By: Leigh Rice

On November 26th, 2025, audiences will impatiently crowd around their television sets to watch the beginning of the end: the first four episodes of Stranger Things 5.

Since the release of its very first episode in 2016, Stranger Things has only grown in popularity, becoming a worldwide sensation. And it’s not just the fans who love it; critics also can’t get enough of it. The series has been nominated for 57 Primetime Emmy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, four Grammy Awards, four Critics’ Choice Television Awards 13 Saturn Awards, two Producers Guild of America Awards, three Writers Guild of America Awards, and two Peabody Awards, and won 19 of those.

The mark of a culturally significant piece of media is how it impacts the world around it, and Stranger Things is no exception; the show has been responsible for a spike in interest in 80s fashion and culture, as well as a massive boom of popularity in Dungeons & Dragons and other TTRPGs (table-top role-playing games). The series is set in the 80s, starting with season 1 being in 1983, and masterfully captures the aesthetic and nostalgia that made so many people fall in love with Hawkins, Indiana.

The highly-anticipated Stranger Things 5 will be coming soon, with the episodes releasing in three waves– labelled as “volumes”– at the end of this year. The first volume will be released on Netflix on November 26th, the second volume on December 25th, and the third volume– which is just the series finale episode– will be released on December 31st. The finale episode has been revealed to be around 2 hours long, and will be shown in select movie theaters on the release day only, alongside its Netflix release.

Audiences have been waiting for this continuation since July 2022, when the latter half of Stranger Things 4 was released and ended on a captivating cliffhanger. The series has been announced to not pick up exactly where it left off, but include a time-skip, to help account for the fact that the actors are now much older than their characters. And this is no surprise; the series has been going for 10 years, while only 3 years have passed in the show.

After 10 years of buildup, during which audiences became as attached to Hawkins as to the characters themselves, everything has been building towards this moment. The final season, the final episode; the conclusion of a decade of work and emotional investment. This season will hopefully answer all the questions and tie up all of the loose ends in the story, creating a truly epic conclusion to the world that so many people have come to love.

Image credit: Netflix