Get ready, Stranger Things fans: the creative team behind the sci-fi drama/horror series is beginning to drop hints about what we can expect from the show’s upcoming fifth and final season.
“[Season] Five, the way we see it, is kind of a culmination of all the seasons,” creator Ross Duffer said during an FYC panel attended by Variety over the weekend, teasing that Season 5 would pull elements from each of its four prior seasons.
Duffer says that while the first four seasons of Stranger Things all had a “distinct” style—citing the “big summer blockbuster” of Season 3 and “psychological horror” of Season 4—the final return to Hawkins will be one reminiscent of the very first season.
“I think that what we’re trying to do is go back to beginning a little bit, in sort of the tone of [Season] 1,” he said, adding that the last group of episodes in the final season are “scale-wise,” more aligned with its immediate predecessor, Season 4.
“Hopefully, it’s got a little bit of everything.”
Stranger Things Season 5 Pitch Meeting Had Execs ‘In Tears’
While the Stranger Things team is keeping mum on spoilers for now, they’ve already cooked up an emotional conclusion for the series—the two-hour pitch meeting where they laid out their plan for the show’s end allegedly left Netflix execs in tears.
And as fans prepare to say goodbye to characters like Millie Bobby Brown’s Eleven or Noah Schnapp’s Will Byers, how could they not be?
“Just as important as the supernatural, we have so many characters now, most of whom are still living,” Duffer said, noting the importance of giving meaningful endings to characters who have grown up in front of our eyes.
“It’s important to wrap up those arcs because a lot of these characters have been growing since Season 1. So, it’s a balancing act between giving them time to complete their character arcs and also tying up these loose ends and doing our final reveals,” he added.
While director Shawn Levy told the panel he was “paralyzed with fear” when it came to accidentally revealing spoilers, he would say that he was impressed with how Duffer and his brother/co-creator Matt Duffer were “taking care of” the characters’ stories in the final season.
“Even though the show has gotten so famous and the characters have gotten so iconic, and they’re so much about the ’80s and the supernatural and the genre, it’s about these people. It’s about these characters. Season 5 is already so clearly taking care of these stories of characters because that’s always been the lifeblood of Stranger Things,” he said.
Seasons 1-4 of Stranger Things are now streaming on Netflix.
