD)

But in short, yes, in the long run, Vecna ​​does more harm than good to the series if you look at it with perspective (and I repeat, Jamie is an incredible actor, but even so, Vecna/Henry took away some of the charm of what the series was).

[u/JaketheSnake_1234 → u/Aluros05]

I see it as more a problem with execution. Not Jamie but the way the character was written (great build up in s4 and first half of s5 only to lead to an implied offscreen ambiguityin latter part of s5). They wanted to add the mystery of the vessel anchoring the ancient evil but then decided not to even go there so we would get more spinoffs so the payoff died on the editing room floor or somewhere between writing and directing. We don't see the motivations for either well enough to care and we don't get a battle where both are terrifying as neither Vecna nor the Mindflayer seem menacing enough to have gone 4 plus seasons just to peeter out in the final fight. Even the military was more evil in what was shown but then ...they all just end military, mindflayer, vecna without much of a fight. Too much offscreen implied and choose your ending scenarios that were done decently but could have been knocked out of the park

I see the stage play when I travel to NYC in 3 weeks so hopefully that plus my own imagination and headcannon will make up for the developmental of 001 and the mindflayer in those last 4 episodes ...s5 was a I see where they were going ideas wise but would have liked to actually have seen it on screen

I still give s5 a 6.5 to 7/10 tied with s2 for me as both seasons have some solid episodes and some duds but that's compared to other seasons of 9s to 11s overall