All good things must come to an end, and, in contrast to a lot of great shows that overstayed their welcome (*Cough* Game of Thrones, though House of the Dragon has been something of a redemptive tonic), it seems like Stranger Things is going to pull the plug at the right time.
Four seasons in, we finally know – more or less – what the endgame is following the feature-length season four finale, and season 5, which has already been announced as the show's last, is shaping up to be a beast of a conclusion to Netflix's biggest series.
We were expecting to see production begin for Stranger Things season 5 last year, but the writers' strike threw a bit of a spanner in the works. (Something something, David Zaslav is more evil than Vecna, something.) We now know that it will pick back up in January, meaning the home stretch is upon us. Here's everything else we know about the final season so far.
The Duffer Brothers know the pressure is on to end the series with a bang
How do you wrap up a show that - over seven years - has snowballed into the kind of phenomenon that can make superstars out of its unknown cast and shoot a 40-year-old song to the top of the charts? It's something the show's creators, the Duffer brothers, are very aware of. “Endings of shows are like opening a restaurant in terms of the success-failure rate – there’s an 80% failure rate, I’d say,” said Matt Duffer. “But I think one very particular way to fail is to attempt to appease everybody. We have a huge variety of fans that span a huge age range and 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."
The entirety of season 5 is now written, and the pair seem content with where they've decided to park the ship. "It was funny: once we got there, it just felt right and we’re going to go for it!”
Despite trying to block out the voices of the Mind Flayer-esque Twittersphere (let's hope they're more successful than Henry Creel in that respect), the brothers say they have pulled out all the stops for the show's final outing to make sure as many people feel satisfied by the ending as possible. “This season – it’s like season one on steroids,” said Matt. “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. And, yes, there may be spin-offs, but the story of Eleven and Dustin and Lucas and Hopper, their stories are done here. That’s it…"
That backs up something they said earlier this year with regards to streamlining the show's stories in the lead-up to its finale and re-focusing on what made the series such a hit in the first place. Speaking to IndieWire, Matt Duffer said “We're doing our best to resist [adding new characters] for Season 5. We're trying not to do that so we can focus on the OG characters, I guess.”
Will “takes centre stage” in Stranger Things season 5, according to the Duffers
Noah Schnapp opened up on the next season of Stranger Things in a Variety profile, in which he also spoke about coming out as gay — and how that was informed by the coming out of his character in the show, Will.
The Duffer brothers told Variety that Will “really takes center stage again in 5," after being somewhat sidelined since the first season, in which his disappearance served to kick off the story. “This emotional arc for him is what we feel is going to hopefully tie the whole series together. Will is used to being the young one, the introverted one, the one that's being protected,” Ross Duffer said. “So part of his journey, it's not just sexuality — it's Will coming into his own as a young man.”
Observant viewers will notice the neat symmetry this teases: after all, it was Will's journey into the Upside Down that set Stranger Things in motion in the first place, so it's pleasing and clever that the closure of his personal arc will seemingly be the focus of this final season. How long we'll have to wait to see it remains an open question with the SAG and WGA strikes ongoing.
Earlier in the profile, the Duffers confirm that they'd always conceived of Will as a character struggling with his sexuality, though they weren't aware of the overlap with Schnapp's personal identity until the young actor came out publicly at the beginning of 2023. “Honestly, no,” Matt Duffer told Variety. “I actually didn't know at all until he came out I found out when everybody else found out on the internet.”
Linda Hamilton has joined the Stranger Things fold
They've had Winona Ryder, Robert Englund, Sean Astin, Matthew Modine… now it's time for another ‘80s icon to come in to the Stranger Things line-up. Enter Linda Hamilton, star of the original Terminator movie — perhaps the prototypical ’80s sci-fi action flick. It's that or Aliens. (No, but really, it's The Terminator.)
Exact details on her character are being kept under wraps, per Variety. The casting news was announced at Netflix's Tudum event, as Tweeted out by the streamer.
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Such is Hamilton's prime position in the collective nostalgia brain of ‘80s kids across the land, not least the Duffers, it’s kinda surprising that they've not nabbed her for a season before this. Now we'll just wait for the Jamie Lee and Sigourney announcements.
Maya Hawke has mixed feelings on Robin getting a girlfriend in Stranger Things season 5
Season three dropped a bombshell revelation when Maya Hawke's Robin, then looking to be on a one-way train to romance city with crusher Steve (Joe Keery), came out as a lesbian. The following season saw them grow into best buds — she tells Nancy they're “Platonic with a capital P” — with Robin yet to come out to anyone else (it's the '80s, after all).
A scene in the final episode, however, teased the potential blossoming of sandwich-based romance between Robin and a new muse, Amybeth McNulty's Vickie, a clarinettist who plays with Robin in the Hawkins marching band. Will they become girlfriends, even on the down low? Whatever the case, Hawke doesn't know what the writers have planned for Robin in the final season, as per a recent interview with Yahoo Entertainment. She has conflicting feelings about the character's potential direction regardless.
“I don't know. I feel mixed about it,” Hawke said of a potential on-screen beau for Robin. “I feel that it's both a great thing, but I also love characters where their love life is not the center of their existence. That friendship with Steve is so special. And friendships have been carrying me through my life. I think they're really important and they deserve their airtime.” Sounds to us like there might be a love triangle set up in the making, here. Somebody get Luca Guadagnino on the phone.
When will Stranger Things season 5 be released?
With production only kicking back into gear in January and the revelation that this series will be bigger than ever in terms of scale, it's unlikely we'll see season 5 any time before 2025.
In an interview with GQ, Wolfhard revealed that he'll be 22 by the time season 5 hits our screens, which, considering he was born in December 2002, puts us securely in 2025. He also added “I’ll be able to drink with Gaten [Mazarro], Caleb [McLaughlin] and Noah [Schnapp] and the whole cast at the premiere of Stranger Things 5. [You] couldn’t have said the same thing at the season one premiere, which blows my mind.”
At least, with season 5 closing out this chapter of Stranger Things, they won't have to resort to some The Irishman technology to de-age these newly-minted twenty-somethings into 13-year-olds.
What is going to happen in Stranger Things season 5?
At the end of season four, Big Bad Vecna won the battle for Hawkins, creating a rift in the barrier between our reality and the Upside Down, merging the two worlds. It means there'll be nothing stopping Vecna and his army of demogorgons and demobirds from attacking the town and its inhabitants.
So, it seems like season 5 will see Eleven and co attempting to fend off these evil forces, close the entry point to the Upside Down permanently and kill Vecna once and for all. Sounds like a spicy one.
At an LA panel in November, co-showrunner Matt Duffer revealed that while few people know how the series will end, the pitch for the full final season — a two-hour meeting with Netflix executives — left the room in tears. “We did get our executives to cry, which I felt was a good sign that these executives were crying. The only other times I've seen them cry were like budget meetings,” he joked. Grab the tissues.
The first episode of Stranger Things season 5 will be called “The Crawl"
Fans were hoping for something big on 6 November, dubbed “Stranger Things Day" by Netflix in reference to the date that Will Byers went missing in the first season of the show, and the Duffer Brothers didn't disappoint. Although likely still a while off, with star David Harbour telling GQ that he didn't expect the final season to drop until at least mid-2024, they announced on Twitter the title of the premiere, “The Crawl.”
Since that announcement on Sunday, fans have been in a tizzy trying to decipher what it could mean — no mean feat based on, well, two words, but these are some dedicated so-and-sos with a hell of a lot of time on their hands. As a result, the internet is already alight with theories (insert the It's Always Sunny conspiracy meme here), from Metallica lyrics to Dungeons and Dragons.
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First off, some fans reckon the title could derive from the chorus of Metallica's “Master of Puppets," on which James Hetfield roared “Come crawling faster / Obey your master.” As Stranger Things heads all know, this was the song that Joseph Quinn's Eddie Munson rocked out to in season four's explosive climax, and as such has become irrevocably entwined with his character (Quinn even jammed with the band themselves over the summer). Some suggest, then, that this could mark Munson's resurrection, unlikely so it would be. But hey, if Hopper could come back, why not another cooler-than-cool misanthrope?
Another broadly backed theory is that “The Crawl” refers to the “dungeon crawl” section of a Dungeons and Dragons game, in which the players face off against various monsters and ghoulies while solving puzzles in labyrinthian lairs. In this case, season 5 would have to open with aplomb, immediately pitting our heroes against the burgeoning threats of the Upside Down — and that'd certainly chime with what we see in the denouement of Stranger Things season four, which sent the shadowy realm of Vecna into terrifying convergence with normal, nice Hawkins.
Whatever the case, at least we only have to wait, like, two years to find out.
Maya Hawke says “people are probably going to die” in Stranger Things season 5
Thank god Stranger Things isn't late-stage Game of Thrones, but it serves to suggest that they'll wanna ramp the tension up as much as possible for an explosive final season. And how better to do that than send all of our favourite characters to an early grave? They already faked the death of David Harbour's Chief Hopper, of course, pulling a fast one off with a death tease at the end of season three — but that doesn't mean the plot armour is gonna stick around. Just ask Maya Hawke.
Speaking in a recent Rolling Stone profile, the 24-year-old actor, who portrays one-time ice cream purveyor and Hawkins mainstay Robin, said: “Well, it's the last season, so people are probably gonna die." She continued:
“I would love to die and get my hero's moment. I'd love to die with honour, as any actor would. But I love the way the Duffer Brothers love their actors. The reason that they write so beautifully for me and for everyone else is because they fall in love with their actors and their characters, and they don't want to kill them. I think that's a beautiful quality that they have, and I wouldn't wish it away.”
Will Stranger Things season 5 have the same whopper episode lengths as season 4?
According to the Duffer Brothers, no. After dropping a set of 1.5 hour episodes this time around, the Duffers say they'll be able to get things done a little bit quicker in season 5, thanks to the cliffhanger ending allowing them to skip through the preamble of previous outings. “The only reason we don’t expect to be as long is, this season, if you look at it, it’s almost a two-hour ramp up before our kids really get drawn into a supernatural mystery,” they said.
“You get to know them, you get to see them in their lives, they’re struggling with adapting to high school and so forth, Steve’s trying to find a date, all of that. None of that is obviously going to be occurring [in season five]."
They did say, however, that they'll probably do a feature-length finale again, and given its going to be the last ever episode (of the show in its current format, anyway), that sounds like a good thing.
Is Max dead? Is Sadie Sink coming back in Stranger Things season 5?
Sadly, it's still unclear. As far as we know, Max is in a coma. But when Eleven tried to find her in the void toward the end of the finale, she was nowhere to be found. Sadie Sink, who plays Max, says she doesn't know if Max is dead or alive, or whether she'll be back next season.
“I have no idea what’s coming in five and what that looks like,” Sink told Deadline. “Max’s storyline is very up in the air, ’cause obviously she’s in a coma and Eleven can’t find her in the void. So who knows where she is and what state she’s in.”
Is this the last of the Stranger Things universe?
Is anything ever really dead when it comes to pop culture? It's probably safe to say that the tangled world of Hawkins and the Upside Down has left a lot of unexplored paths ripe for exploration, so who knows what could be unearthed in five or ten years. Wolfhard has already joked that he's not expecting his journey as Mike Wheeler to be over with season 5, saying “I mean, Netflix is gonna want us to come back in 10 years anyways and do Stranger Things: The Adult Years or whatever. They wanna milk it, people want to see it, and I wanna milk it as well.”
There's also been talk for years of a Robin x Steve odd couple-style spin-off, which Maya Hawke is particularly keen on. “Normally I wouldn't be a proponent of a spin-off,” she said. Though she did concede that she'd be up for doing one with Joe Keery, who stars as best bud Steve. “If I got to do it with Joe Keery, I would do anything,” she continued. “He's so funny and wonderful and smart, and he's got great boundaries. He's an excellent coworker, and I would do anything for him.”
So, if Robin doesn't go out in a blaze of Schwarzenegger-esque glory, soundtracked by Bonnie Tyler with an M60 in one hand and a grenade launcher in the other, maybe there's more gas left in the tank of that friendship forged in the depths of Scoops Ahoy.
In the immediate future, however, a prequel outing is set to make its way to us in the form of a West End stage show. Stranger Things: The First Shadow premieres this winter in London, telling the story of Hawkins way before The Hellfire Club and Eleven, focusing instead on the life of a young Jim Hopper in 1959. The show will also feature Henry Creel, the troubled young would-be Vecna. The Duffer Brothers are behind the show, alongside series writer Kate Trefry and Jack Thorne, who brought Harry Potter and the Cursed Child to the stage.
