There’s a lot riding on the Duffer Brothers as Stranger Things is about to wrap up its fifth and final season. Whether or not a television series can stick the landing can make or break its legacy, and nearly a decade after the show first premiered, fans are eagerly awaiting its conclusion.
In a wide-ranging Variety feature ahead of Season 5, Matt and Ross Duffer and their creative team opened up about writing a series finale that will hopefully please even the most skeptical of fans.
“We went back over and over and over and over, dozens of times,” said writer Kate Trefry, who has been with the show since Season 2. “They would start writing it, they’d come back. We’d blow it up, and we’d just rinse and repeat.”
To prepare for writing the finale, the Duffers said they “studied” notable series finales that they felt were particularly strong, such as Six Feet Under, Friday Night Lights, and The Sopranos—even if the latter was controversial when it first aired. (If taking into account the Six Feet Under ending is any indication, fans can probably prepare themselves for a real tear jerker.)
“The best ones were very true to themselves,” Ross explained. “The shows that are trying to be super clever—I think that’s where it can go wrong really quickly.”
Matt said that it helped that they knew they were writing towards something specific. “We knew roughly what the end scene was for years‚it wasn’t something we had a strain to come up with,” he said. “There were elements of it that were discussed for weeks, but the core idea of the ending, we had for a really long time.”
“Anyway, we’re really happy with the way it ended,” Matt added with an apparent sigh. “It’s nerve-racking to put it out. I’m sure people will have opinions!”
People will indeed have opinions. In a separate feature in Time magazine, Finn Wolfhard, who plays Mike Wheeler, expressed concern that the finale might have backlash, such as say, Game of Thrones. Fans practically revolted at the conclusion of the eighth and final season back in 2019.
“I think everyone was pretty worried, honestly,” Wolfhard admitted. “The way that Game of Thrones got torn to shreds in that final season, we’re all walking into this going, ‘We hope to not have that kind of thing happen.’ But then we read the scripts. We knew that it was something special.”
In either case, fans won’t have to wait much longer to find out. The first four episodes of Stranger Things Season 5 premiere on Nov. 26, the day before Thanksgiving, while the following three premiere on Christmas, with the finale on New Year’s Eve.
You can watch the official Netflix teaser, here.
