When Stranger Things ends later this year, it will be the fulfillment of something the Duffer Brothers have been thinking about for a long, long time. Not just the show as a whole, but specifically, the final scene of the show.
“We’ve known for a really long time what the final scene of the show was going to be, which gave us a North Star,” Matt Duffer told the Hollywood Reporter. “But as far as a lot of the details, that was us and our writers following the story and the characters in ways that often surprised us.”
Showrunners and creators often say that sort of thing as their big show or movie series comes to a close, but for the Duffers, we know it’s true. Way back in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, they were also saying the same thing. “We’ve known the ending of the show for quite a while,” Matt Duffer said five years ago. “The honest truth is we didn’t know if we’d go beyond season one, so we liked the idea of season one that it could function basically as its own standalone piece, like almost as a limited series. But it had the potential to go beyond that. And if it were to go beyond that, we had an idea of where it would go. Yeah, and we have an ending in mind.”
That in-between, however, is the main thing that has changed in that time. In 2020, the Duffers were working on Stranger Things 4, which, as we now know, ended with a pretty large cliffhanger, all but promising a new season. But they also knew they couldn’t only think about the ending they had in mind. Each season has had to work on its own.
“We always tried every season to make it the best one we possibly can, as opposed to stressing about the end,” Ross Duffer said back in the present day. “It’s very hard when people have to plan three movies ahead. You have to make one good movie first. And the fact that we grew up watching almost no television, and only watching movies, is why we ended up calling them Stranger Things 2 and Stranger Things 3, rather than seasons two and three. We wanted them each to have their own identity and feel very different. It kept us from getting bored. The second we’d get bored, we knew we’d have to end the show because the creative would suffer.”
Of course, the Duffers wouldn’t say how this season, and the show, will end. And we wouldn’t want them to. It’s been quite the ride, and we are very excited about seeing what the brothers have had in their minds for all this time.
Stranger Things 5 is being released in three parts over the next month or so. It begins with Volume 1 on November 26, continues with Volume 2 on December 25, and then the finale on December 31.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
