After a decade, the Netflix hit is bowing out. Ahead of its last episodes, the show’s creators and cast talk about big 80s hair, recruiting a Terminator killer – and the birds Kate Bush sent them

How do you finish one of the biggest and most popular TV series of the last decade? Three years after season four came out, the fifth and final season of Stranger Things is about to make its way into the world. Millions of viewers are getting ready to find out what happens to the Upside Down and whether the plucky teens of Hawkins, Indiana can fight off Vecna for good, but it is early November 2025, and its creators Matt and Ross Duffer are finding it difficult to talk about. It’s not just because they’re feeling the pressure, or because the risk of spoilers and leaks is so dangerously high. It’s because the identical twin brothers from North Carolina are just not ready. “It makes me sad,” says Ross. “Because it’s easier to not think about the show actually ending.”

A decade ago, hardly anyone knew what the Upside Down was. Few had heard of Vecna, Mind Flayers or Demogorgons. In 2015, the brothers – self-professed nerds and movie obsessives – were about to begin shooting their first ever TV series. Stranger Things was to be a supernatural adventure steeped in 80s nostalgia, paying tribute to Steven Spielberg and Stephen King. Part of their pitch to Netflix was that it would be “John Carpenter mashed up with ET”. Winona Ryder and Matthew Modine were in it, so it wasn’t exactly low-key, but it was by no means a dead-cert for success, not least because it was led by a cast of young unknowns. The first season came out in the summer of 2016, smashed Netflix viewing records, and almost immediately established itself as a bona fide TV phenomenon.

The health secretary has embarked on a high-stakes reorganisation. It could be a model for rebuilding public services – or a nail in his and Labour’s coffin

Everybody has a horror story about NHS waiting lists. If it isn’t you, then it’s probably your neighbour, your friend, your elderly parent; trapped in an anxious, miserable limbo for months longer than they should have been, getting passed from pillar to post. The only thing we don’t all know about waiting lists, it turns out, is that actually they’re coming down.

Barely a quarter of Britons knew waiting lists had fallen in Labour’s first year in power, according to recent polling for the Health Foundation thinktank in September: more than a third thought they had just kept going up, presumably because that’s what we have become gloomily resigned to. Since waiting lists are one of those emotional yardsticks by which people judge whether the country is falling apart or not, you would think the government might like to mention this, and indeed this week it planned to. But then someone close to Keir Starmer chose to accuse the health secretary of plotting a coup two days before a planned speech on NHS reform, accidentally ensuring that Wes Streeting’s pre-booked stint on breakfast telly was mostly spent debating whether the prime minister is toast or not. Streeting emerged a picture of injured innocence, while reminding everyone how much better he is at this stuff than the boss. Well done, everyone, and now back to the bit that actually affects anyone hoping to see a GP this side of Christmas.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Far from hospitals, nomadic Gujjar women routinely go into labour – and die – on their herder communities’ long seasonal treks

Dawn had just broken across the trail through the Pir Panjal mountains when Fatima Deader felt the first labour pains. She and her family had almost reached the midway point of their 134 mile (215km) trek from Rajouri in Jammu to Kashmir’s higher pastures. Mist clung to the forest, and the ground was slick beneath the feet of the caravan of about 70 pastoralists who had stopped to camp together the previous night.

A week from her due date, she had been travelling on horseback and assumed the discomfort she felt was fatigue – until pain tore through her body.

The actor’s account of his big Hollywood break – and how it almost never happened

Michael J Fox has already eked out four books of Hollywood memoir, so the justification for a fifth – written with longtime collaborator Nelle Fortenberry – ought to be good. It is: the subject of these 176 pages is a three-month period in 1985 when Fox was simultaneously shooting his breakout sitcom role in Family Ties and the career-defining American classic, Back to the Future.

That’s two more-than-full-time jobs for one little guy, necessitating that the then 23-year-old actor work 20-hour days, six days a week. This schedule was only possible because the mid-1980s was a time before showbiz labour laws caught up with basic human decency. These days, we’re told, a standard contract “demands two weeks of buffer time on either side of a job”, while Fox didn’t even get an hour.

Sport’s famous rivalry began in 1877 and since then 853 men have featured in Australia v England Tests. But who are the very best of the best?

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The X-Files star is at his charismatic best as a ruthless multimillionaire who hires Jack Whitehall as a sinister nanny. It’s like The White Lotus meets The Talented Mr Ripley

I can’t say I had “Jack Whitehall stars with David ‘The X Files/ Californication’ Duchovny in glossy TV thriller” on my 2025 bingo card, but here we are, and a good time with it can be had by all. Alongside, perhaps, a smidge of national pride to see the daft lad from Fresh Meat, Bad Education and Travels With My Father all grown up and holding his own.

The glossy thriller in question is Malice, in which Whitehall plays Adam, a tutor promoted to manny (male nanny, for those not au fait with rich people’s terms), who is bent – for reasons as yet unknown – on ruining high-rolling businessman Jamie Tanner (Duchovny). Whether he has it in for the rest of the Tanner family and friends, or they are just doomed to be collateral damage, is not clear, but that doesn’t spoil the machiavellian fun.

Fallout continues over budget income tax U-turn, with Treasury saying expected fiscal gap has dropped to £20bn

This is from Helen Miller, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank, on the market reaction to the chancellor’s reported budget U-turn.

Investors will have 2 broad concerns about news that Chancellor won’t increase income tax rates

1. Does it signal less willingness to do politically difficult things

Britain’s long-term borrowing costs were sent soaring as reports suggested the latest U-turn would leave Rachel Reeves scrambling to fill a gaping black hole in the nation’s finances just two weeks before the 26 November budget.

Yields on 30-year UK government bonds, also known as gilts, jumped as much as 14 basis points in early trading, and the yield on 10-year gilts also shot up 12 basis points – rising the most since July.

US private equity group’s deal collapses amid newsroom criticism and threat of regulator intervention

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RedBird Capital has dropped its £500m bid for the Telegraph Media Group, throwing the future of its daily and Sunday titles into further uncertainty.

The private equity group founded by Gerry Cardinale has been under intense attack in recent weeks with the Telegraph newsroom – and allies including former editor Charles Moore and ex-Spectator chief Fraser Nelson – publishing a string of pieces calling for its links to China to be investigated.

Text messages released by US House show convicted sex offender coaching Maga influencer on political messaging

The convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein apparently served as a behind-the-scenes adviser to the former Trump official and Maga influencer Steve Bannon during an August 2018 media campaign to defend Trump and his agenda, and to promote Bannon’s media ventures.

Text messages released by the House oversight committee on Wednesday detail a six-day exchange between the men from 17 to 23 August, and show Epstein coaching Bannon on television appearances and political messaging.

Investigation by Guardian and Carbon Brief finds just a fifth of funds to fight global heating went to poorest 44 countries

• Cop30: click here for full Guardian coverage of climate talks in Brazil

China and wealthy petrostates including Saudi Arabia and UAE are among countries receiving large sums of climate finance, according to an analysis.

The Guardian and Carbon Brief analysed previously unreported submissions to the UN, along with data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), that show how billions of dollars of public money is being committed to the fight against global heating.