“Stranger Things” aired its fourth season earlier this year, but it’s going to be a bit of a wait for the fifth and final season run as filming hasn’t begun yet.
Nevertheless, show creators The Duffer Bros. are hard at work on creating the new season and already revealed the title for the first episode a while back.
This week, speaking with Netflix’s Tudum site, the Duffers say that they are pulling out some old ideas they cooked up in the wake of the immense success of the show’s first season to make this final run the best it can be. Ross Duffer says:
“The success of Season 1 freaked us out, and then we knew we needed to build up this bigger world, that this was going to be ongoing.
That meant prep for Season 2 included filling up a whiteboard with every idea the writers’ room could imagine. But it was way too much – [five times] more ideas than we needed, or [ten times].
For Season 5, we’re pulling from a lot of those big Season 2 ideas… A lot of our big ending stuff has pulled from stuff that we thought was going to be in Season 2.”
The second season ended up focusing on Will (Noah Schapp) and his recovery from a prolonged stay in the Upside Down, as well as his connection to the Mind Flayer. It also went into the past of Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) at Hawkins Laboratory.
The Duffers managed to outline the entire fifth season before the fourth was made. Once they got feedback on the fourth season from collaborators and fans, they returned to look over their plan and had to make some changes. Matt Duffer says:
“We re-read the document. We’re like, ‘That’s cool, that’s cool. That could be a lot better. That could be a lot better. Even the ending is a little bit different [now]. A lot of the big ideas are the same, but the stuff that happens within, it’s very different.”
What we do know of the new season is that the Upside Down is beginning to bleed into Hawkins. It’s also expected to finally give the underserved Will some decent screen time/storylines.
“Stranger Things” will begin filming its fifth and final season in 2023.
