‘Never done anything like this before’

The pressure was on for the Stranger Things team heading into the big series finale.

One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things 5, the new documentary from director Martina Radwan that released Monday on Netflix, delves behind the scenes of the show’s final season and the crunch to finish the last episode’s script.

The captured footage shows creators Matt and Ross Duffer discussing how they started production on season 5 without a finished finale script. It even got to the point where they had to start shooting the last episode before the script was complete.

“It’s not like we don’t know what the ending is. It’s all plotted out,” Matt can be seen telling members of the team on set while filming the sequence where Karen (Cara Buono) defends her daughter, Holly (Nell Fisher), from a demogorgon attack. “I have to write it, and we’re just low on time.”

The series finale, titled “The Rightside Up,” ran 2 hours and 8 minutes in length, revealing the final showdown against Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) and the fates of the main characters. The episode dropped on New Year’s Eve on Netflix and in select theaters across North America.

Another scene from the doc took viewers to Day 117 of production, which landed at the halfway point of filming. The script for episode 8 still wasn’t finished by this time. A different scene showed key set production assistant Montana Maniscalco informing the camera, “We are shooting episode 8, which isn’t completely written yet — spoiler alert! So we don’t even fully know what’s going on.”

“I’ve never read 8 through, and we’re just shooting it,” Matt said in the doc. “I’ve never done anything like this before. This is so weird jumping to eight… Don’t love it. Don’t love it.”

In a more formal interview setup, Matt explained the situation. “We were getting hammered constantly by production and by Netflix for episode 8,” he said. “It was the most difficult writing circumstances we’ve ever found ourselves in, not just because there was the pressure of we had to make sure the script was good, but there’s never been so much noise at the same time.”

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By the time the doc reached the first table read of the finale script, star Finn Wolfhard told the camera, “We had a year of being on the edge of our seats. It was torture.”

The table read was held on Sunday, Sept. 8, 2024, on Stage 16 of the show’s Atlanta studio space. The Duffers remarked in the doc that they finished the script the Wednesday prior.

“It was the longest time we’ve ever spent with the writers on a single episode,” Matt said.

Watching this journey play out in the documentary marks an extra nail in the coffin of “Conformity Gate,” the viral fan theory that claimed to have evidence of a secret bonus episode. The conversation was inevitably squashed, but now we have documented proof that the Duffers were racing to finish writing the episode order they did have.

One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things 5 is now available to stream on Netflix.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly