With Stranger Things about to drop its last two episodes of season four next weekend, it’s time for fans to face up to the fact that the Netflix phenomenon is coming to a close. Thankfully, we do have one whole season left to go, but the end is in sight for the show. And given its proclivity for darkness, folks are predicting that season five could bow out by bringing the story full circle… and not in a good way.
As a viral tweet from fan account @thehe11fireclub shared, this prediction goes that Stranger Things 5’s concluding chapter, aka the series finale, could be given a grim title that recalls how the Hawkins-set saga began back in 2016 — “The Disappearance of Will Byers”, much like the series premiere is called “The Vanishing of Will Byers”.
While so much has changed over the past four seasons, one constant of Stranger Things is that Will’s life is always miserable, from his stint as a puppet of the Mind Flayer to being routinely ignored by his friends. So it makes a depressing amount of sense that the show would end in a mirror of how it started, with Will going missing once more.
Obviously, this would be a particularly cruel way of closing the book, as fans would no doubt be furious with such an open-ended, downbeat final episode. But then again, even if the finale is called something that resembles the pilot’s title it could be deliberately misleading. After going through so much, the characters — Will especially — deserve to ride off into the sunset with a happy ending.
But this is Stranger Things we’re talking about, so season five is definitely not going to be all sunshine and rainbows. We already know that a shocking death (or possibly several) is about to occur in the season four finale, which will leave things in a super-dramatic place for the fifth run. Don’t miss volume two, which consists of two feature-length episodes, when it hits Netflix this July 1.