Stranger Things‘ Creators Tease an Unavoidable Final-Season Time Jump
Charlie Mason
Editor
As Stranger Things fans tick off the days until the release of Season 4, Part 2 (on Friday, July 1), the series’ creators, the Duffer Brothers, are also counting down — to the fifth and final season of their record-breaking Netflix hit. “I’m not sure we’re ready to say yet a start date for shooting,” Matt Duffer tells TVLine. “But a lot of it is pretty well mapped out.”
Which is not to say that what he and sibling Ross have planned won’t be altered before or as the cameras begin to roll. “We learn a lot every time we make a [season],” says Matt. “We’ve learned a lot just working with all of our new actors and the ones that we’ve worked with for a long time over this year [making Season 4], so I’m sure it’ll change a little bit from that outline.
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“The ending is the hard thing,” he adds. “That’s obviously the stressful thing. We really want to stick the landing.”
At least one aspect of Season 5 does sound like it’s written in stone. Given how quickly the show’s young leads are growing up, “I’m sure we will do a time jump,” says Ross. “Ideally, we’d have shot [Seasons 4 and 5] back to back, but there was just no feasible way to do that.
“So these are all discussions we’re going to have with our writers when we start the room up,” he continues. “Believe it or not, we’re still working on Season 4. We’re trying to finish the final two episodes, they’re so massive.”
Yep. Always an inevitable issue when main characters are supposed to be specifically at a certain child/teenager age but the RL aging of the actors starts being obvious not to sync up.
I figured season 5 would take a couple years and focus on the gang’s last year in high school. You know: Eleven has to kill a monster at prom, Will gets a boyfriend, someone doesn’t survive graduation, etc.
Suddenly seeing the Buffy influences in this statement.
First thing I thought too!
Damn, they’re gonna skip over my 1987 birth year haha.
But yeah, I’m only 4 episodes into the new season, but I think it would be wise to just set season 5 like 5 years later or something. Everybody can feel like they’ve had a break from monster fighting and they’re getting their lives put together etc and then wam, the big final showdown starts brewing
This seems like the best tactic. It’s already a strain that pandemic delays makes everyone like 2 years old when they were already playing younger. By the time they shoot the next one they might not look ready for college but social security, so give the continuity a little break to catch up to them some, if not all the way.
Well, that could be another nice little nod to Stephen King’s IT, and they do so love their homages. Probably already crossed their minds! 🤡
Or bring on an all adult cast towards the end. Like IT with all the kids grown up. Spin off of Stranger Things with all of the characters in their 40s and 50s in the modern day.
They all look like they could still be in High School. They should just be in their senior year.
Remember that the Duffer Brothers have not even set a date yet to even begin shooting the next Season.
It would make sense if it is a 3 year time jump. It would be 1989, the end of the 80s. The kids would be in their senior year. Starting and ending in the 80s would seem to make sense. If they had to go into the 90s than put it in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union (considering they seem adamant about this Russia plot line).
I hope that even after Season 5 of the Hawkins story, they’ll continue with stories elsewhere in the Stranger Things world. They don’t all have to be about American kids from the ’80s dealing with monsters released from a shadow plane.
Given that the actors, well the kids, are actually 5 to 6 years older than what they are suppose to be, I figure if they plan a time jump they do it to match the age of the characters, again just the core kids, to the same age as the actors. So a time jump would have to bring the show into the early 90’s. Basically, giving the kids a break to have a somewhat normal life before having to deal with a major world ending event. I like to think that after season 4 the kids will try to live a normal life, but also preparing themselves for the final battle or something.
Finish the season…