‘Stranger Things’ Matt & Ross Duffer And Barrie Gower On Creating A Frightening Vecna: “More Slime” – Contenders TV: The Nominees

deadline.com:

On the morning they opened the writers room for the fifth and final season of the Netflix series Stranger Things, Emmy-nominated creators Matt & Ross Duffer teamed with prosthetics designer Barrie Gower to relive for Deadline Contenders the events of Season 4.Stranger Things got 13 Emmy nominations for a season that featured shocking cast deaths and reveals, a detour to a Russian prison and a messy climax that sets up a final battle between the teens of Hawkins, Indiana, and the psychopath Vecna.

Being vanquished by Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) when he was a sociopath hospital orderly (Jamie Campbell Bower), the series villain became the slimy, tentacled Vecna, who secretly commanded the creatures that tormented the Stranger Things characters through the series in the alternate universe they called the Upside Down.

It wasn’t until late in Season 4 that the Duffers finally revealed their supervillain and set the stakes for the final battle after Vecna breached the walls between his dark world and theirs.Contenders TV: The Nominees — Deadline’s Complete Coverage“We jokingly called it ‘Stranger Things Revelations’ because we were finally able to start showing our hand,” Matt Duffer said. “Season 3 was our ‘play in the sandbox’ season, which we really enjoyed, but here we got to tell more about the history of the villains and the Upside Down, a lot of the things we discussed and came up with all the way back in Season 1.

A big chunk of the reveals came in Episode 7, and in the finale, our challenge was to reunite characters that had been separated.