EDITORS NOTE: This article contains spoilers for Stranger Things Season 4 Volume 2. With Hopper trapped in a Russian prison, the Byers family moving to California, and Eleven traveling to the middle of the desert for the Nina Project, Season 4 of Stranger Things took us far beyond the Hawkins city limits. Having so many locations naturally lead to Season 4 being the biggest installment in the series so far, as it clocked in at over 5 hours longer than its predecessors.
Along with those new locations came a handful of new characters like Jonathan's (Charlie Heaton) pizza-slinging stoner friend Argyle (Eduardo Franco) and the Russian counterparts to Hopper (David Harbour) and Murray (Brett Gelman), Dimitri (Tom Wlaschiha) and Yuri (Nikola Djuricko). With such a grand scope, Season 4 saw as much sun as it did snow as our heroes traveled all over the world to get back what they'd lost — in Joyce's case, Hopper, and the Byers boys chased after Eleven as she disappeared in a secret government plot to get her powers back.
With the world of Stranger Things feeling bigger than ever before. Collider's Editor-in-Chief Steve Weintraub sat down with series creators Matt and Ross Duffer to discuss where we're left in Season 4 and what we can expect in Season 5. Weintraub shared high praise for the new season saying, "One of the things about Season 4 is it's just F'ing massive, in terms of all over the place. Is Season 5 going to be this world going outside of Hawkins, the way you did in Season 4 or will it be more contained?" Matt Duffer confirmed that the fifth and final season will primarily happen where it all started: Hawkins, Indiana.
In addition to confirming the location, Duffer shared an amusing anecdote about the struggles of VFX minutiae with the Upside Down leaking out into the real world. Duffer said:
"Yeah. It's mostly in Hawkins, and there's a lot obviously in the Upside Down. Which is exciting and also not exciting, because I swear half my life is spent looking at spore shots and just going, 'That spore's too big. That spore just flew through the body of our character.' Anyway. I don't want to think how many hours of my life have been spent watching spore shots and will be watching and looking at spore special effect shots."
With Joyce having rescued Hopper, and Eleven having escaped from Brenner's menacing clutches with Mike and her brothers, all of the characters we love made it back to Hawkins, more or less in one piece, by the end of Season 4. In teasing Season 5, Matt Duffer really leaned into the concept of going back to the roots of these relationships that are so essential to the series, saying:
"I think one of the things that's exciting about Season 5 is [that] Season 4 was interesting to us because everyone was scattered to the winds. That's what was unique about it. But this is about everyone finally coming back. Coming back together, coming back to Hawkins. Hopper is back in Hawkins. The original group [is] back together—the original group of boys plus Eleven. The OG group. There's something interesting to re-explore some of the season one dynamics again, except on this grander scale."
The Duffer Brothers and the rest of the writing staff are set to get to work on the fifth and final season of Stranger Things in August. You can watch Seasons 1-3 and both volumes of Season 4 right now on Netflix.