SPOILER ALERT: The story includes details about the series finale of Netflix‘s Stranger Things.
Netflix’s first blockbuster series, Stranger Things, closed out its five-season run with a nostalgic look back in a finale featuring footage from the early seasons and wrapping the story of Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Will (Noah Schnapp), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) the way it started in the very first episode — with a game of Dungeons & Dragons in Mike’s basement.
The two-hour closer also snuck in a nod to Stranger Things‘ origins.
Almost 11 years ago, on April 2, 2015, Netflix announced a series green light to Montauk, a supernatural drama series written and directed by then-young genre filmmakers Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer and executive produced by Shawn Levy, to debut in 2016.
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Described as a love letter to the ’80s classics that captivated a generation, the series was to be set in 1980 Montauk, Long Island, where a young boy vanishes into thin air. As friends, family and local police search for answers, they are drawn into an extraordinary mystery involving top-secret government experiments, terrifying supernatural forces and one very strange little girl.
While the premise never changed, the drama became untitled for awhile, until going with Stranger Things at the 11th hour, and its setting was moved to the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana.
The original title and location were considered key to a 2018 lawsuit filed against the Duffer Brothers by a filmmaker Charles Kessler who accused them of plagiarizing the series from his short film Montauk before withdrawing the complaint, admitting that “my work had nothing to do with the creation of Stranger Things.”
After moving away from their original setting (and despite the legal headache it may have triggered), the Duffers opted to bring it back in the finale of Stranger Things as Jim (David Habour) revealed in the epilogue that he was mulling a move to Montauk for a job. He wouldn’t do it alone — he laid out his plan to Joyce (Winona Ryder) at a dinner where he proposed to her.
While the series left the storyline open-ended as the duo’s move was not confirmed, it went full circle, bringing Stranger Things to where it first began with the Duffers’ original idea.