Before season four comes out, Netflix gives Stranger Things a fifth and final season

The fourth season of Netflix’s somewhat-surprisingly enormous hit Stranger Things isn’t out yet, and won’t be for a few more months, but the streaming service has already picked up the show for a fifth—and final—season (and possibly a spin-off). That comes from The Hollywood Reporter, which says production on season five hasn’t started yet, which means it’s still a ways off. But seeing as how season three came out in the summer of 2019, Stranger Things fans should be used to waiting a while for new seasons.

Besides, there’s still that fourth season to get through, and we finally know when it’s coming out—but there’s a catch. THR says the season is being split into two halves, with the first half coming on May 27 and the second half coming on July 1. Series creators the Duffer Brothers explained that season four has “a runtime nearly twice the length of any previous season,” so rather than making everyone wait for all the episodes, they’re doing this half-and-half release.

The official synopsis for season four says that it takes place six months after “the Battle Of Starcourt” (so hopefully those kid actors haven’t aged in the last three years) and it involves the gang “navigating the complexities of high school” while dealing with the aftermath of the monster attack from season three and “a new and horrifying supernatural threat.” And they’re going to have to do it all without David Harbour’s character, who totally died in season three! (Wink.)

As for the potential spin-off, the Duffers teased that “there are still many more exciting stories to tell within the world of Stranger Things,” they just want to get through “this tale of a powerful girl named Eleven and a her brave friends” first. They could pretty easily just slap the Stranger Things name on all sorts of unrelated horror/sci-fi stories, and it sounds like that’s exactly what they want to do.