Updated:

Jan 2, 2026 3:42 pm

Posted:

Jan 2, 2026 3:23 pm

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.

the ending credits was so cool though #StrangerThings5 pic.twitter.com/63rHUdpFMD

— clueified 🤍 (@clueified) January 1, 2026

The epilogue and the end credits were inspired by The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Matt and Ross Duffer told Deadline.

“We thought about [The Lord of the Rings] Return of the King a lot, just in terms of the length of the epilogue,” Matt Duffer said. “I always defend the Return of the King epilogue, but I’m one of those hardcore Lord of the Rings fans, to the point where I’ve watched all extended editions in a row on a single day. If you do that, the epilogue feels absolutely perfect and not long at all. In fact, if it felt shorter, it would feel absolutely distressing.

“I think, Stranger Things, if you watch Season 5 all the way through, it’s going to feel great. You just want to spend extra time with these characters. Anyway, that was sort of the reference for the epilogue. Then we love the credits at the end of Return of the King. So that was the initial idea, and they were these very simple illustrations.”