The first season of Stranger Things was released back in 2018, and it quickly became something of a phenomenon. You could barely move without encountering some kind of Stranger Things merchandise, book, or even a musical that’s still being performed now.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been nearly nine years since we were first introduced to Mike, Dustin, Will, Lucas, Eleven, and the rest of the now iconic characters that are the center of the Stranger Things universe. But it has, and we haven’t yet had the final fifth season, so has Netflix dropped the ball and left it too long?
Now hear me out, I’m not saying that the final season is going to flop, and I’m also not saying this out of a dislike of the show. I’ve got merchandise and books dotted around the house, I’ve binged every season on release day, and I even went to the Stranger Things Experience while visiting Las Vegas in 2023.
But thanks to COVID paused production of season four and delayed release, and the WGA Writers Strikes in 2023 that effectively did the same thing to season five, by the time the final season comes out, there will have been two seasons in six years. With a year confirmed canonically between each season, this causes an issue for the characters and their actors.
When the first season came out, the main cast was all approximately the same age as the characters they portrayed. Take Finn Wolfhard, who plays Mike. During filming for season one, he was 12 years old and playing an equally 12-year-old character. While filming season five, he’s 21 years old and playing a 16-year-old.
Maybe we need a better example. It happens all the time in Hollywood, with older actors playing characters much younger than themselves. Hell, in Bridgerton, Penelope is played by an actress a whopping 20 years older than the character. But it gets more questionable when you take characters like Steve or Erica.
Where Stranger Things left off in season four, with the Upside Down seeping into Hawkins, Steve was 19 and Erica was 11. Even taking into account the now confirmed one-year jump between seasons four and five, Joe Keery (who plays Steve) will be 32 playing a 20-year-old, while Priah Ferguson (who plays Erica) will be 19 and playing a 12-year-old.
The actors have aged by three years for each of the last two one-year time jumps, leaving them wildly ahead in terms of age compared to their characters in the show. What makes this so noticeable is the fact that we aren’t being introduced to them at this stage, we were introduced to their much younger faces and are now expected to believe that they have somehow come out of the other side of puberty while still in the midst of their teen years.
Perhaps I’m looking too much into the details, but with a show that reportedly has a budget of around $30 million per episode, the details deserve to be looked into.
Any show that has been ongoing for almost a decade will have built up an absolutely rabid community of die-hard fans, and despite what I’ve already said, I count myself among those fans when it comes to Stranger Things. We’ve all been waiting for the conclusion of the gang’s story since season four ended on such a cliffhanger back in 2022, and even if we’ve grown tired of the wait, we’ll still sit down on release day and cement Stranger Things as the most watched show on Netflix for a time.
On the plus side, we do have a window for when to expect Stranger Things season five, if you can call it that. On November 6, as part of “Stranger Things Day”, Netflix released a teaser trailer which provided all eight episode names, which also confirmed that season five will be coming at some point in 2025:
Previous seasons have been released at any point between May and October, so there’s really no telling when season five will finally be available to watch on Netflix. Whenever Netflix posts about Stranger Things on Twitter or other social media, there is an ever-growing number of people venting their frustration at the delay. While it’s not the fault of the show’s writers or producers, it is getting tiresome.
There’s going to need to be some serious story-telling in season five to explain why this group of troubled sixteen-year-olds have five o’clock shadows, or why Jonathan suddenly looks more like Will’s father than his brother. Or perhaps we’ll just be expected to overlook these small details, and appreciate the fact that we finally get to see how it ends.
I guess you could put the character’s rapid aging down to the stress they’ve been through over the last five years of their lives, and explain it away that way. I’m sure any of us would have more than our fair share of wrinkles if we’d encountered the horrors that these guys have seen. If that’s the lore I have to tell myself in order to get through the final season and see how everything ends, then that’s precisely what I’ll do.
Regardless, I’ll still be watching with everyone else when Stranger Things season five comes to Netflix in 2025, probably completely forgetting my current concerns. Stranger Things is like that, I suppose. Disbelief and immersion breaking details go out of the window when you’re embedded in the story of teenagers destined to save the world from the demon spawn of the Upside Down.
