Wait, What Do I Need to Remember From ‘Stranger Things’ Again?
A refresher on the cursed Will Byers, the state of Jancy, and how everything leads back to Vecna
A lot can change in three years: Since the last season of Stranger Things aired, Millie Bobby Brown became a mother, Sadie Sink and Joseph Quinn joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and David Harbour was read to filth on a new Lily Allen album. What hasn’t changed: Stranger Things remains a cultural juggernaut—perhaps the closest thing we’ve had to TV monoculture since Game of Thrones—and all that time away from the show has only drummed up anticipation for its fifth and final season. Now, Stranger Things faces its biggest challenge yet: ending an era it helped define—in style.
Netflix, for its part, isn’t tightening the belt. Each episode of Stranger Things’ fifth season reportedly cost $50 million to $60 million, and most of them are feature-length. The streamer’s also plotting an extended holiday rollout—episodes are dropping on the night before Thanksgiving, on Christmas Day, and on New Year’s Eve—which sounds like fun for the whole family and not so fun for the culture bloggers of America. But a three-year hiatus and the penultimate season’s extended episodes (all but one ran longer than 70 minutes) might make it seem daunting to remember every critical bit of information from Stranger Things—and what the series is building up to.
Don’t worry: If you don’t have time to re-binge Stranger Things before Turkey Day, we’ve got you covered. After spending the past week inhaling Season 4, I’ve put together a much-needed refresher covering everything that should matter in Stranger Things’ endgame, from the origins of the show’s big bad to more evidence of Will Byers being the most cursed child in the most cursed town in America. Spoilers ahead, obviously.
All Roads Lead to Vecna
Different creatures from the Upside Down have tormented the citizens of Hawkins, Indiana, over the years: Demogorgons, Demodogs, the Mind Flayer. But in Season 4, the show’s supernatural evil takes on a (very mangled) human form. We’re originally introduced to Vecna—so named, in classic Stranger Things fashion, after the Dungeons & Dragons antagonist—as he’s terrorizing high school cheerleader Chrissy Cunningham, who suffers frightening hallucinations before Vecna uses his psychic powers to kill her. The manner in which Vecna ends his victims’ lives—snapping limbs and popping eye sockets—is the stuff of nightmares. But Vecna isn’t in the teen-murdering business just for the love of the game: With four kills, he can open a rift between the Upside Down and Hawkins.
What makes Vecna such an effective big bad is that he targets characters who’ve suffered some kind of trauma—he’s a monstrous manifestation of someone’s grief and guilt. (Which is why he goes after Max Mayfield following her stepbrother’s death in Season 3.) The fact that Vecna possesses such powerful psychic abilities also makes him a worthy foil to Eleven, and as it turns out, they have a shared history. In a series of flashbacks, we learn that Vecna was once Henry Creel, a young boy who murdered his mother and sister before being put under the care of Dr. Brenner and becoming the first test subject at Hawkins Lab. Unable to control Henry’s psychopathic behavior, Dr. Brenner inserts a chip in his neck that suppresses his powers, but years later, Henry manipulates a younger, Season 1–era Eleven into removing it. Henry then kills everyone in the lab except Eleven and Dr. Brenner, and when Eleven rejects his offer to join forces, they have a psychic showdown straight out of X-Men, during which Henry is banished to an alternate dimension that disfigures his body. (Which is why Vecna looks like an irradiated strip of jerky.)
Long story short: Vecna’s beef with Eleven runs deep, and it appears he’s been orchestrating all the supernatural happenings in Hawkins from the very beginning. While Eleven does stop Vecna from destroying Hawkins in the Season 4 finale, he’s still alive—wounded, but not defeated, somewhere in the Upside Down. To stop Vecna for good, Eleven will need to be at the top of her game, with all her friends by her side. Firing up some more Kate Bush wouldn’t hurt, either.
Eddie Munson and Satanic Panic
Another newcomer in Season 4, Eddie Munson is the leader of the Hellfire Club, a lovably nerdy high school group that puts together D&D campaigns. Eddie is inadvertently roped into Vecna’s plot when Chrissy goes to his trailer to score some drugs in a last-ditch effort to stop the hallucinations, moments before she’s killed. Understandably freaked out by a girl levitating in a hypnotic state until her limbs break apart like uncooked pasta, Eddie flees the scene. When these incriminating details are coupled with news reports linking D&D to Satanic cults, Eddie becomes a person of interest to the police—and public enemy no. 1 to Chrissy’s jock boyfriend, Jason Carver.
Thankfully, some other members of the Hellfire Club—Mike Wheeler, Dustin Henderson, and Lucas Sinclair—know a thing or two about supernatural phenomena in Hawkins and promise to help clear Eddie’s name. (Quick note: I know the plan is to stop Vecna, but, uh, I’m not sure how you’d convince a bunch of cops that a teenager was murdered by a deranged telepath from another dimension.) But while Eddie initially spends the season hiding out, by the end of it, he joins the fight against Vecna and, much to the dismay of the Stranger Things fandom, heroically sacrifices himself.
In a sequence worthy of a heavy metal music video, Eddie plays Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” in the Upside Down to distract a swarm of Demobats (exactly what they sound like: demon bats) before dying from the injuries he sustains. In a cruel twist of fate, Eddie’s still the town pariah deemed responsible for Vecna’s killing spree; few will know the lengths he went to in order to save everyone in Hawkins. Barring a flashback, Eddie won’t reappear in Season 5, but like so many tragic deaths in the series (rest in power, Barb, Bob, and Billy), his loss will reverberate with the characters whose lives he touched.
Hopper Lives
By the end of Season 3, we assumed that Chief Jim Hopper died a hero, caught in an explosion that closed a portal between Hawkins and the Upside Down. The good news: Hopper did, in fact, survive. The bad news: He escaped one deadly situation for another. He ended up in the Soviet Union, where he was brutally tortured for information before being thrown in a wintry gulag. (“This man does not deserve the peace of death, so I have sent him to hell,” a Soviet officer intones.)
With the help of a prison guard, Dmitri Antonov, Hopper is able to send a message to Joyce Byers indicating that he’s alive. One thing leads to another, and Joyce and Murray Bauman travel halfway around the world to rescue him. (Sneaking into the Soviet Union is a wild thing for anyone to do, least of all a single mom raising three kids!) Hopper, meanwhile, tries escaping the gulag on his own; sadly, the smuggler hired by Dmitri double-crosses them, and his punishment links back to the Upside Down. The Soviets have a captive Demogorgon, and they set up gladiatorial battles between the monster and unruly prisoners. Before the fight, Hopper gives an affecting monologue in which he tells Dmitri that he thinks he’s a curse on his loved ones—he lost his daughter to cancer, and his wife left him in the aftermath—and that he doesn’t deserve happiness.
Thankfully, Hopper and Dmitri survive the Demogorgon attack just as Joyce and Murray sneak onto the base and set them free. It’s also a momentous episode for longtime Jopper shippers: Our middle-aged heartthrobs finally kiss. (As everyone reminds Hopper, someone doesn’t spring you from prison just to lock you up in the friend zone.) While there’s one more face-off with several Demogorgons in Mother Russia before the end of the season, Hopper eventually returns to Hawkins for a heartfelt reunion with his adoptive daughter, Eleven. All told, Hopper has been through Soviet hell and back, conquering some figurative and literal demons along the way. Vecna isn’t ready for this smoke:
The Military’s Relationship to Eleven
In the immortal words of Austin Powers, Eleven lost her mojo. Without her telekinetic powers, Eleven is helpless to stop anything at the start of Season 4, including bullies at her new school in California. (At least, until Eleven turns a roller skate into a weapon.) Then she gets a lifeline: Dr. Brenner returns, and he believes that a trip down repressed-memory lane in a hidden lab can help restore her powers. But while Dr. Brenner understands that Eleven is our best and only hope to stop Vecna, other government figures assume that she is responsible for the latest killings in Hawkins.
Led by Lieutenant Colonel Jack Sullivan, the military tracks Eleven down at the lab. Dr. Brenner is killed in the cross fire, but Eleven regains her powers and escapes. Now, heading into Season 5, Eleven has more than just Vecna on her plate: She’s still on the run from the military, which has imposed a quarantine around Hawkins. (Does this mean that she and Hopper are living off the grid?) Eleven’s latest adversary on the military front appears to be newcomer Dr. Kay, played by Terminator alum Linda Hamilton. “She’s a scientist but if she needs to, she can get into a fight and shoot a gun,” cocreator Matt Duffer teased in an interview with Empire magazine.
Throughout Stranger Things, the American government has effectively functioned as a secondary antagonist, putting Eleven through harrowing experiments to hone her telekinesis—which, by the way, was inspired by a real-life CIA program (!!)—and leading to the Upside Down making contact with our world. In their pursuit of Eleven, you get the sense that our government operatives don’t care about the greater good as much as covering their tracks. As Eleven gears up for a final confrontation with Vecna, I suspect that the military will play a similar role: knowingly or unknowingly putting the citizens of Hawkins in harm’s way.
The State of Jancy
Just as important as the ultimate fate of humanity: What’ll happen to Nancy Wheeler and Jonathan Byers? They’ve been a couple on-screen since Season 2—and off-screen for even longer—but some cracks have started to form between Jancy. I don’t know what it’s like to face off against interdimensional monsters, but many of us can relate to what ails Nancy and Jonathan in Season 4: the trials and tribulations of maintaining a long-distance relationship. Nancy stays in Hawkins, becoming a star reporter at the high school paper; the Byers family moves to California, where Jonathan discovers the joys of smoking weed.
Two other issues: Nancy thinks Jonathan is going to join her at Emerson College after graduation, but he never applies; meanwhile, her former fling, Steve Harrington, puts on a charm offensive. Steve tells Nancy about his dream of having six (!) kids and traveling around the country in an RV—and he always thought she’d be the mother of his children. (The jury’s still out on whether Nancy wants that many kids; she’d know her ob-gyn better than members of her own family.) Nancy also doesn’t waste a single second rescuing Steve from a trio of Demobats when he’s pulled through a portal under the aptly named Lover’s Lake. If that’s not a declaration of love, I don’t know what is.
With all that in mind, can Jancy reconcile in Season 5? My gut says yes, and that Stranger Things will intentionally mirror the relationship of the actors playing Jonathan and Nancy. What’s more, if there’s any beloved character marked for death on this show, my money’s on poor Steve. The Duffer brothers originally intended for him to die in Season 1, but they were too charmed by Joe Keery to let that happen. (Aren’t we all?) There’s no reason for Stranger Things to pull its punches in the final season, and considering how meaningful Steve has been to the characters—as a love interest and babysitter—few deaths would hit as hard as his. And, by process of elimination, Steve’s demise would clear the way for the series to end with Jancy intact. In honor of Steve, maybe there will still be RV road trips in Nancy’s future—only with Jonathan at the wheel.
House of R Rewatches ‘Stranger Things’
Should Hawkins Be Nuked From Orbit?
It’s not a great sign for this fictional Indiana town that the lede of a Time magazine feature on Stranger Things’ final season starts: “Matt and Ross Duffer have been dying to destroy Hawkins for a decade.” The Duffers have done a pretty good job of it already. Television’s deadliest town since Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Sunnydale, Hawkins has already been ground zero for immense devastation: The Starcourt Mall burned down, the Mind Flayer turned citizens into mindless zombies and Cronenbergian biomass for its physical form, and Vecna created a rift between Hawkins and the Upside Down that locals believe was a 7.4-magnitude earthquake. By the end of Season 4, many folks are leaving the town for good as helicopters swarm the area:
Hawkins was already doomed, and now the creators of Stranger Things are gleefully talking about unleashing hell on the streets in Season 5. Not even Zohran Mamdani could save this place. We know that the town will be under military quarantine, which gives serious “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this!” energy since Hawkins Lab is the reason everyone here can’t catch a break from the Upside Down. Nevertheless, it wouldn’t be an act of violence if the military beat Vecna to the punch and wiped Hawkins off the map: At this point, it’d be an act of mercy.
Danger, Will Byers
For all the horrible things that’ve happened in Hawkins, nobody’s had it worse than Will Byers. He’s barely gotten a moment of peace since the beginning of Stranger Things, when he was snatched by a Demogorgon and spent almost the entire first season trapped in the Upside Down. Ever since, Will’s been a character in constant turmoil, whether he’s being possessed by the Mind Flayer or having unrequited romantic feelings for his best friend.
While Will is more on the periphery in the fourth season—part of the gang rescuing Eleven from Dr. Brenner’s hidden lab—the closing moments of the finale indicate that he still has some kind of psychic connection to Vecna and the Upside Down. And from what we’ve seen about Season 5, things aren’t looking any better for our guy. The opening sequence of the premiere brings us back to the very beginning of the show, when a (de-aged) Will tries to escape a Demogorgon before he’s captured and brought forth to Vecna, who sticks a gooey tendril down his throat.
“You and I, we are going to do such beautiful things together,” Vecna says, which, combined with one of the Season 5 trailers showing Vecna pulling Will toward him, makes it clear that villain and victim are on a collision course. After everything Will’s been through on Stranger Things, you’d want nothing more than for him to get a happy ending. But as Vecna closes in on our heroes one last time, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Will’s story, like Hawkins itself, is destined to end in darkness.
