This holiday season is about more than gathering with family and escaping the cold: it’s also getting together with the Hawkins gang one last time. Stranger Things Season 5 is in the middle of a three-part release schedule tied to major holidays: Volume 1 premiered the day before Thanksgiving, and Volume 2 drops three more episodes on Christmas Day. It all leads up to a two-hour-long finale on New Year’s Eve that you can catch at home or in theaters.
The last time we left our intrepid heroes, their grand scheme to smuggle Vecna’s 12 chosen “vessels” out of military containment had failed. While the reveal of Will’s powers to control the Demogorgons kept the gang alive, Vecna now has everything he needs to end the world as we know it. So what comes next? A new trailer reveals their next move, and this plan looks even wilder than the last. Check it out below.
The trailer picks up immediately after Volume 1, as everyone licks their wounds and tries to figure out how to defeat Vecna now that he’s more powerful than ever. Not all is lost — they have a new supernatural tool in Will, and Eleven’s sister Kali (aka Eight) is along for the fight too. It’s hard to tell what the plan is yet, but it seems to involve an electrocuted demogorgon, floating interdimensional doors, and demodogs running amok in a hospital.
But this trailer promises more than just Stranger Things’ typical harebrained schemes: it also teases some major answers. “This whole time, everything we've ever assumed about the Upside Down has been dead wrong,” Dustin says while he and Steve look at a swirling red orb of strange matter — possibly the Upside Down’s very power source. This next volume will take the story to the precipice of the final showdown, so expect some major reveals, huge twists, and full-circle moments. And probably a lot of blood and goo, too.
