Will the Wise? More like Will the Sorcerer.
Volume 1 of Stranger Things 5, which is now streaming on Netflix, ends in a fist-pumping spectacle. With our heroes under attack by an army of Demogorgons, Will (Noah Schnapp) taps into an unlikely source to save his friends — his connection to Vecna.
Leaning on happy memories — like his makeshift fort, Castle Byers, and his friendship with Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard) — Will responds to Vecna’s (Jamie Campbell Bower) taunts by taking down the Demogorgons psionically. It’s a full-circle moment for the boy who was abducted in Season 1 and who had been controlled by the Mind Flayer in Season 2.
“One of the earliest ideas in [Season 5] is, ‘What if Will were able to harness this connection and use it against our villains?’ ” co-creator, executive producer, writer, and director Ross Duffer says. “We also felt it very natural to re-center the story on Will. He was the kid who was taken in Season 1, so it felt right for the story to come full circle. If anyone [was] going to be the key to ending Vecna, it needed to be Will.”
The big moment arrives just as Will accepts who he is, unlocking a new power within that gives him the potential to end the Vecna nightmare once and for all. “There is a lot that Will has been dealing with over the course of the four seasons prior to this — so many emotions and inner conflicts that remain unresolved,” co-creator, executive producer, writer, and director Matt Duffer explains. “So we wanted him to grow as a human and become a fully formed version of who he is. … And once he’s able to do that, he’s able to harness these incredible powers.”
So where do we go from here? Keep reading to delve deeper into the first four episodes of Stranger Things 5, along with what’s in store for our friends in the episodes to come.
Season 4 culminated with Nancy (Natalia Dyer), Robin (Maya Hawke), and Steve (Joe Keery) sending an injured Vecna into hiding after their fiery attack on the Stranger Things villain at his family home, the Creel House. So when Vecna resurfaces in Season 5 at the end of Episode 4, he’s a monster on a mission.
“We knew that when he arrived, we wanted it to feel like this huge moment,” Ross Duffer says of Vecna’s menacing walk through the military’s MAC-Z gate to the Upside Down — a moment inspired by Darth Vader’s memorable entrance in the 2016 film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. “The minute he walked out of that gate, you felt the power of Vecna. You felt how scary he was.”
With Will in his grasp, Vecna reveals his plan to refashion the world. To do that, he needs 12 children, which he deems the “perfect vessels” because they’re easily shaped and controlled. And it was Will, Vecna admits, who showed him what was possible when he took the boy as his first vessel in 1983. Now Vecna intends to use Will as his spy one last time.
But Will fights back, white eyes and all, in a moment that Millie Bobby Brown, who plays Eleven, says had her “gagged to the floor.”
Schnapp called it a dream that Will stands up for himself against the show’s big bad. “He’s such a walked-all-over character who never gets to [use] his own voice. Through the first few episodes, you see that he wants to [express] his opinion,” Schnapp tells Tudum. “Getting to be strong and direct and powerful is just so satisfying as an actor.”
The hand motion that Will uses to channel all that power was “originally supposed to be like an Eleven move” with his palm facing downward, Schnapp says. However, they landed on “this move of the outstretched hand [facing] up” as though Will is “pulling the powers from Vecna.”
Following the opening of the rifts at the end of Season 4, the military has placed Hawkins under quarantine. Secretly, though, officials have been conducting experiments on various Upside Down creatures in their shadow-dimension military base.
Leading that front is military scientist Dr. Kay (Linda Hamilton), whose focus is on finding Eleven. All the “cataclysmic stuff that is happening around her does not shake her from her mission,” Hamilton explains. Searching for Eleven is a full-time gig that leaves little time for niceties, so Dr. Kay’s relationship with her subordinates is fraught. She “treats them like they are insignificant unless they can bring her what she wants.”
Meanwhile, Lt. Col. Sullivan (Sherman Augustus), the no-nonsense military leader from Season 4, heads up a ruthless unit known as the Wolfpack. Living up to its name, the crew uses a powerful sonic weapon in Episode 3 that briefly neutralizes Eleven before Hopper silences it with bullets.
For someone with unique abilities like Eleven, it can “literally shut them down and paralyze them,” Frank Darabont, who directed Episodes 3 and 5, points out. “Nobody else can hear it, but those people with special powers can. It’s a very clever storytelling device.”
In Episode 1, we learn that Mike and Nancy’s younger sister, Holly (Nell Fisher), has been talking to herself, which concerns her teacher and parents, Ted (Joe Chrest) and Karen Wheeler (Cara Buono). As it turns out, they had good reason to worry.
Vecna has been appearing to Holly as an imaginary friend named Mr. Whatsit (also played by Bower), based on the beloved character Mrs. Whatsit from her favorite book, A Wrinkle in Time. To embody Mr. Whatsit’s friendly demeanor, Bower also referenced the fabled Pied Piper of Hamelin as well as children’s TV icon Mr. Rogers. “It's all a presentation, wrapped up in this gift box,” Bower says.
Introduced in Season 5 as Holly’s potty-mouthed bully of a classmate, Derek Turnbow (Jake Connelly) is the last person you’d expect to save the day — especially after he throws a fit when he realizes Joyce (Winona Ryder) and company have drugged and kidnapped him, and they fail to convince him that his imaginary friend, also Mr. Whatsit, is the bad guy. However, Derek changes his tune when his abductors protect him from the Demogorgon sent to retrieve him.
He uses his new “Delightful Derek” persona to act as an inside man, helping our crew smuggle Vecna’s potential targets out of the military base to safety. While Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) leads a group through the underground tunnels, Mike directs his own party through MAC-Z.
The leadership role, Wolfhard notes, comes naturally to his character. “Mike started as the dungeon master and someone who is always planning for disaster, planning for a really fun adventure, and planning to protect his friends,” he explains. “As the seasons have gone on, Mike has sort of deviated from that part of himself, and now I think, because it’s the final season, he’s gone back into Season 1 Mike mode.”
For McLaughlin, the crew’s rescue efforts are a role reversal. Back in Season 1, Lucas and his friends were all alone while uncovering a government conspiracy involving supernatural creatures from the Upside Down. “No one was there for us when we were going through the Demogorgon [stuff] in the Upside Down, and now we’re protecting these kids,” he says. “We’re protecting our younger selves in this way, and we’re going to bat for ourselves, but we’re doing it for these kids.”
For most of Stranger Things, Karen has remained unaware of the supernatural occurrences in Hawkins. But that all changes in Episode 2, when a Demogorgon comes for her youngest daughter.
The Wheeler matriarch unwinds with a bubble bath and a bottle of wine, which she breaks and uses as a weapon to defend Holly from the Upside Down creature.
Karen’s big moment came as a surprise to Buono, who had “no idea that this was ever going to be something I was going to be part of and get to do” before reading the script. “I was beyond excited that [the Duffer brothers] had written this for me.”
After the attack, Nancy is horrified to find her sister missing and her mother bloodied and unconscious on the kitchen floor. “I think Nancy kind of prides herself on having a plan and protecting [her loved ones], so that scene is really heartbreaking,” Dyer says.
Eleven, who had been training in the junkyard since Episode 1, slips into the Upside Down to track the Demogorgon that has taken Holly. “The second that Nancy looks at me, and she’s like, ‘Eleven, go in,’ Eleven doesn’t need much to want to go into the Upside Down. She’s been wanting to go in, so she’s ready.”
Both Karen and Ted, who were critically wounded in the Demogorgon attack, are rushed to the hospital, and Mike and Nancy are left reeling over the unthinkable situation. “I think there’s a lot of guilt [about] not doing enough to protect her family,” Dyer adds.
Episode 3 reveals that Holly is brought to the Creel House, restored to its pristine 1950s condition, in a strange mental prison she later dubs Camazotz — after the planet where evil resides in A Wrinkle in Time.
Back in Hawkins, when Will inadvertently taps into the Demogorgon hive mind, he sees through the creature’s vision — aka Demovision — that Holly and three other kids have been entombed in separate spires of what looks like the inside of a monster’s ribcage.
In Camazotz, Holly is carefree, convinced that Henry, aka Mr. Whatsit, is keeping her safe from the monsters that threaten her family. When she follows a mysterious map into the woods, where Henry had instructed her never to go, she’s surprised to find Max (Sadie Sink), not Henry, waiting for her.
Remember when Max fell into a coma at the end of Season 4 and Eleven was unable to sense her? There’s a pretty good reason for that: She’s been stuck in Vecna’s mental prison, hiding out in a cave system that he’s inexplicably afraid to enter.
Max almost escaped in a memory from the night that Vecna tried to kill her, but the portal to the real world vanished right as Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” stopped playing in her hospital room. After that, Vecna chased her through various memories before she landed in the cave, where she has since made a home.
Of her character’s surprising revelation, Sink thinks it’s “cool” to see where Max has been all this time, and how she “made it her own [with] this collection of things she found from memories” — even the clothes she wears. “The patch on her jeans is actually a piece of fabric from one of the shirts you see young Henry Creel wear, which is such a cool detail.”
In Season 5, Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) is grieving his friend Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn). The town believes Eddie was a murderer, but Dustin knows he died a hero and still proudly wears his Hellfire Club shirt in tribute. But Dustin is also picking fights with the school jocks, and his friends are concerned about his behavior.
When Dustin’s antics result in his missing the crawl, it spurs a heated argument with Steve in Episode 2. “Everybody is coping with the fact that Max is, for how they see it, just gone from them. And he’s not really helping his friend through that,” Matarazzo explains. “It feels like if he puts himself in harm’s way, then he’s making up for the fact that he couldn’t do that to save Eddie.”
Steve is “doing the best that he can,” Keery says, “but he’s being overbearing and not being super understanding.”
Keery found it fun to play up that side of their dynamic, “because the relationship isn’t just happy-go-lucky all the time. It kind of brings a new dimension to the relationship for me. … And it’s all rooted in a real place. It comes from a place of me wanting to help my friend.”
Nancy and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) are still very much together, but things between them are complicated.
“The most important thing that’s going on right now is all this chaos and turmoil and fighting Vecna, [so] there’s some distance between them,” Dyer says. “There are some things that need to be said that haven’t been said. So they’re on different pages, and the hope is that they can at least get on the same page.”
When Eleven enters the mind of Lt. Robert Akers (Alex Breaux), she sees that the military has been holding something — or rather someone — behind a steel door in Dr. Kay’s greenhouse. Given the level of secrecy and security surrounding this “Kryptonite,” Eleven believes that mysterious someone is Vecna.
But when she and Hopper infiltrate the military base, she is shocked to find her “sister” Kali (Linnea Berthelsen), not Vecna, on the other side of that door. Kali, aka Eight, who El first met in the Season 2 episode “The Lost Sister,” was also raised by Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine). But unlike Eleven, she wields the power to create illusions.
What the military had planned to do with her, however, remains to be seen.
When Will taps into Vecna’s power at the end of Episode 4, it “changes the game” for our heroes, Matarazzo says. “I think that puts us on more of [an even] playing field. I’m sure that’s objectively terrifying to Vecna.”
“We have two Elevens,” Wolfhard adds, and Matarazzo notes that the prospect of two super-powered friends is “so badass.”
Vol. 2 of Stranger Things arrives with three new episodes on Christmas Day, followed by the finale episode on New Year’s Eve. Find out when they premiere in your part of the world here.
But before you unwrap those remaining episodes, revisit Seasons 1–4 of Stranger Things and take our superfan quiz. And keep checking Tudum for more Stranger Things updates.
