After years of waiting, the final season of Stranger Things has finally dropped on our TV screens.
Or, kind of. The first four episodes have, anyway. But that’s more than enough to be getting on with. Volume One offers up four hour-long episodes (more or less) which sets the scene for the final showdown with Vecna.
But how does it actually end? And what about that reveal? Let’s dive in.
Warning: massive spoilers ahead
The set up
The show starts a few months after the apocalyptic scenes that engulfed Hawkins in flames. You know, the one where Vecna almost killed Max and ripped open a door to the Upside Down.
Since then, things have mainly returned to normal, but with a catch: Hawkins is now surrounded by the US military. The gang spend their days combing the Upside Down trying to find Vecna, but in the meantime, kids have started to go missing, including Holly Wheeler, the sister of Mike and Nancy.
She’s been having visions of a kindly man called ‘Mr Whatsit’, who has been promising to get her and her classmates to safety, away from the monsters. Instead, a Demogorgon breaks into her house in the night, injuring her parents and taking Holly away.
We don’t know where she ends up, but it appears to be inside Vecna’s mind, where he appears as the kindly ‘Henry’ who warns Holly not to go into the woods. She does, and whilst there, she finds Max, who has been ‘living’ there since she went into her coma.
To try and get Holly back, the gang plan to target the family of the next kid Vecna was planning to abduct – Derek Turnbow – and knock them out with sleeping pills. Then, when the Demogorgon comes to take Derek to the Upside Down, they can attack it and put a tracker on it, which they could theoretically then follow.
While all this is happening, El and Hopper have also ended up in the Upside Down, trying to track down Vecna. Instead, they run into US Military soldiers, who have set up a base there.
They interrogate one and find out that Doctor Kay (Linda Hamilton) is holding a powerful person hostage there, using the same kind of sound technology that the soldiers have used to incapacitate her. Naturally, they think it’s Vecna.
What happens in the final episode?
The final episode starts in a barn, where Joyce, Robin, Erica and Will have taken the drugged Turnbow family. Little Derek Turnbow, though, has already woken up, and proceeds to cause trouble for the gang.
Then bigger trouble shows up in the form of a Demogorgon. Joyce tries to fight it off with an axe, but things look pretty bleak, until the Demogorgon is hit at speed with Steve’s car.
As the Demogorgon hits the ground, Will collapses and screams, too. The gang in the car – Dustin, Steve, Jonathan and Nancy – decide to follow the fleeing Demogorgon into the Upside Down to try and track down Holly.
What happens to Holly and Max?
Holly spends most of the episode chatting to Max. The pair are both apparently stuck inside Vecna’s head, but while Holly was abducted, Max ended up there after her near-death experience, while her body lies in a coma in Hawkins Hospital. As she tells Holly, she’s been desperately trying to escape (using the power of Kate Bush), but hasn’t managed it yet. But she has a plan, and she needs Holly’s help to get them both out.
Steve and the gang
Trapped in the Upside Down, Steve, Nancy, Jonathan and Dustin find themselves waiting for Hopper and Eleven to arrive. Which is pretty much where we leave them for this episode.
Eleven and Hopper
El and Hopper, meanwhile, finally infiltrate that army base in the Upside Down. The pair break in, but then the alarm goes off. After a fight, the soldiers and Linda Hamilton’s scary Doctor Kay are defeated, but Hopper breaks a window and tells El to get out – the sound weapon is still going and she’s helpless. He reveals he has a suicide vest, and is intending to use it to kill Vecna – and himself.
He disappears into the secret door, while El screams after him. But after that, the sound stops and he reappears. The pair go into the secret room together and find not Vecna, but El’s old ‘sister’, Number Eight, or Kali, who has the power to create illusions.
Vecna vs Will
Back in the real world, Joyce, Mike, Lucas and Will decide that the best thing to do to stop Vecna is to get the rest of the kids he’s targeting (the ones who can see ‘Mr Whatsit’) out of Hawkins. It’s complicated by the fact that the US Military has taken them all to a barracks next to the (heavily guarded) entrance to the Upside Down as a way to lure out Vecna themselves.
They manage it by using the secret tunnels underneath Hawkins – which conveniently run underneath the barracks. During their walk there, Robin and Will have a heart to heart in which she tells him that the only thing holding her back when it came to accepting herself (and her sexuality) was being “scared. Scared of who I really was. And once I did that, I was so free. It was like I could fly.”
They break in, and get Derek to convince the infected kids to follow them out, where Murray is waiting with a van to smuggle them away.
But their plan goes badly wrong when a) the army discovers them and b) the Demogorgons show up. Bullets start spraying everywhere, and the gang find themselves caught in the middle.
Things only really get interesting when a man with a flamethrower attacks one of the monsters – doing real damage where the bullets don’t seem to. As it falls to the ground in pain, Will starts screaming too, and the rest of the Demogorgons are mysteriously incapacitated as well.
Then Vecna shows up. He kills the soldiers, revives the Demogorgons and proceeds to gloat to a helpless Will, while the Demogorgons make off with all the kids.
“You know why I chose them to reshape the world,” he says. “It’s because they are weak. Weak in body and mind. Easily controlled. They’re perfect vessels. And you, Will, you were the first. And you broke so easily. You showed me what was possible. What I could achieve.”
Then he retreats into the Upside Down and leaves the Demogorgons to kill everybody left: Joyce, Lucas and Mike.
But wait! Will reaches down deep inside himself, remembers Robin’s words, and taps into some unrealised power: first halting the monsters with what looks like telekinesis, and then crunching their bones, just like Vecna did to his victims in season four (the episode title is very aptly called Sorcerer).
Whaaaaat? What’s happening? Guess we’ll have to wait for Volume 2 to find out.
When is Volume 2 out?
Bad news, fans: we have to wait an entire month until Volume 2 comes out. In the US, that’s on Christmas Day, but in the UK, it drops at 1am GMT on Boxing Day. Set your alarms, if you’re not still in a food coma from Christmas dinner…
Stranger Things Season 5 Volume 1 is streaming now on Netflix
