• Episode eight will be around an hour and a half.
• While the season finale will be two hours and 19 minutes.
• So two three-and-a-half-hour episodes of television, and it’s not even the last season.

Stranger Things show’s executive producers, Shawn Levy, said, “There’s no question that season four is built as a prelude to and springboard for the fifth and final season. When you watch Volume II, you’ll know what I’m talking about.”

Read more: Stranger Things 4: Recap and review of episode 2

He further staed, “It’s important to the [Duffer] brothers, and all of us who make the show with them, that we finish strong, stick the landing, and not tell one fragment of story more than has purpose.”

This is a daring remark to make about a programme that appears to be aiming for a cinematic world rather than a television show, but Shawn Levy, it’s alright. I don’t have much more to say about it than I did in a previous blog on the subject, but it’s clear now more than ever that the jumbled schedule and long runtime are more of a marketing ploy to entice viewers to stay away from competing shows (like The Boys on Prime Video and Obi-Wan Kenobi on Disney+).

Read more: Stranger Things Keeps Getting Stranger

It can assure audience… and justify the $30 million per episode spend for season five by having a broken-up schedule bookending both the release and finale of the other series.