Spoilers follow for Stranger Things Season 5, Vol. 2.
In the Season 5 episode of Stranger Things, “Chapter Six: Escape from Camazotz,” Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) lays out for the Hawkins gang (and the audience) exactly what’s going on with the Upside Down. Per Dr. Brenner’s journal, all of the chaos comes down to a wormhole that’s been acting as a bridge between Hawkins and Vecna’s machinations.
If you’re an observant viewer, there have been plenty of breadcrumbs leading to this reveal, including earlier in Season 5 when Mr. Clarke (Randy Havens) was teaching his science class about wormholes. In an interview with IGN, series creators Matt and Ross Duffer said they committed to that idea going all the way back to Season 1 when Netflix required that they outline their endgame for the series.
The Duffers Have Known How Stranger Things Ends for Years
The brothers have previously said that they’ve known what the final scene of the show will be for “six or seven years.” And it sounds like many other elements of the show’s final season have been in the works even longer than that.
“Netflix came to us very early on in the writing of Season 1 and were just asking to explain some mythology,” Ross said. “We said, ‘Well, we don’t want to tell the audience everything in the first season.’ It’s really from the point of view of the characters, and we wanted a mystery. And they said, ‘That’s great, but for us, you write it down.’”
Ross told IGN that they sat down with their writers’ room, and that’s where they developed the wormhole underpinning: “It wasn’t called The Abyss then, but the idea was that there was this other dimension that all of the evil and our Demogorgons and our monsters came from. It’s been in the works for a while, so it’s nice to finally be able to reveal it at last.”
Asked if the complexity of the various high-concept ideas about the Upside Down, The Abyss and the science of it all ever broke their brains, Matt admitted, “Sometimes it does hurt your brain. I’m not gonna lie.”
But he also pointed to their talented writers, especially Paul Dichter who has been with the series since Season 1. Matt said Dichter has the “superpower” of being a sci-fi expert.
“He’s read every single hard sci-fi book in the world. Ross and I have not,” Matt chuckled. “He’s very smart in areas like this, so he’s able to keep all of this in his brain. And so whenever we get confused or the other writers get confused, Paul sets us straight.”
Another key collaborator from the start is executive producer/director Shawn Levy who helped them close out the series. In fact, for the first time in the history of the show, they co-directed an episode together, “Chapter Seven: The Bridge.”
Matt Duffer said initially that was just a Duffer Brothers episode, but it became impossible for them to do it alone and finish writing the series finale, and they knew they couldn’t screw that up.
“Shawn initially wasn’t going to be available, but his schedule freed up a little bit with Deadpool [& Wolverine],” Matt said of what changed. “It was really fun to collaborate with him. I mean, we were never working together. He was directing scenes and we were directing scenes, but it does average out to almost exactly 50/50. I’m going to be interested if people can figure out who directed what.”
Ross agreed, “Our styles are so similar when we’re directing Stranger Things that hopefully it just feels like a cohesive whole. But again, we’re so lucky that he was able to come in and help us out and buy us that time that we so desperately needed to write.”
Jamie Campbell Bower and Noah Schnapp on Season 5 Endings
We also spoke to Jamie Campbell Bower (Vecna) and Noah Schnapp (Will Byer) about the latest batch of episodes, and the long-established bond between their characters which is clarified in the episode “Chapter Five: Shock Jock.” There Will first discovers that he can siphon powers from the demon, and then uses that knowledge to actually damage Vecna’s leg at the end of the episode.
Asked how that’s sitting with Vecna going into the series finale, Campbell Bower said his character’s “vexation is becoming worse.”
The actor said he processed what happened early in Season 5 between Vecna and Will as a byproduct of Will being a means to an end. “But then, of course, you know how much it affects Vecna in this chapter, and how much it can affect Vecna in this chapter makes that irritation so much worse for him,” he chuckled. “Does it set him on the back foot? I don’t think he’d like to consider that it does, but I definitely think it is, like you say, a knockdown and a bit of a blow. But you know, old Vecky is gonna hobble his way on.”
As for his scene partner, actor Noah Schnapp, he said finding out how their dynamic resolved only came out in the final script when he read it with the rest of the cast.
“I was so anxious to see it, and that one was different. They didn’t send it to anyone,” Schnapp said of how the episode’s script was dispersed. “We all actually read it together for the first time at a table read. And it was scary to turn the page. You want to just skip to the end and see – is it good? But progressively through that table read, the emotions just were higher and higher, and everyone was crying by the end. If it was that emotional reading it, I can’t even imagine what it’s like to watch the episode. It was fun that they did it that way, and that we all got to experience it together for the first time.”
