Stranger Things 4 was easily the biggest season of the Netflix smash to date, with most episodes being close to 90 minutes, but its season finale went above and beyond with its whopping 2-hour, 30-minute runtime. That’s longer than most Marvel blockbusters! Given that this single episode was so sizable you could easily watch three season one installments over the same duration, the obvious question to ask is: why didn’t they just split the finale into two manageable, yet still feature-length, chunks?
According to creators the Duffer brothers, though, it wasn’t as easy as simply guillotining the episode halfway through. When asked by Collider why they elected to retain such an enormous season finale instead of just making ST4 10 episodes long, the Duffers explained that there was no obvious place to put a break that would retain the flow of the story and leave both halves as their own “satisfying” experience.
“I think we just couldn’t find a good spot to break it because there’s almost an hour of build-up tension, and then it just goes hard for an hour. Then we have our 25 minutes of coming down the coda. It would’ve just not been a very satisfying episode to stop it after that first hour. In our opinion, it just would’ve petered out. We didn’t want to force an ending, so we just figured, well, it’ll just be this monster episode. If you want to pause it, go ahead.”
While chopping the episode in two might’ve seemed like a no-brainer to us couch potatoes watching the thing, the Duffers make a good argument for why this wasn’t actually feasible. Bifurcating the finale at the midpoint would damage the building thrills of the grand conclusion and the second part would’ve been mostly all the wrap-up scenes at the end. And the Duffers have already made it clear how much they hate when a TV show’s penultimate episode is better than the last one.
However, for those who prefer their TV episodes, you know, actually TV episode-sized, we have some good news. The Duffers have previously promised that season five will be a little trimmer than its predecessor, and the episodes won’t be quite so bladder-busting in length. Having said that, the series finale is unlikely to fall below two hours.