The final episode of Stranger Things wasn’t one of the worst series finales ever. However, the flaws of Netflix’s flagship sci-fi series over the past few seasons were embodied by the overlong runtime and other awkward issues, including arguably the biggest one: A cast of actors who largely aged out of playing teenagers well before Season 5.
It actually comes as a visceral shock when you rewatch the first episode and remember that once upon a time, the kids were played by real kids. Assembling the core cast of Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Finn Wolfhard, Noah Schnapp, and Millie Bobby Brown was a testament to the talents of casting director Carmen Cuba, who found a young cast of fresh faces who gelled well together. To the very end of the series, even in moments when Stranger Things became bogged down in its own mythology, their charisma was able to help retain the viewers’ interest.
Yet it’s still hard to ignore the aging issues, which really began after production on Season 4 was shut down for over six months due to the pandemic. Much of the cast experienced serious growth spurts during that break; in the opinion of the show’s creators, though, it wasn’t “as dramatic as people think.” At least, that’s what Matt Duffer told Variety last fall about the aging of the show’s cast, saying that “There was a scene in Season 4 in Episode 4, the ‘Dear Billy’ episode. Sadie [Sink] is in the basement, writing her letters, and then she walks out of the basement outside, and a year has passed for her, because we shot the two scenes at the beginning and the end of production. And you can’t tell. No one’s ever, ever noticed that. That’s a full year.”
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Viewers might not have not caught that specific example, but that interview happened before the premiere of Season 5. And it’s Season 5 where the discrepancy between the ages of the actors and characters really stands out out. For decades TV has been asking us to believe in twenty-somethings as believable adolescents (never forget Beverly Hills 90210). That strategy is most successful, however, when the actors in question have been cast because they happen to be twenty-somethings who look a decade younger than they are. We haven’t already watched those teenagers age into twenty-somethings over the past nine years. That’s where the mental break occurs.
The first episode of Stranger Things takes place on November 6th, 1983, and the final episode ends on May 27th, 1989, as the main cast graduates high school. That’s about six years, including the not-quite-enough 18-month time jump the show did execute in the finale. Really, the bulk of the series’ action actually takes place over a span of exactly four years, as the final climactic battle with Vecna occurred on November 6th, 1987. This means that when Season 5 opens, and we first see Gaten Matarazzo walk down the halls of Hawkins High as an alleged high school junior, nine years have passed for the actor, while only four have technically passed for the character.
The resulting cognitive dissonance could have been avoided, had Stranger Things been far more bold in its implementation of time jumps: Skip forward a few extra years at the start of the final season, to a point where the cast would match more believably with the ages of the characters. It would have been a very different season, likely eliminating the whole “Hawkins under lockdown” storyline (which honestly stretched believability), but it would have created more opportunities for the show than drawbacks.
Stranger Things (Netflix)
For one thing, the show would no longer have needed to retcon the age of young Holly Wheeler in Season 5 from around 7 to 10. Additionally, while Stranger Things’s core aesthetic has always rooted in 1980s nostalgia, by Season 4, that element of the show had begun to feel a bit played out. Jumping the show further into the future, perhaps even as far as the early 1990s, would have been a bold choice, but one that could have added some unexpected freshness. Not just in terms of the fashions: A Season 5 marinated in the anti-government/conspiracy theory-obsessed decade that gave us The X-Files could have been fascinating.
A time jump would have meant the core characters were no longer high school students, and yes, ending the show on the Party’s graduation day has a certain resonance. However, that sentimentality is not enough to conquer the other issues sticking with this timeline creates. I’d have been far more interested to find out what young adulthood might look like for these characters, especially after everything they’ve been through.
Perhaps what we got was the ending the Duffers had always had in mind for the show. However, the best creators of television have always understood that part of telling a serialized story over the course of years is learning how to adapt to better ideas or changing circumstances.
Read any book about the making of Breaking Bad for a master class in this, though more relevant to Stranger Things is the first season of Lost, as one of the survivors of the ABC mystery drama’s central plane crash was 10-year-old Walt, played by then-12-year-old Malcolm David Kelley. Over the course of the show’s first season, Kelley did what kids his age did and aged dramatically. This created a continuity problem for the show as the first season was meant to take place over a matter of weeks, not months. The show’s solution was to essentially have Walt disappear after Season 1; not what the writers had planned originally, but it did address the issue.
Mad Men, another iconic TV achievement, featured numerous time jumps that brought its characters from the ’60s to the ’70s, and it did so in a way that gave the series an epic feel. Just because the hemlines and hairstyles changed didn’t mean the show did. Instead, it evolved. As time forces us all to do.
One big time jump wouldn’t have fixed all of Stranger Things’s issues as a series (if we’re making a list, “tighter editing” belongs at the top of it). However, it would have made it that much easier to not just connect with these characters — but believe them.
Stranger Things is streaming now on Netflix.