One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things 5 premiered on Netflix earlier today. The documentary follows filmmaker Martina Radwan as she takes a deep dive behind the scenes of the hit show's send-off.
The feature-length final episode has split opinions, with many fans expressing disappointment about how the story ended. In news likely to only heighten frustrations with the finale, the documentary confirms (via SFFGazette.com) that "The Rightside Up" began shooting without a finished script.
Creators and showrunners Matt and Ross Duffer are featured discussing how production started on both the season and the series finale without the ending being put on paper.
"It's not like we don't know what the ending is. It's all plotted out," Matt says. "I have to write it, and we're just low on time." Later, we jump to around the halfway point of filming, where it's confirmed that episode 8's script still wasn't done.
Set production assistant Montana Maniscalco tells the camera at one point, "We are shooting episode 8, which isn't completely written yet — spoiler alert! So we don't even fully know what's going on."
Matt later acknowledges that he's unhappy with how things are going. "I've never read 8 through, and we're just shooting it. 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 sit-down interview, he elaborated, "We were getting hammered constantly by production and by Netflix for episode 8. 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."
This will surely bring the "Conformity Gate" theories to an end, as the Duffer Brothers barely had time to write the finale we got, never mind a secret extra episode meant to reveal what "really" happened.
It's common for Marvel Studios movies to shoot without finished scripts—Avengers: Doomsday reportedly didn't have an ending when cameras started rolling—but this clearly isn't a process the Duffer Brothers were familiar or overly comfortable with.
Does this explain the issues fans had with the Stranger Things finale? It may go some way in addressing the show's problems in its final year, and it's strange that Netflix was happy to publicly reveal these production issues in an officially released documentary.
For a better idea of what to expect from One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things 5, check out the trailer below.