Stranger Things will try not to introduce new characters in season 5

The fourth season of Stranger Things has been out for a minute now, and we can look back and say that it was an unqualified hit. It was at the top of the Netflix charts for weeks, everyone was singing “Running Up That Hill” by Kate Bush, and fans can’t wait for season 5.

And this after the show took a multi-year break between seasons 3 and 4. “The most important thing for us is to get it right and not rush it,” creator Matt Duffer told IndieWire. “If we’ve made any mistakes with the show, it’s been through rushing. I don’t want to take forever — you can’t because of the kids, we can’t take 10 years. So we gotta move at a decent pace. But our priority is to get it right.”

Translation: don’t expect to see the fifth and final season anytime soon. But when it does come, it should end the show right.

The final season of Stranger Things will “focus on the OG characters”

Matt and his twin brother Ross Duffer did give the barest of hints of what they’ll do in season 5…or rather, what they won’t do. “We’re doing our best to resist [adding new characters] for Season 5,” Matt said. “We’re trying not to do that so we can focus on the OG characters, I guess.”

This is after a long history of successfully introducing new characters to an already-full cast and watching them go on to be embraced by the fandom, rather than feeling like weird appendages. It happened with Max in season 2, with Robin in season 3, and most recently with Eddie Munson in season 4, Metallica rest his soul.

“Whenever we introduce a new character, we want to make sure that they’re going to be an integral part of the narrative,” Ross said. “So that’s something with Eddie this season, where we go, ‘Well, we need a character here for this storyline to really work, and to give it the engine that is needed.’ But every time we do that, we’re nervous, because you go, ‘We’ve got a great cast of characters here, and actors, and any moment we’re spending with a new character, we’re taking time away from one of the other actors.’ So we’re just very, very careful about who we’re introducing.”

No, Vecna wasn’t the plan from the beginning

Obviously they’ve done a good job up until now, but it does make sense to focus on the core crew for the show’s final go-round, especially when they have such a powerful threat to face: the fourth season introduced Vecna, a Freddy Kreueger-esque villain whom it was revealed was behind pretty much everything that had gone wrong in Hawkins since the first season.

That said, the Duffers didn’t have the idea for Vecna to be the big bad of the series from the start. “The truth of it is when we came in, and we pitched it, it was just one season that we had figured out, we didn’t do the five season map out, because our approach — and it sort of is still to this day — is one season is so much to focus on, just focus on getting that right. We had no idea we were gonna go beyond Season 1, so it was just like, ‘Let’s make an amazing season, we may never have this opportunity again.'”

"And then when we got that opportunity again, and the show was successful enough, we’re like, “OK, we’re gonna get multiple seasons,” we did sit down and sort of figure out a lot more about the mythology of the Upside Down. And we have a 25, 30 page document that’s a little bit boring to get through, but it has a lot of the ideas that we started to introduce this season. And initially, it was more fun that we didn’t know it. It’s scarier to not know, but as we were moving this so many hours into the season, it started to actually be fun to start pulling back the curtain, not too much, but pulling back the curtain a little bit and revealing more about the Upside Down, the origins of the Upside Down, what happened to the numbers and all that. So we jokingly call this [season] Stranger Things: Revelations because we tell the audience a lot of what was in that document when we were working on Season 2."

Ross confirmed that “it wasn’t really till we’d gotten into the season that we figured out all the details. That it was Henry, that this is how his powers are going to work and operate, and all of that. So we like leaving these huge goalposts, what the Upside Down is, and we hint at it this season, but the final reveal is going to be in Season 5, and we’re excited about that.” Us too.

Stranger Things creator “lied” to Netflix when pitching the show

The Duffers have come a long way since the start, when Stranger Things was an ’80s pastiche they had no idea if anyone would like. “I told Netflix it would appeal to everybody, but I was lying to them to get the show sold,” Matt said. “We thought it would appeal to us, people who grew up on these movies, either watching them in the ’80s, or like us, steep[ed] in the VHS growing up. So that has been the biggest shock to me, that it has resonated as much as it had with preteens and teens who don’t have these references. That has everything to do with the style of storytelling that we’re trying to replicate. It’s just encouraging.”

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