‘Stranger Things’ creators studied these surprising TV finales to write the Season 5 ending

Now entering Hawkins. 

“Stranger Things” is finally ending, with its fifth and final season premiering Nov 26. 

In a Variety feature published Wednesday, the Duffer brothers and the cast teased the fate of The Upside Down.

The creators studied series finales of other shows that they felt “really worked,” including “Six Feet Under,” “Friday Night Lights” and “The Sopranos.” 

“The best ones were very true to themselves. The shows that are trying to be super clever — I think that’s where it can go wrong really quickly,” Ross Duffer said.

Co-creator Matt Duffer added, “We knew roughly what the end scene was for years — it wasn’t something we had to strain to come up with.”

“There were elements of it that were discussed for weeks, but the core idea of the ending, we had for a really long time,” he explained. “Anyway, we’re really happy with the way it ended. It’s nerve-racking to put it out. I’m sure people will have opinions!”

“The Sopranos” notoriously cut to black, leaving Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) to an ambiguous fate after a mysterious man entered the diner where he was eating with his family. 

The “Six Feet Under” finale, meanwhile, was an emotional tear-jerker that flashed-forward to show how all the key characters die, over the course of many years. 

The “Friday Night Lights” finale also ended with a montage peeking into key characters’ futures. 

“Stranger Things” first premiered in 2016. Set in the ‘80s, the hit Netflix sci-fi show follows a gang of misfits in the town of Hawkins, Indiana, including Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), her adopted dad Hopper (David Harbour), friends Steve (Joe Keery) and Robin (Maya Hawke), Eleven’s friends like Will (Noah Schnapp), Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), and Will’s mom Joyce (Winona Ryder). 

As they navigated school, crushes, and summer jobs, they’ve also battled the sinister otherworldly dimension “The Upside Down” and the creatures in it. 

The series finale will be called “The Rightside Up” and will clock in around two hours.

The cast and crew said it got emotional. 

“It felt like they were writing the end of our real-people lives — it went beyond just the screenplay. I’ll always connect my life to some of the beats that they wrote,” Schnapp told the outlet. 

He added that he cried watching his TV mom’s last scene. 

“I was at Winona’s last day. I was like, ‘This is a work goodbye; we’ll see each other soon.’ And then I was in her trailer, and I was like, ‘No! You can’t leave!’ I was holding on to her, just sobbing. I did not expect it to hit me so hard.”

Harbour explained, “It’s like you’re asking me to talk about my family. The events that happen in that script, they pay off a lot of things that we started in the first season. The series begins with kids in a basement, and when we leave the series, they’ve grown up. The passage of time is just very moving.”

Keery said that everyone felt “fatigue” from shooting for a year. 

“Everyone was looking forward to being done, but then once you get to the finish line, you look back and think, ‘Oh, man, can I just have one more?’”

Hawke, for her part, thinks the experience “changed” her. 

“I am a different actor today, and I think a better actor, because of that opportunity to do a scene that was on such a high-stakes emotional day of my life that was also a high-stakes emotional scene. It was just this extraordinary gift,” she said. “But I did spend 12 hours in a rolling cycle of weeping.”

The cast got so emotional that it was “hard” to get through the takes, Ross recalled.

“Occasionally, they were actually too emotional in moments when it was a little too early in the scene. We’re like, ‘You’re not supposed to be upset!’”

“Stranger Things” Season 4 ended with the Upside Down creeping into the regular Hawkins dimension. 

The Duffers told Variety that Season 5 will pick up 18 months later, with the town living under military quarantine. 

The writers were keen to answer the question of, “what the Upside Down was.”

“Every season would be like, ‘Should we talk about it?’ And we’d go, ‘No, let’s wait,’” Ross explained. “And then finally, we’re like, ‘Well, we have to now!’”

“Stranger Things” Season 5 will have 8 episodes, dropping on Netflix in three volumes, releasing on Nov. 26, Dec. 25, and Dec. 31.