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Stranger Things officially comes to an end next month, and TV fans are understandably wary.
Of course, there’s a lot of excitement about the blockbuster final season on Netflix with everyone looking forward to finding out how the sci-fi classic ends its tale in Hawkins and the Upside Down.
However, fans of everything from Lost to Game of Thrones know how truly gutting it can be when a show doesn’t quite hit the landing, leaving a sour taste after pouring some many hours into a programme.
Thankfully, everyone involved with Stranger Things was all too aware of the dangers, including Finn Wolfhard, who is back as Mike Wheeler for the fifth season.
‘I think everyone was pretty worried, honestly,’ he told Time magazine. ‘The way that Game of Thrones got torn to shreds in that final season, we’re all walking into this going, “We hope to not have that kind of thing happen.”‘
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However, he admitting that after reading the scripts, everyone ‘knew that it was something special’.
Executive producer Shawn Levy was one of the earlier champions of the series through his own 21 Laps company, and he helped Stranger Things land on Netflix a decade ago.
He admitted creators and showrunners Matt and Ross Duffer have been on red alert after their own disappointment in the past.
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There’s a buzz in the air as Stranger Things season 5 approaches, but some of us are understandably nervous.
We’ve been burned before – whether it’s by Game of Thrones, How I Met Your Mother, Lost or Dexter.
The latter has reversed its fortunes with New Blood and Resurrection (the ill-fated Original Sin prequel series deserved a second season too), but ‘he became a lumberjack’ will still remain shorthand for a TV show which really did screw the pooch.
Not every series will become a franchise with a second chance – and no number of spinoff series will truly make us forget the initial disappointment.
Game of Thrones was the biggest show in the world by the time the eighth season rolled round, but a messy and rushed ending with questionable choices aplenty left me and many others swiftly moving on.
There are spinoffs like I said, but who can truly say GOT feels anywhere close to the impact it made at the time?
Stranger Things cannot fall into the same trap, not least because of the decade fans have waited for this payoff.
The Duffers are saying all the right things, and it’s encouraging that everyone involved went in with similar fears and a determination to make it right.
Let’s just hope they haven’t turned the whole thing… upside down.
‘They have had their hearts broken by shows that they loved that failed fans in the end,’ he explained to Variety. ‘They did not want, and do not want, and refuse to be one of those shows.’
The Duffer brothers also told the outlet how they left no stone unturned, or thread loose, for this final run of cinematic episodes.
Indeed, they’ve even had the a rough idea of the closing scene ‘for years’, which might give fans some hope that there’s been a plan all along.
‘It wasn’t something we had a strain to come up with,’ Matt explained. ‘There were elements of it that were discussed for weeks, but the core idea of the ending, we had for a really long time.’
They hope that fans will feel like they’ve been on a complete journey, while the siblings reckon it’ll make the show ripe for satisfying viewers from future fans binging it all in one go as a ‘complete story’.
‘It doesn’t feel like we dropped a storyline,’ Ross added. ‘It all connects.’
Stranger Things season 5 arrives on Netflix on November 26.
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