- Hopper mentions the town of Montauk in the series finale of Stranger Things.
- Montauk actually doubles as an easter egg that predates the show’s inception.
- Spoilers are ahead!
While there are plenty of theories to pour over now that Stranger Things has officially come to an end (what am I supposed to do with my life now???), there are still some nuggets that have yet to been excavated by fans. In fact, the Duffer Brothers hid a little call back to the original pitch for Stranger Things in the very last episode that fans might have missed while they were tearfully sending off the party on their future endeavors.
But! Before we get into it, please know that spoilers are ahead, so if you haven’t watched season 5, episode 8 of Stranger Things yet…you’ve been warned!
After the gang defeats the big bad Vecna and destroys the Upside Down, our main characters are experiencing better days in Hawkins, Indiana. Mike, Will, Dustin, Lucas and Max are heading to college, Holly has started a Dungeons & Dragons party of her own, and Jonathan, Nancy, Robin and Steve are settling into their own careers as college students, newspaper reporters, radio DJs and (LOL) sex ed teachers.
As for Joyce and Hopper, the pair finally got to go on their date to Enzo’s after years of waiting. And the wait was worth it—Hopper suggests that he and Joyce pack up and move somewhere with a nice beach like Montauk, New York, before proposing to her.
As it turns out, Stranger Things was originally pitched to Netflix as Montauk, an “eight-hour sci-fi horror epic” set to take place in the city and other parts of Long Island. The original pitch revealed it was set in Long Island in the 1980s and was “inspired by the supernatural classics of that era, we explore the crossroads where the ordinary meet the extraordinary … emotional, cinematic and rooted in character, Montauk is a love letter to the golden age of Steven Spielberg and Stephen King — a marriage of human drama and supernatural fear.”
Montauk was inspired by Steven Spielberg’s Jaws—which uses Montauk for the fictional Amity Island in the movie—in addition to the Montauk Project, a book series by Preston Nichols that explores theories of the United States government conducting top secret projects at either Camp Hero or the Montauk Air Force Station to create psychological warfare techniques…not too unlike the projects that were conducted at the Hawkins lab to spy on the Russian government.
Don’t expect Montauk to become a series of its own, though—“Ross [Duffer] 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,” Matt Duffer told Collider. “No, but I actually think it’s really cute. I’m glad we have it.”
Thankfully there are a few Stranger Things spinoff series in the works, which you can read up on below…
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