Stranger Things has been a Netflix fixture since 2016—but the freaky events in Hawkins will wrap up starting in November, when the first chunk of season five arrives. Co-creators Ross and Matt Duffer know fans have towering expectations for the show’s long-awaited (season four was 2022) conclusion, and they’re doing all they can to make the series’ end a satisfying one.
In a new Variety profile, the Duffer brothers were obviously cagey about any spoilers, but they spoke in vague terms about what to expect.
It will be cohesive and coherent, tying back to all that’s come before: “It doesn’t feel like we dropped a storyline—it all connects,” Ross said.
Matt added, “We do every last remaining thing we wanted to do with the Demogorgons and Mind Flayer and Vecna and the Upside Down and Hawkins and these characters. This is a complete story. It’s done.”
In keeping with that, season five will address one of the biggest enigmas Stranger Things has cooked up: exactly what is the Upside Down, beyond the obvious “sinister alternate dimension” we assume it to be?
Ross told Variety he and the show’s other writers are well aware there are a lot of questions about that. “Every season would be like, ‘Should we talk about it?’ And we’d go, ‘No, let’s wait.’ And then finally, we’re like, ‘Well, we have to now!’”
There’s good news, too, for fans who are tired of seeing the ensemble cast split apart on different side quests. Season five begins with everyone together in Hawkins (still quarantined by the military), some 18 months after the end of season four.
But “everything was on the table when we first started,” writer Paul Dichter explained. “We had the names of every character on a whiteboard, and it was like anything is possible for any of these characters. They could live or die. They could end up together…”
“Or not together,” Kate Trefry, another writer on the series, added. The goal was to deliver “enormous spectacle” that’s not “a CG slimefest, where you don’t really care who’s doing what and why.”
And just because Stranger Things is ending—and the Duffers are departing Netflix for a new deal at Paramount—it won’t be the end of that world. There’s still the upcoming animated series Stranger Things: Tales From ’85 (set after season two; thanks to the format, Matt said, “the kids can stay young forever”) and the much-speculated-about Stranger Things spinoff.
While neither Duffer is talking details, Matt said it will not “increasingly expand what could become an insanely convoluted mythology,” but rather, as Ross explained it, it will “live in a bit of a different world,” but “there’s going to be connective tissue.”
Stranger Things season five drops episodes November 26, December 25, and December 31.