I haven’t watched the documentary yet so I’m sure there is some dumb framing that is making this more confusing but guys. it’s literally the show’s standard practice for the scripts of the last two episodes to be written during filming. that is how every single season of stranger things was made, including the ones you like I’m assuming. that’s how they build in some efficiency in production scheduling vs the more traditional tv model with much more separate writing / filming teams where that work is even more overlapped
the writers room breaks the whole season together at the start of this process, which involves outlining the entire thing including the ending. there is no smoking gun here, we all spent 10,000 hours staring at that fuckass whiteboard grid which included 507 and 508.
I think people are looking for some process thing to blame for s5 but the truth is they had all the resources in the world available to them and just wrote a bad season of television anyways. that's it
