Stranger Things Says Goodbye with Nod to Montauk Roots

It’s official, Stranger Things Season 5 is over, and the story has come to its conclusion with a special acknowledgement of Montauk — the town that inspired it all. Buckle up,  spoilers ahead.

As the last season of Netflix’s Stranger Things aired its final episode, “Chapter Eight: The Rightside Up,” Hamptonites got to enjoy a little mention of Montauk, aka The End. For those who don’t know, the series was inspired by the legends and lore surrounding Montauk — as detailed in Preston Nichols and Peter Moon’s 1992 book The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time, among other sources — and was actually going to be titled Montauk in 2016 before they moved it to Hawkins, Indiana.

After the big bad, Vecna, is defeated, and we check in with all the surviving characters, Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) and her man Chief Jim Hopper (David Harbour) go out for their long-awaited fancy dinner at Enzo’s, where he suggests they find a place to live by the sea, noting that Montauk, New York has a police job he could fill, before proposing to her.

While Stranger Things does have spin-offs underway, Collider learned that Montauk will not be one of them. Show co-creator Matt Duffer noted that his brother Ross Duffer just felt compelled to add the Easter egg. “Ross wanted to put the Montauk thing in, and this is what I didn’t want to happen, is people thinking that there’s going to be a spinoff in Montauk,” he said to Collider, adding, “No, but I actually think it’s really cute. I’m glad we have it.”

For now, fans of the show can look forward to a new Stranger Things: Tales from ’85 animated series, as well as another live action story with a fresh new narrative loosely related but separate from the last five seasons.