First, the bad news. Despite the last part of the most recent season coming out more than two years ago, the fifth and final season of Stranger Things won’t be out this year. The culmination to Netflix’s most iconic show won’t be seen until some point in mid to late 2025, presumably by which point all the cute kids we fell in love with back in 2016 will have beer bellies, five o’clock shadows and repeat prescriptions for osteoporosis medication.
The better news is that Stranger Things has started to sense our impatience, which is why it has begun to dribble out information about the final season. A two-minute behind the scenes featurette dropped online on Monday, revealing that filming for season five is about halfway completed. Concrete details about what we can expect to see are remarkably thin on the ground – the video’s dialogue is almost exclusively limited to a) we’re excited about Stranger Things, b) you should be excited about Stranger Things and c) Stranger Things is good – but the more eagle-eyed among you might have noticed a few hints in the background.
For example, 30 seconds in, we learn that production has hired one guy to smear fake blood across yards and yards of cable with his hands. Later, it seems as if several scenes will take place inside a high school, that Vecna is back, that Hopper has a big old beard now, and that Eleven is doing that thing with her hands again. More excitingly, we get a quick glimpse of the new cast member Linda Hamilton, as well as looks at three more just-announced new actors, Nell Fisher, Jake Connelly and Alex Breaux.
Is this enough to make you as excited about season five of Stranger Things as Stranger Things wants you to be? Probably not. Fortunately, the video isn’t the sole source of information we have about the new episodes. A cast this big is bound to be a bit leaky, so here’s what we’ve been able to glean from them so far.
Stranger Things will be big
Obviously it’s going to be big in the sense that it will be inescapable when it drops. But just in terms of sheer mass, Stranger Things is going to be big. The plan is for the series to conclude with eight episodes. However, by all accounts they’re going to be whoppers. Speaking to Podcrushed two weeks ago to promote Inside Out 2, Maya Hawke revealed: “We’re making basically eight movies,” and said the final batch of episodes will be “very long”.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise, since episodes of Stranger Things have been gradually expanding. Every episode of season four was more than an hour long, with five over 75 minutes and the season finale clocking in at a punishing two and a half hours. If this is the sort of scale that season five is planning to beat, it might be worth investing in some flight socks to watch it.
It sounds quite full-on
As well as the inclusion of Linda Hamilton – who you don’t hire unless the script requires something supremely badass – all signs point to season five being the most ambitious yet. Last year some of the Stranger Things writers hinted that season five would be like “if season one and four had a baby. And then that baby was injected with steroids.”
The season one part might stem from the fact that Will is thought to be the main character this time around, with the episodes forming a sort of supernatural coming of age story for him. It is also going to be “pedal to the metal from the opening scene” and “rock and roll throughout the entire season”, according to showrunners and directors. One of the Duffer brothers also said that the scripts are so emotional that “I saw executives crying who I’ve never seen cry before.”
The cast is itchy for death
There’s a part of the new featurette in which Millie Bobby Brown notes that she started work on Stranger Things when she was 10, and now she’s pushing 20. In interviews she’s given recently, that fatigue has been loud and clear. Last year she stated: “I’m definitely ready to wrap up. I feel like there’s a lot of the story that’s been told now, and we know of it, it’s been in our lives for a very long time. But I’m very ready to say goodbye to this chapter of my life and open new ones.”
In the same interview, Noah Schnapp said that the Duffer brothers “need to kill off some people”, because the show has got “too big”, before Brown added: “The Duffer brothers are two sensitive Sallies that don’t want to kill anyone off ... We need to be Game of Thrones. We need to have the mindset of Game of Thrones.” Maybe they listened. And maybe that means Eleven comes to a grisly end.
The end isn’t the end
Inevitably, as much as this is being billed as the final season of Stranger Things, that isn’t the case. There’s the Stranger Things play, plus an animated Stranger Things series has been announced. Plus, upon announcing the final season, the Duffer brothers said: “There are still many more exciting stories to tell within the world of Stranger Things. New mysteries, new adventures, new unexpected heroes.” Basically this thing is going to outlive us all, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
