Stranger Things Season 5 Volume 1 Ending Explained: How

Warning: This story contains spoilers for Stranger Things season 5.

It’s the beginning of the end for Stranger Things.

On Nov. 26, Volume 1 of the fifth and final season dropped on Netflix, with four episodes that brought fans closer to the grand finale (which drops Dec. 31). Things picked up over a year after the dramatic events of season 4 ended, which saw Hawkins under military lockdown and the entrance to the Upside Down blocked off under government control.

The military presence has not kept the crew sitting idle, though. They have undergone over 30 missions, which they call “crawls,” where Hopper (David Harbour) sneaks into the Upside Down in a military van and attempts to find Vecna (a.k.a. Henry Creel, played by Jamie Campbell Bower), who disappeared in the season 4 finale and hasn’t been seen since.

The crawls are a team effort, involving all the kids — Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Will (Noah Schnapp), Steve (Joe Keery), Robin (Maya Hawke), Nancy (Natalia Dyer) and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) — as well as Joyce (Winona Ryder).

Meanwhile, Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) has been training rigorously in the hopes of joining Hopper on a crawl. She moves through Hawkins via a tunnel system to avoid the military, which is hunting her after her escape in season 4, but has been frustrated that she’s not more involved in the hunt for Vecna. Hopper is extra protective of her and has been refusing her help on missions.

Eventually, Eleven finally makes it back inside the Upside Down when she goes inside to find Holly Wheeler (Nell Fisher), who is taken at the end of episode 1. (A quick refresher: in season 4, viewers learned Eleven initially opened a gate to the Upside Down when she banished Vecna after he attacked Hawkins Lab.)

Holly’s attack sent the whole team into a spiral, raising the stakes yet again as they prepared for one final battle against Vecna. So how did this initial chapter end? Here’s a recap of where things were left in Stranger Things season 5: Volume 1.

What happened to Eleven and Hopper?

Both Eleven and Hopper are in the Upside Down, where they’re looking for Holly, who was taken in episode 1. It was revealed that the “imaginary friend” of Holly’s is actually Henry Creel (a.k.a Vecna). He had a demogorgon take Holly from her house in Hawkins into the Upside Down where she’s been staying in a dreamworld version of the Creel’s house, which seems to be hidden from the dark side of the Upside Down and unreachable, thanks to a massive impenetrable wall.

While they haven’t yet been able to find Holly since she was taken, Hopper and Eleven did gain some valuable new insights into the military effort happening within the Upside Down, which is led by Dr. Kay (Linda Hamilton). They took a soldier, Lt. Akers (Alex Breaux) hostage, and while Hopper interrogated him, Eleven was able to enter his mind to try to find Vecna. Based on what she saw, Eleven is convinced that there’s a vault within the military base in the Upside Down where Vecna has been trapped.

Hopper finally allows Eleven to put her training to the test to scale the government building and break in. She gets through and once Hopper joins her, she becomes debilitated when siren starts going off, which renders Eleven’s powers useless. As top military scientist Dr. Kay (Linda Hamilton) confronts them, Hopper and Eleven fight her off and Hopper eventually knocks her unconscious.

Hopper tells Eleven to go to the woods for safety while he continues on in the building. He eventually comes back for her, and shows her what the authorities have been hiding. Eleven sees that her “sister” Eight (played by Linnea Berthelsen) is being held in a chamber.

How is Max alive and does Holly escape the Upside Down?

The season 4 finale left Max (Sadie Sink) “brain dead, blind and all of her bones are broken,” as creators Ross and Matt Duffer told Deadline, after Vecna attacked her. She’s been unconscious and in a coma since, totally unresponsive, despite Lucas’ many attempts to wake her up.

But there’s finally some good news about her survival: at the end of episode 3, she appears in the Upside Down and makes contact with Holly. Max lures Holly to meet her within the dreamworld-like part of the Upside Down.

Max explains to Holly she’s living in “Henry’s prison” and when he took her, he opened the “fourth and final gate,” which split the town in two. When Holly questioned why she wasn’t dead, Max said, “I definitely should be.” She said she did die “for a moment” but she felt a calling, and traveled through different memories of Henry’s life. Holly connects the idea to a plot in A Wrinkle in Time.

Max explained that she knew she had three choices: take her own life, accept fate or escape. She chose to escape. She got to the end of Henry’s memories by following Kate Bush’s song, “Running Up That Hill,” and got to a place where she saw herself in a coma in a hospital bed with Lucas by her side. As soon as she was about to run through the portal back to her life, the cassette stopped playing and it disappeared. She was chased by Vecna and found safety in a cave, which he wouldn’t enter.

“I took s—– door two,” Max said. But now that Holly arrived, she wants to try option three again (escape). She devised a plan but it means Holly has to go back to the house with Henry. “This is the only way,” said Max.

Holly understands. “Tell me what I need to do,” she says.

What happens to Dustin, Steve, Nancy and Jonathan in the Upside Down?

At the beginning of episode 4, the group run over a demogorgon with Steve’s car as it was about to attack Joyce. As the monster leaped back into the Upside Down, Steve booked it in his car and chased it into the other dimension. They eventually crashed into the impenetrable wall, and get ahold of Hopper and Eleven via walkie talkie.

While they’re waiting for Eleven and Hopper to find them, Dustin realizes the massive wall is a circle, and in the center is the Department of Energy (a.k.a. Hawkins Labs, where the Upside Down was created).

Did the school children escape Vecna?

Once the crew realizes the government is rounding up kids around middle school age and sending them to the government headquarters, they send in the only person they know who can infiltrate the military base and kickstart their rescue mission to save those possessed by Vecna: Holly’s bully classmate, Derek Turnbow (Jake Connelly).

He arrives late to the military fortress (since he was being kidnapped in a barn by Joyce), but manages to identify his peers that also have seen “Mr. Whatsit” (a.k.a Vecna). He leads them to a tunnel through the bathroom, where Will and Mike are waiting to bring the kids to safety through the underground tunnels.

They get a few kids through before a pipe bursts, causing a leak and attracting attention from the soldiers on duty. Their plan goes haywire and Demogorgons track down all the kids who were making their escape and carry them away into their lair.

Who dies?

As the crew attempts to rescue the school children that the government rounded up in their military base, Mike, Will and Joyce are caught helping them exit through an underground tunnel. The military bring them outside the barracks just as an attack by demogorgons begin. As they attempt to protect the kids and find safety in a Radio Shack, the soldiers and guards are all killed by the monsters as Vecna enters.

What is Venca after?

The search to find — and kill — Vecna is the central storyline of the first three episodes of Stranger Things’ final season. At first, Vecna appears only as Henry Creel, Holly’s imaginary friend, who she calls Mr. Whatsit, though Holly is not the only kid who sees him. Henry Creel appears to her classmates too.

Hopper’s hunt to find Vecna in the Upside Down has not been successful — despite having done 37 crawls — because Vecna has built a wall of demogorgon-like flesh to hide behind, which is where both Max and Holly appear to be trapped.

Finally, at the end of episode 4, Vecna appears. He summons Will into the air to approach him face to face. He asks, “Can you see them, William? Can you see the children?”

Vecna says he chose these children specifically to “reshape the world” because they’re “weak in body and mind.”

They are “easily broken, easily reshaped, controlled, the perfect vessel,” he says. Adding, “And you, Will, you were the first. And you broke so easily. You showed me what was possible, what I could achieve. Some minds, it turns out, simply do not belong in this world. They belong in mine.”

He lets go of Will and walks back into his realm in the Upside Down.

What does this mean for Will?

Will might have escaped the Upside Down years ago, but he’s never truly been free of Vecna. Season 5 began with a flashback of Will’s kidnapping and his original time in the Upside Down in season 1, during which it was finally confirmed that Vecna had grander plans in store for him.

In season 5, Will still feels connected to the monster, and to the demogorgons — or as they call it, the “hive mind” — and, with the help of an analogy from Robin, he realized that he’s something of an antenna for Vecna. The group is now trying to use Will’s connection to Vecna as a form of reverse-psychology to anticipate Vecna’s next victim, which Will realizes is Derek.

After the crew saved Derek and his family, Will pieces together his connection to Vecna more and more. He has a vision and sees the “hive.” where Holly and other children are being kept by Vecna. Will knows the “hive” is something that’s important to the monster — and something he wasn’t supposed to see.

After Vecna releases him in the final scene, he can see the demogorgons about to attack his friends (Lucas, Robin and Mike in their attempt to save the middle schoolers) and suddenly, they all freeze.

He hears the words of Robin saying, “I was looking for the answers in somebody else but I had all the answers.” Will’s childhood flashes before his eyes and the camera then cuts back to the demogorgons in mid-attack mode as he’s summoning them to stop with newfound powers. He kills each creature with his mind. The episode ends with him wiping blood away from his nose.

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Vol. 1 of Stranger Things season 5 is now streaming on Netflix. Vol. 2 drops Dec. 25 with three episodes, and the finale drops Dec. 31 at 8 p.m. ET.