Stranger Things series finale will be “Return Of The King-ish”
By Dan Selcke
The final two episodes of the fourth season of Stranger Things dropped this past weekend on Netflix, and they were a doozy, if for no other reason than the finale was two-and-a-half hours long! I mean, is this even a TV show anymore? That’s a movie, people. A long one.
The whole season is pretty huge, with no episode shorter than an hour and a few considerably longer. Appearing on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, creators Matt and Ross Duffer said they expect the fifth and final season to be a bit shorter.
“We don’t expect it to be as long,” Matt said. “And the only reason we don’t expect to be as long is because typically—or 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. 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 obviously is going to be occurring in the first two episodes of [Season 5]. For the first time ever, we don’t wrap things up at the end of four.”
"I don’t know that it’s going to be going 100 miles an hour at the start of [Season 5], but it’s going to be moving pretty fast. Characters are already going to be in action. They’re already going to have a goal and a drive, and I think that’s going to carve out at least a couple hours and make this season feel really different."
Stranger Things creators promise shorter season 5, but they’re probably wrong
Personally, I think I could use a little more of the slice-of-life stuff, but it’ll also be fun to see the show hit the ground running.
That said, even in this same interview, Matt second-guessed the whole “the next season will be shorter” thing. “If you had talked to us at the start of writing [Season 4] I would have told you it’s about eight episodes and they’re about an hour long each, so I don’t know. I wouldn’t trust a word that comes out of my mouth.”
In fact, he went even further, suggesting the series finale will be another feature-length event that takes its time winding up all the storylines. “It’s going to be Return Of The King-ish with, like, eight endings.”
Look, the final season of Stranger Things will have 20 episodes and they’ll all be at least two hours long; we should just start preparing now.
As for when we’ll get to watch this behemoth, there’s no release date yet, but we shouldn’t expect to have to wait as long as we did for season 4.
Next. Every episode of Stranger Things season 4, reviewed and explained. dark
To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.
Get HBO, Starz, Showtime and MORE for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels
h/t The A.V. Club