It's hard to believe, but in a few short months we'll have seen the end of Stranger Things. Who could have predicted back when the '80s-themed sci-fi show began its run in 2016 that it would grow into the biggest genre television juggernaut since Game of Thrones? The hype is through the roof for its final season, which will finish out the series in spectacular fashion as our teenaged heroes in Hawkins, Indiana duke it out with the forces of darkness from the Upside Down.
The comparison to Game of Thrones is especially relevant, because that may be the last time a show had this much attention trained on its final season. We all remember how that turned out; the series rushed to the finish line, and fans the world over turned on the beloved fantasy show like Freys at the Red Wedding. A petition for HBO to re-do season 8 with "competent writers" racked up more than 1.8 million signatures. To this day, when you Google "bad writers," articles about Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss are the first things to pop up. It was a blood bath.
Needless to say, the team behind Stranger Things very much wants to avoid this fate. “I think everyone was pretty worried, honestly,” Finn Wolfhard (Mike Wheeler) told Time Magazine. “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.”
Fortunately for Stranger Things, it is in a very different position than Game of Thrones. HBO's fantasy show was based on pre-existing source material by author George R.R. Martin...except it had long left Martin's unfinished book series behind, and needed to forge its own path to an ending. No matter how good Benioff and Weiss and the rest of the creative team behind Thrones may have been, they were not George R.R. Martin. Martin is a once-in-a-generation talent, and there's no denying the show suffered without the guidance of his books. Add in the fact that fans had been ravenous to have any hint of how the series would end ever since the first book released in 1996, and it was a recipe for disaster.
Stranger Things, on the other hand, is not based on anything except creators Matt and Ross Duffer's own imagination. This is their story, which they have shepherded to immense success and critical acclaim. Yes, it's still more than possible that some fans will be disappointed with the ending of Stranger Things; I think that whenever an extremely popular story ends, it's bound to have admirers and detractors of its conclusion. But so far the creative vision has remained razor sharp for Stranger Things, and wherever season 5 goes, it will be where its creators wanted it to go. That alone is enough to give it a leg up on Thrones.
The Duffer Brothers are not figuring things out as they go, either. They've been planning this ending for a long time. “We knew roughly what the end scene was for years — it wasn’t something we had a strain to come up with,” Matt Duffer told Variety. “There were elements of it that were discussed for weeks, but the core idea of the ending, we had for a really long time.”
Stranger Things 5 will release in three parts on Neflix. Part One drops on November 26, Part Two on December 25, and The Finale on December 31.
h/t Variety