The creators of Stranger Things have come under fire after making a wild admission in a newly released documentary showing behind-the-scenes of season five.
Stranger Things season five finished nearly two weeks ago, yet controversy has continued to rage on over the show’s finale, a controversy that is sure to be extended by the release of One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things 5.
The documentary is two hours long and details how the Netflix show’s final season came to pass, with interviews from all of the main cast except for Winona Ryder and David Harbour.
With ‘Conformity Gate’ officially debunked, many Stranger Things fans are now coming to terms with the fact that the season five finale released on New Year’s Eve was officially the end of the story.
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The documentary, released today on Netflix, features the creators of the show, Matt and Ross Duffer, making some fairly wild admissions.
Much of the doc features on how close to shooting season five’s eighth and final episode got before anyone involved got eyes on a script of any kind.
Matt Duffer admits in the documentary ‘we went into production without having a finished script for the finale’.
One crew member in the doc described what they were doing throughout the season as ‘laying down the tracks as the train is going’.
The chaotic nature of this is a major theme in the documentary, with crew members explicitly talking about how they are having to piece together sets and VFX for the finale based solely on conversations, not scripts.
Whilst most fans on X and Reddit have been focusing on the fact that the show began filming episode one without a script for the finale, the documentary also reveals the shocking fact that the finale episode itself began shooting before a script was fully done.
This was due to time constraints surrounding filming the Camazotz scenes outside the cave in Vecna’s mind, where summertime natural lighting was required, but saw key set production assistant Montana Maniscalco telling the doc: “We don’t even fully know what’s going on.”
One fan tweeted about this revelation, saying: “going into production of the Stranger Things finale without a script locked.. with all the resources and money on the line… no sh*t it turned out like that.”
Another on Reddit asked quite a brutal question, saying: “Why would they release that?”
The fan questioned why Netflix would release a documentary in which they filmed the first episode without writing an ending, also pointing to other issues the documentary raises with the production process.
Others commented defending the Duffer Brothers, though, claiming that ‘99 percent of of all TV shows you love do that’.
Whilst this is not strictly true, it is more common than you would expect, with Avengers: Doomsday recently making headlines for not having finalised scripts for certain actors until partway through shooting.
Whether this is normal practice or not, however, the clear strain this puts on other departments exposed in the documentary is not a great look for the Duffer Brothers.
One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things 5 is available to stream on Netflix now.
Topics: Stranger Things, Netflix, TV, TV and Film
Michael Slavin