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We know, already, that the actors in Netflix’s Stranger Things aren’t getting to see the final episode before the rest of the world, but it turns out that the final episode was a mystery to the cast even when they were filming it — with some scenes being shot before the final episode’s script had even been finished.

“I had actually filmed some scenes from Episode 8, without having read the script, which was quite funny,” Nell Fisher (who plays Holly Wheeler in the new season) told Variety in a recent oral history of the show's finale. Which might seem like it’s taking the secrecy part of things a little too far, but was apparently a factor of the production schedule and the way the finale was set up from the beginning.

“There were certain scenes in the finale that took place in a summer setting that we had to shoot before we had completed the script,” series co-creator Matt Duffer explained. “That was unusual, in that we did feed some pages completely out of context to our actors, and we had to shoot scenes from Episode 8 part way through production. It’s a horrible thing to do. You don’t want to be establishing continuity in that way, but it was necessary. It ended up working totally fine, thank God.”

Of course, my takeaway from this wasn’t ‘That seems like an entirely practical, if unfortunate, way of dealing with the time lapse issue,’ but instead ‘So there’s part of the finale that takes place in summer, huh? What does that mean?” I’ll have to wait until New Year’s Eve to find out — but then, you already knew that, having checked out our guide to the release dates of the final Stranger Things season, I bet.

(Also, our guess? There's an epilogue to the main action set the following summer. We'll know if I'm wrong in a month and a half!)

Stranger Things season 5 begins on Netflix November 26.

As we all collectively wait for Stranger Things season 5, here's the keys to getting ready:

• How to watch Stranger Things in chronological or release order
• Getting to know the Stranger Things season 5 cast
• There needs to be more death in Stranger Things, says co-star Gaten Matarazzo
• The Stranger Things time jump between season 4 and 5 has been confirmed by Netflix - and it raises some serious questions
• "They land the plane," David Harbour describes the Stranger Things finale, which he calls its "best episode"