Stranger Things fans, wake up! The showrunners just teased more season 5 news, and it’s left Twitter in ruins.
Clocking in a movie-length finale, the fourth season of the Netflix original series queued up an epic ending ahead — from Eddie Munson shredding Metallica on electric guitar and Eleven versus Vecna in a nose bleeding brain-powered showdown. But, alas, The Duffer Brothers already confirmed that season 5 won’t be as long as the last, and now we know exactly how many episodes we can expect.
Though it’s a bittersweet conclusion, the showrunners just revealed where they’re at in creating the fifth and final season. The official Stranger Things writers recently tweeted a photo of a big dry-erase whiteboard, captioning it: “Grid Stage.” On it, the board showed an outline of boxes with eight columns titled for each episode.
The sight of it was enough to rile up Stranger Things fans. Many immediately began spinning a frenzied web of queries and sounded off in the Twitter comments section, sharing mixed emotions.
“ONLY EIGHT EPISODES???” one person replied. “Anyone else think we’re actually going to get nine episodes as we don’t see the board finish?” a different viewer theorized. Others took the blank space opportunity to write in their own theories. “The double lines here … Does this mean anything? Is this where the time jump is gonna be??” another follower wrote.
In an unexpected twist, the Stranger Things writers joined the conversation with a cryptic response: “Not a time jump. Does it mean anything? 🤔.”
Folks definitely have a reason to feel frustrated. Season 4 delivered a historic nine episodes, including a super-sized finale that tallied up twice its usual run time. Unfortunately, it looks like we’ll watch everything play out over eight episodes, rather than last season’s nine.
On August 13, Matt Duffer explained the final season’s length to The Hollywood Reporter. “I don’t think the runtimes will be as extreme in season 5,” he told the outlet. “We’re trying to return to the simplicity of the structure in season 1, with bigger scale and scope.”
With that said, he revealed there will be an exception for the final episode, which he expects will be “pretty massive.”
Our one last hope of an extra-long finale hinges on the fact that there’s no specific runtime the streaming show’s tied to, as Matt previously noted. “You’re not beholden to advertisers in the way that television used to be,” he explained to the site. “We don’t have to hit this specific 45-minute length, so it can be as short or as long as you want.”
So, perhaps that missing episode won’t matter after all!
As an Associate Product & Reviews Editor at the Good Housekeeping Institute, Jacqueline Saguin writes about all kinds of top-tested products across beauty, home, lifestyle and more. Before joining GH in 2021, she was a Style & Beauty Reviews fellow at Insider, covering everything from viral trends to sustainable brands. She’s a graduate of the University of Florida’s school of journalism, with a specialty in magazine and mass communication.