The 'Stranger Things' Season 5 Episode Count Has Been Revealed

Even in a year filled with huge fantasy and sci-fi releases, the fourth season of Stranger Things stood out. The most recent season of Netflix’s paranormal ’80s homage was a massive hit for the streamer, making headlines both for its ambitious story and movie-length episodes.

But all good things must come to an end. Season 5 of Stranger Things will be the show’s last. Brother co-creators Matt and Ross Duffer have promised that the final season will be a little less sprawling than Season 4, on account of the characters being back together and there being a larger focus on the original cast. Now, we have a slightly better idea of what to expect.

How many episodes will the final season of Stranger Things have?

The gears are starting to turn on the production of the fifth season of Stranger Things. The Twitter account for the Stranger Things writers’ room featured an image showing that work on the show’s final season is now in “grid stage,” where the writers will presumably plot out the overall arc of the season and how it breaks down into specific episodes. The whiteboard in the image shows eight episodes total, as opposed to season 4’s nine episodes.

This is pretty par for the course for Stranger Things, which has fluctuated between eight and nine episodes per season. But given the ballooning runtimes in Season 4, many are wondering whether Season 5 will have similarly enormous episodes.

“I don’t think the runtimes will be as extreme in Season 5. We’re trying to return to the simplicity of the structure in Season 1, with bigger scale and scope,” Matt Duffer told The Hollywood Reporter earlier this month. Of course, the final episode of the season is the exception; Duffer teased that it will be “pretty massive.”

Fans were quick to note that there appears to be a double-line separating episodes 4 and 5 in that Twitter picture, which some thought could represent a time jump. The writers were quick to reply. “Not a time jump,” they wrote. “Does it mean anything?”

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