With the final season of Stranger Things now completely finished and the last vestiges of the insane Conformity Gate fan theories fizzling out, fans are finally coming to grips with the reality of the beloved series’ conclusion. In doing so, many longtime fans of the show are voicing similar complaints all stemming from the same central issue: the feeling that the final episode didn’t satisfyingly close all of the various threads from across the show’s five seasons.
In a newly released behind-the-scenes documentary on Netflix, One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things 5, fans have been given a transparent and incredibly frank look at what exactly happened during the making of the final season, and in many ways, it has only served to exacerbate many peoples’ biggest fears. Because in the documentary, it is revealed several times over that not only was the finale for Stranger Things not fully written when production started on the final season; the finale’s script was still unfinished even while they were filming the episode.
Early on in One Last Adventure, the creators of the series, the Duffer Brothers, admit that despite the fact that the season is charging head-first into filming, they do not have a completed set of scripts. As Matt Duffer details, “We went into production without having a finished script for the finale… we are laying down the tracks as the train is going.”
Later on in the documentary, footage is shown of the canyon set from Henry Creel’s dream world, and key set production assistant Montana Manisalco is interviewed on-set, saying “Today’s an interesting day. We are shooting episode eight, which isn’t completely written yet… so we don’t even fully know what’s going on.”
This means that even as the production team was filming key sequences from the final episode, “The Rightside Up,” things were still so in-flux that the script wasn’t even done. This is especially strange given just how delayed the entire final season was. There were several years of downtime between the release of season 4 and the beginning of work on season 5, with the timeline getting pushed even further back in 2024. While it's not for me to insinuate that the writing team should have been writing that entire interim, especially given the Hollywood labor disputes of 2023, it is certainly strange to see that unfinished scripts remained such a problem all the way up until the very end when they had such an abundance of time on their hands.
I also don’t think an unfinished script means that a project is going to be bad. There are plenty of great projects that infamously went into production without a finished script, or one that changed a lot during the actual filming. However, given that some of the most consistent critiques of the Stranger Things finale have all tied back to things that were overlooked, glossed over, or left in a contradictory sort of limbo, it feels fair to say that this unfinished finale script was the source of a great deal of strife.