When it comes to a long-running TV show with a serialized narrative, the conventional wisdom is that the final season (if a series is lucky enough to know it’s a final season) should essentially be one long payoff for everything that came before. Additionally, any new storylines should be kept to a minimum, and the show certainly shouldn’t introduce new characters at a time when fans are already too eager to find out what happens to the characters they’ve been following since the beginning. Yet any good artist worth their salt knows that going against conventional wisdom often results in the most vibrant and inspired work. As such, most major series buck this supposed trend, as their creators realize that a season consisting solely of endings and payoffs does not constitute real television.
The best case scenario is one where showrunners can have the cake and eat it too, so to speak, and that’s exactly the position creators Matt and Ross Duffer have found themselves in heading into the fifth and final season of “Stranger Things.” They hoped to reintroduce a youth element to a series where the main cast quickly became young adults, and not have to introduce too many new characters in the show’s already busy final season. Luckily, they were able to come up with an idea that solved both problems in one fell swoop with Holly Wheeler’s character. This decision was certainly tricky, as it required a casting change that could prove controversial with fans. Still, it’s something that the Duffer Brothers believe is causing some of the final season’s typical pitfalls, and based on remarks they made at a recent press conference, their reasoning for this decision is entirely valid.
The Duffer brothers wanted to find a child character in Stranger Things
The prospect of new main characters being introduced to “Stranger Things” seems insane, given that the show has at least a dozen main characters to contend with (depending on your count) before the final season. Still, the Duffers have a pretty big reason why they were looking to add a new face to Season 5. During a virtual press conference that /Film attended, Matt Duffer explained how their interest in expanding the core group had everything to do with the original creative vision for the series:
“We are always very careful about adding new talent […] you don’t want to upset the balance of things. And especially last season. For a while we were planning not to do it at all. But one of the things we wanted to do with the final season was recapture some of the feeling of the first season, so it felt like it had come full circle. And because the kids on the show are clearly not kids anymore, the only way to really recapture some of the energy and innocence of the first season was to introduce a new, younger cast to the show. To get the kids back into the show. »
To be fair, most viewers probably still consider the main characters of Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) to be “kids”, given that that’s how they were introduced to us and the older characters still make up a large part of the show. Still, there’s no denying Duffer’s point of view, and while one of the major themes of the series is growing up and coming of age, the presence of a more innocent character only serves that theme better.
The Duffers found their solution in Holly Wheeler
Once the Duffers figured out why they needed someone new to join the main cast, they then had the problem of who that person could be. Luckily, as Matt explains, this character was right under their noses:
“That’s when we came up with the idea of elevating Holly to a major character, which made sense, because she’s another Wheeler. She’s really just in the background. We thought it was a really fun way to bring back some of that spirit of Season 1.”
One of the downsides of this lateral move involved the element of recasting, as Holly had previously been played by twins Anniston and Tinsley Price, given the character was a toddler in Season 1. In Season 5, Holly is now played by Nell Fisher. Duffer laid out the tricky logistics behind this decision:
“And then we were very nervous about casting, because there weren’t a lot of kids who could play a role of that size and had the kind of scale that we knew Holly would need. And also, as an added challenge, she had to look like our Holly and like she was a member of the Wheeler family. But we were very lucky to find Nell. [Fisher]who we consider to be a very special child and an extraordinary actor.”
Based on the tenor of Duffer’s comments, it seems like they managed to capture the best of both worlds with Holly, allowing her to bring back the much-needed childlike energy to the show without seeming like a left-field addition. We’ll see for ourselves how this all plays out when the final episodes of “Stranger Things” premiere on Netflix.
