The Stranger Things Season 5 finale epilogue and its end credits were inspired by The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, creators the Duffer brothers have revealed.
Warning! Spoilers for Stranger Things Season 5 Episode 8, The Rightside Up, follow:
Stranger Things ends with Season 5 Episode 8, dubbed The Rightside Up, and an epilogue set 18 months after the events that showed the destruction of the Upside Down, the death of Vecna, the apparent death of Eleven, and the rescue of the kidnapped children.
We see relatively happy endings for pretty much all the main characters as they move on with their lives, kicking off with the core characters’ graduation from Hawkins High School. The show comes to a close with the end of the Dungeon and Dragons campaign that kicked off the Netflix series nine years ago, and the passing of the torch to a new generation of D&D fans made up of Holly Wheeler, Derek Turnbow, and more.
A decent chunk of the final episode’s 2-hour 8-minute runtime is devoted to this epilogue, which even finds room for a successful marriage proposal from David Harbour’s Jim Hopper to Winona Ryder’s Joyce Byers. Fans are then treated to end credits that show famous scenes as D&D illustrations, characters in the style of D&D character profiles, maps of locations from the show, and a final image showing Stranger Things as a D&D players manual.
