How the Stranger Things Season 4 Finale Sets Up the End of the Series-1

The final episode of Stranger Things’ fourth season turned the whole world of the show upside-down, literally: the Upside Down has officially come to Hawkins. Although Netflix is planning on making spinoffs, the series will come to an end with the upcoming fifth and final season.

The Duffer Brothers, who created the series, have previously said they needed four or five seasons to tell the story they had in mind, and Netflix gave them five. While there are few details about what the final season will entail, the end of season 4 certainly left a lot of plot threads dangling, and there’s a lot of wrapping up that needs doing. Here’s a look at how the end of season 4 could set up the events of season 5.

What we know—so far—about Stranger Things season 5

Little is confirmed about Stranger Things season 5. Netflix officially renewed the show in February, but neither the release date or the length of the season have been revealed. It’s likely that the next season has yet to be written—Ross Duffer told Collider that the writing staff was “going to take a little vacation in July … And then we’re going to come back. I know that the writer’s room is going to start in that first week of August.” Filming will begin at some point after the scripts are written, though there’s no clue as to when that will be.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Duffer said that while the fifth season’s exact storyline is not yet mapped out, the team knows how the series will end. “While a lot of season 5 is actually pretty blurry, the last 30 minutes of it are pretty clear in our heads,” he said. “So if we can make the journey entertaining, I think that we have an end that will hopefully satisfy. You can’t satisfy everyone, but the hope is that it’s something that feels right for this story.”

In that same interview, Matt Duffer said the season will take place entirely in Hawkins, in contrast to the fourth season’s trips to California and the U.S.S.R., and that the cast breakdown would resemble that of season 1. “We wanna go back to a lot of the things we did in season 1,” he said. “There’s something nice about coming full circle.”

Will there be a time jump in Stranger Things season 5?

The Duffer Brothers have previously teased the possibility of a time jump between the end of the fourth season and the start of the fifth season. “I’m sure we will do a time jump,” Ross Duffer told TVLine in June. While months had passed between previous seasons, the creators were reportedly looking at a larger gap in part because the actors playing 15-year-old high schoolers are increasingly in their early 20s and don’t really look the part anymore.

But the ending of season 5 makes the idea of a big time jump seem less likely. The season ends right as the Upside Down comes to Hawkins. To skip ahead a couple of years would be to gloss over what seems like a very immediate problem!

While speaking with EW in July, Matt Duffer seemed to say as much. While previous seasons had a slower build—the start of season 4 began with Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) looking for a Dungeons & Dragons playmate and Lucas’ (Caleb McLaughlin) big basketball game—the main plot will already be in motion when season 5 starts.

“For the first time ever, we don’t wrap things up at the end of [season] 4, so it’s going to be moving,” Duffer said. “I don’t know that it’s going to be going 100 miles an hour at the start of 5, but it’s going to be moving pretty fast. Characters are already going to be in action. They’re already going to have a goal and a drive, and I think that’s going to carve out at least a couple hours and make this season feel really different.”