Duffer Brothers Talk “Stranger Things” Season 5 Finale Runtime & What The Upside Down Really Is

The fifth and final season of Stranger Things is coming to Netflix later this year, and fans are in for a big send-off.

The season will have eight episodes, split into three releases. The first two volumes drop on November 26 and December 25, with the finale landing on December 31. The Duffer Brothers, along with Shawn Levy and Dan Cohen, are producing the final chapter.

Almost all the main cast members are returning, including Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Noah Schnapp, Sadie Sink, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Joe Keery, Maya Hawke, Brett Gelman, and Priah Ferguson. Amybeth McNulty, who guest-starred in the previous season, joins the main cast this time, along with newcomer Linda Hamilton.

Season 5 picks up a year after the events of Season 4. The story is set in the fall of 1987, and Hawkins is in chaos after Vecna opened rifts to the Upside Down.

The group reunites to stop Vecna, but the military’s arrival complicates things, especially for Eleven. As the anniversary of Will Byers’ disappearance approaches, the characters face one last deadly challenge.

In a recent interview with Variety, the Duffer Brothers shared some insights about the final season. They revealed that most episodes are about an hour long, though Episode 4 runs 83 minutes, and the finale clocks in at “around two hours.”

Matt Duffer explained that one of the biggest questions they finally wanted to answer was about the Upside Down. “Every season would be like, ‘Should we talk about it?’ And we’d go, ‘No, let’s wait.’ And then finally, we’re like, ‘Well, we have to now!’”

The writers started Season 5 with a very open approach. “Everything was on the table when we first started,” said co-writer Dichter. “We had the names of every character on a whiteboard, and it was like anything is possible for any of these characters. They could live or die. They could end up together…”

Trefry added, “Or not together. Especially as the show’s arc drew toward the final climax, the writers had to deliver enormous spectacle while not letting it devolve into a CG slimefest, where you don’t really care who’s doing what and why.”

The team worked hard to keep the show grounded in its core themes. “It’s never cynical. It’s never winking at you. It’s looking toward that core of innocence and how to maintain that as you grow older and are beset by all of the nightmares of the world,”

Trefry said. Writing the finale took multiple rounds of revisions. “We went back over and over and over and over, dozens of times. They would start writing it, they’d come back. We’d blow it up, and we’d just rinse and repeat.”

Matt Duffer added that they always had the ending in mind. “We knew roughly what the end scene was for years, it wasn’t something we had a strain to come up with. There were elements of it that were discussed for weeks, but the core idea of the ending, we had for a really long time.”

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