Almost a full 10 years after debuting on Netflix, Stranger Things has finally come to a close in its fifth and final season. Ordinarily, one would say that audiences grew up with the children at the heart of the science fiction bildungsroman, but that’s not really true in a case where the actors have lapped the characters whom they play by over a decade in some cases.

In the first season, the five preteen actors at the core of the cast played 12-year-olds, while their older siblings, teenagers in-universe, were played by actors in their early 20s. By the show’s finale, only four years are supposed to have passed. But the 16-year-old Jane Hopper, known in the wider culture by her mononym of “Eleven,” is played by Millie Bobby Brown, who is now an almost-22-year-old wife and mother. The godfather of Brown’s child is Noah Schnapp, who is similarly 21-playing-16 in the show, despite being about to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, and Joe Keery, who are supposed to play college-aged characters by the show’s last season, are 30, 31, and 33........

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