David Harbour is giving some insight into the Stranger Things series finale.
The actor participated in the Happy Sad Confused podcast’s 10-year anniversary celebration at New York Comic-Con on Thursday, which included a conversation with host Josh Horowitz, Jack Quaid, Zoë Chao and Jaimie Alexander.
While speaking onstage, Harbour teased the upcoming fifth and final season of the hit sci-fi show, which is currently in production.
“Look, I’m very close to the show, so I have very strong opinions, and they may not match yours if you’re a fan of the show,” he began, via People. “I’m an actor on the show. So I see the nuts and bolts,” adding that he can sometimes be very critical of it and “get very mad” at “a bad episode” or a season he “didn’t like.”
But when it comes to the final Stranger Things episode, which will be the eighth one in the fifth season, Harbour shared that he has no complaints.
“They land the plane, and it is the best episode they’ve ever done,” the Black Widow star said, before diving into an anecdote from the day the cast did the final table read.
“The end of this episode when we were reading it — just us reading it — about halfway through, people started crying,” Harbour recalled. “Then about the last 20 minutes, it was just uncontrollably crying, waves of different people. Noah Schnapp being my favorite.”
He explained that part of the reason why the cast got so emotional was because, for a lot of them, Stranger Things was their childhood. Millie Bobby Brown (Eleven) and Schnapp (Will) were 11 when they first started working on it. Finn Wolfhard (Mike) was 12; Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin) was 13; and Caleb McLaughlin (Caleb) was 14. Now, a decade later, they’re all in entirely new stages in their lives as 20-somethings. (Brown is even married.)
“It’s 10 years later, and we examine that idea, and it’s so well done and so beautiful,” he said. “It’s such a great episode, and it’s such a great season. You guys will love it.”
When Stranger Things season five kicks off, the Hawkins, Indiana, crew will face the culmination of all of their biggest threats: Henry Creel (Jamie Campbell Bower), also known as “001” and “Vecna,” who they were able to briefly defeat in the season four finale before he escaped. In the final moments of the penultimate season, Vecna causes a natural disaster in their hometown with devastating consequences, as the friends and family look down on Hawkins being split into four pieces.
