Image Credit: Netflix
This is the final goodbye. One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things 5 Streaming now is a two-hour look at the making of the final season, which involved nearly a year of filming and many stressful days for everyone involved. Taking it episode by episode, the documentary looks at how the final season played out. Here are the biggest revelations from the documentary that provide some insight into that final season.
Even early on in the documentary, the Duffers knew all too well what it meant to deal with the backlash for going out with a bad ending. He said, “It’s terrifying because you watch shows that people love and adore, and the ending falters, and they abandon the rest of the show. You can’t leave anything hanging, you have to wrap up everything.”
This immediately sets the stage for the scale of the final season and ambition, constantly comparing it to previous seasons, and we’re told that most of the movies are only half the size of single episodes. Stranger things. The series not only uses real-world locations, but in season 5, also uses 12 soundstages full-time, and they have to scrap sets to build new sets. Additionally, this is the first season they filmed with the backlot where the big sequence in Episode 4 took place.
By the end of filming, Matt Duffer confirmed that he had 237 days of filming, 6,725 setups, and 630 hours of footage (from the main unit), totaling over a petabyte of data (1,000 terabytes).
It doesn’t just look at how well the team did; It goes deeper into areas you don’t always see, including the most important place, the writers’ room. Importantly, those writers’ room scenes are interspersed throughout the documentary. While the film is structured linearly, with each chapter covered separately, these writers’ room segments are not always clearly placed in time and instead show the team thinking their way through the process as it unfolds. It’s also refreshingly honest about how difficult it is to put this final season together.
What this documentary does better than others is show just how much of a work in progress everything is for Season 5, especially in those later episodes, given the way the series was being produced, whether it be scripts not being completed, sets being designed, which is demonstrated quite well by the Wallace and Gromit train track section:
It’s also a joy to watch everyone from the costume designers, sculptors, and production designers come up with solutions, and to see their artistry in real time pay off to varying degrees throughout the series. His passion is infectious, and his knowledge and can-do attitude are inspiring.
They didn’t have the final script before it went into production, so they had to hurry…
At the beginning of the doc, which we’ve already begun discussing, the Duffers say, “We went into production without a finished script for the finale. It was scary because we wanted to get it right. It’s the most important episode of the season.”
It’s quite clear, questions still remained in the minds of many production designers as the script and visuals were not fully finalized even during the construction of the set, and they based many of their design decisions solely on concept art and conversations with the Duffers.
During this there is also a section filming In episode 8 where we were told that the scripts were still not complete. “Today is a very interesting day. We’re shooting episode 8, which is not fully written yet. Spoiler alert. So we don’t even fully know what’s going on. Everyone on the set is walking around with red script pages,” said Montana Maniscalco, a lead set production assistant. They were filming Episode 8 out of sequence because they needed a “summer look” for the cave segments. “It’s so weird getting to eight,” Matt Duffer said on set, looking nervous, adding, “Don’t like it.”
The Duffers looked stressed during the filming of this segment. “I’ve never done anything like this before,” said one of the Duffers, referring to the fact that they had never read Episode 8 yet, and they were still shooting it.
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It has come up again, with Matt Duffer saying that he was being “harassed” by Netflix and production to complete the script for Episode 8, calling it an unusual situation that made him uncomfortable.
Going purely on speculation and my own opinion, you can see why the second part of Stranger Things felt so different from the first. The first stage was carefully planned and prepared, as shown in the scenes filmed for Episode 4. While it’s not fair to say that the second half, especially the final episode, was cobbled together, it certainly felt a bit rushed, without time to properly point and transition. It’s not quite a first draft, but it’s far from being a script that’s been rough and ready for months.
The whole time, I wondered why the Duffers didn’t hand out more. Sure, they wanted to get this final season done, but it felt like it was done in a matter of hours, with a production crew tasked with designing the final Abyss segment, somewhat ignorant of the specifics, not having much time to get it right as the scripts weren’t even finished yet.
What really makes you think is what the series would have looked and been like if the industry had not been shut down for the entire year in 2023.
Vecna could have been a lot scarier
Vecna is a pretty awesome looking character, but it turns out that the early concepts of him revealed in the documentary were also pretty awesome, and honestly, he could have been even more awesome.
VFX art director Michael Maher Jr. reported that he did about 100 different looks, experimenting with different looks, including one in which he was wearing some kind of cloak. “Eventually, we used some vines as the diseased aspect, and it became successful.”
handing over the reins to the younger generation
Another theme that the Duffers and many other writers emphasize throughout the documentary is growing up and passing the baton. In this case, from Mike, Dustin and his ilk to Holly and her friends, something that’s made painfully clear in the final scene, given that it’s the boys hanging up their D&D books and Holly and her friends taking their seats.
One simile used by the writers was, “The door to Narnia closes on you, and then some other child will find another door later, but you will never go back…”
The Duffers used a crude illustration to explain the abyss to artists
It was one thing to introduce The Upside Down, a reflection of our world, but Season 5 added several layers after Dustin discovered it was basically a wormhole. The Duffers were seen explaining the concept to several artists using a crude drawing Looks like a viral (albeit AI) entertainment It tells. Of course, Mr. Clarke introduced the concept of wormholes at the beginning of the season.
Natalia Dyer asked if the drawings and concept were based on actual scientific theory, and the Duffers both joked, “It’s all very real.”
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Why weren’t there more monsters in the Abyss?
During one of the many planning sessions for the finale throughout the documentary, we could hear the team brainstorming who would be in the final Abyss battle, where they would all be, and what they would be doing.
One of the writers stated that in the Abyss, there should be Demogorgons, Demodogs, Bats, and other creatures, which is one of the biggest criticisms of the finale, given that they only fought the Mindflayer and Vecna, ultimately, all other creatures were MIA. “I think it’s crazy if there’s nothing there.”
The Duffers fleshed this out by referring to the Mech-Z battle (the one at the end of Volume 1), noting that six Demogorgons were present, with another saying that there might be “demo-fatigue” by the end.
Hope Hines Love was Duffer’s high school drama teacher
This was already discussed in interviews after the release of Volume 1, but shed a little more light on why the Duffers struggled to get their high school drama teacher, Hope Hines Love, into the final season as Miss Harris. “Hopefully, right away, where we were such young freshmen, she saw something in us right away,” he said, adding that she was a big inspiration for both of them, “I don’t think we would have lasted through high school without her.”
Love spoke to the camera about the two Duffers as high school students, saying, “Even in high school, they were both more fearless and more considered than their peers. The boys really knew how much they didn’t know and how much they had to learn, and they were never afraid to fail.”
lots of tears
Another conclusion that the cast teased during the promotional tour for the final season: lots of tears.
The cast and crew had their full exposure here in this documentary, seeing as they had a table read for episode 8, then several raps for individuals during those final parts of filming, and then the final scene in the Wheelers’ basement. You can really tell that this show has gone beyond being a job or event for everyone involved.
Image: Netflix
Image: Netflix
Commitment to real-world sets, not VFX,
Throughout the documentary, you get to see some of the sets that were built and the Duffers were insistent that everything look real, and when the VFX had to do a little more heavy lifting, such as when the white goo with Jonathan and Nancy’s unedited sequence was too watery, Levy was sad to say that they would need to rely on VFX a little more. At the end of the documentary, one of the production designers states that it is extremely rare for a show of the scale of Stranger Things to use real-life sets.
with that, stranger things is at an end. It’s been a great ride!
Image Credit: Netflix