Summary
- The final season of Stranger Things will be the biggest and most epic yet, reminiscent of the show’s beloved first season.
- The core group of characters will be reunited, providing a satisfying full-circle conclusion that fans have been waiting for.
- The show’s creators are realistic about the challenge of pleasing everyone with the ending, but they are focused on telling the story they want, rather than consulting social media.
The concluding season of Stranger Things won’t premiere on Netflix until 2025, but series creators Matt and Ross Duffer are sharing a bit of what audiences can expect. Setbacks, namely the writers’ and actors’ strikes that put much of Hollywood at a standstill, have delayed production for the show’s fifth season (the fourth season premiered back in May 2022). With both strikes now resolved, the final chapter has been written and production will begin next month. While speaking with The Guardian about Stranger Things: The First Shadow, a stage play set in the 1950s that acts as a prequel to the series, the two also opened up about Stranger Things‘ upcoming conclusion:
“This season — it’s like season one on steroids. It’s the biggest it’s ever been in terms of scale, but it has been really fun, because everyone’s back together in Hawkins: the boys and Eleven interacting more in line with how it was in season one,” Matt said.
As the show’s passionate audiences will recall, season 4 of the beloved sci-fi horror series saw much of its core cast separated. Bringing the group back together again not only provides a full-circle conclusion, but also plays on the show’s strengths: critics and audiences believe Stranger Things is at its best when its core group is united.
Drawing a comparison between the final season and the show’s first season, which aired back in 2016, is promising: the show’s first season is the most praised by critics and series fans. The Duffer brothers are realistic, though, and they are aware that pleasing everyone with the show’s outcome is impossible:
“Endings of shows are like opening a restaurant in terms of the success-failure rate,” Matt said. “There’s an 80% failure rate, I’d say. But I think one very particular way to fail is to attempt to appease everybody. We have a huge variety of fans. I’m sure they have all their own ideas of how they want the show to end. But we’re not consulting social media on this.”
Shawn Levy and David Harbour on Stranger Things’ Ending
While plot details for season five are being kept under wraps, there have been other hints at a stellar concluding season. In October, producer and director Shawn Levy said:
“There’s no way to be contiguous with Season 4, and not, frankly, expand scale and depth,” Levy said. “It’s major, major, cinematic storytelling that happens to be called a TV series. ‘Stranger Things 5’ is as big as any of the biggest movies that we see.”
Last month, David Harbour, who has starred in the series as Jim Hopper since its first season, was happy to share that Stranger Things would have a “real ending.”
“The beauty of it is there’s a real ending — things will end in a very real way…Netflix is gonna do spin-offs… but the storyline where we started in the lab and Upside Down is one complete story,” Harbour said during an appearance at Motor City Comic Con.
Long before Levy and Harbour’s comments, Ross told The Wrap that season five would “be pedal to the metal from the opening scene.” All these comments point to an adrenaline-filled and emotional final season of Stranger Things.
Stranger Things seasons 1 through 4 are streaming on Netflix. The fifth season is scheduled for release in 2025. Stranger Things: The First Shadow is at London’s Phoenix Theatre until August 25, 2024.
