2025 is looking like it will be one of the greatest years in history for fantasy and sci-fi television. There are so many good shows on the way, but one of the biggest is Stranger Things, which will wrap up next year with its fifth and final season.
While we don't have an official release date, it is definitively confirmed that the show will be coming out at some point in 2025. After briefly experimenting with a Halloween-themed release schedule in the show’s second season, Stranger Things 3 and Stranger Things 4 both came out in early summer, with season 4 being aired in two chunks released six weeks apart. This strategy has helped Netflix create summer blockbuster-style enthusiasm for its star property, so I would bet on us getting at least the series finale some time around the 4th of July weekend. Netflix also recently released the episode titles for the upcoming season, another sign that it will not be a long wait.
Those episode titles have left the internet abuzz. One of the big questions concerns the setting: where the show's final run take place. Before anyone asks; yes, obviously we'll be spending a lot of time in the small Indiana town of Hawkins. However, over the past three seasons, the plot has branched out and taken our heroes to other towns, states, countries, universes, and maybe even...time periods?
The Stranger Things showrunners have always enjoyed playing with different settings. The first season took place during the holiday season, from November to Christmas 1983. Season 2 was set during the week of Halloween a year later, season 3 delighted everyone with its 1980s summer vacation vibes, and season 4 takes place over the course of Hawkins High School’s spring break week in March. Oddly, this means that since seasons 1 and 2 both ended with Christmas-themed final scenes, the show has (I believe deliberately) shown us Hawkins in each of the four seasons. Stranger Things 4 ended pretty dramatically at the end of the kids’ interrupted spring break, so a major question going into season 5 will be if any time passes between seasons. For plot reasons, they might want to pick up immediately where season 4 left off, but every season so far has allowed time to pass between seasons, so that would be a first. Also, introducing us to the characters after a few months' delay could allow the showrunners to raise some questions that would be answered in time, and this show has always loved itself a good reveal.
Except in its debut season, Stranger Things has a habit of dividing its ensemble cast geographically. Characters form subgroups and go on side quests before linking back together for a climactic conclusion. One reason for this is to give each set of characters their own room to grow, but another is to allow the showrunners to expand the series’ setting. Stranger Things 4 featured four main groupings: ‘the California group’ included Mike, Eleven and the Byers brothers; ‘the Russia-Alaska group’ had Joyce, Murray and Hopper; ‘the Hawkins group’ had Dustin, Lukas, Erica and Max; and the Upside Down group had Steve, Robbin, Nancy, and Eddie. However, these same divisions are unlikely to recur in the fifth season, as the surviving heroes end up reuniting in the finale of season 4.
But this show really likes to divide up the cast, so expect to see several different geographic settings. Probably no one is going back to the Soviet Union in season 5, but we can certainly count on a team entering the Upside Down and others left behind in Hawkins. I wouldn’t be surprised if the characters in our universe end up getting separated and making their way around different sides of town or even going somewhere else relatively close by, Murray’s home in Illinois perhaps?
The Upside Down and "Dimension X"
What is the Upside Down? Starting from the very inception of Stranger Things, the Upside Down has been a dark reflection of our world (and Hawkins, Indiana specifically) full of terrifying monsters, sentient vines, and eerie flashes of red lightning. (Also, for some reason, it has no bodies of water). When the series' new big-bad, Vecna, explains his backstory in the season 4 midseason finale, we see him being banished by Eleven into another universe. That universe is almost certainly not the Upside Down. The world that Vecna ends up in is a scraggly, barren place with a yellow-tinged sky and rocky outcroppings floating openly in the air. Stranger Things is a CGI-heavy show with a budget of almost $30 per episode, so the showrunners have the money to make the show look precisely the way they want it to; the decision to have this dimension have a clear yellow-tinged sky and not a red and stormy one, which is the kind we usually see in the Upside Down, was very much intentional. Online, fans of the series have taken to calling this other setting ‘Dimension X’ to differentiate it from the Upside Down audiences have become familiar with. So what is ‘Dimension X’, and will our characters be spending any time there?
Another question is whether all of our characters will remain in one timeline during season 5. In season 4, Nancy leads the crew of older teens to her house in the Upside Down to retrieve her guns so they can fight the demonic bats chasing them…only her guns aren’t in her room, because they don’t exist yet! In one of the most intriguing scenes in all of Stranger Things, Detective Nancy analyzes all of the objects around her bedroom and then feverishly reads through diary entries only to discover that the last date entered was November 6, 1983: the night that Will Beyers disappeared and Eleven opened the gate to the Upside Down. The Upside Down crew were standing in the past.
So the question is: will Stranger Things 5 divide Eleven, Hopper, Mike, Will, Nancy, Steve, Dustin and the rest from each other by scattering them across space...or time? Some hardcore fans believe that time travel will be an essential theme of the final season. Stranger Things is a treasure trove of 1980s film and pop culture references, and there are plenty of movies from that period that dealt with time travel, including Back to the Future and Terminator. Did we mention that Terminator star Linda Hamilton will be in the final season? It's starting to seem more relevant.
But only time will tell. Until then, we are all eagerly awaiting 2025 and the final year of Stranger Things.
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