At the end of Stranger Things 5 Volume 2, your favorite nerds clear a small but important hurdle in their last stand against Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower): They make it through the heavily guarded MAC-Z gate with the whole party intact. 

But that victory is short-lived as Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) feels uneasy about the sacrifice her sister, Kali (Linnea Berthelsen), has asked her to make. 

“At the end of [Episode 7], there’s a sense of dread or uncertainty that pervades,” series co-creator Ross Duffer says. “There’s a look and a moment between [Eleven] and Kali where it seems as though Eleven has agreed to Kali’s plan to stay in the Upside Down when it explodes. So, even if they are to succeed, there’s a big question mark in terms of what’s going to happen to Eleven.” 

Meanwhile, at the Creel House in Camazotz, Vecna (aka Henry Creel) has gathered his kidnapped children to cast a powerful spell that will set his ominous plan in motion. 

In the last Stranger Things episode — The Finale, arriving on New Year’s Eve at 5 p.m. PT — the crew faces the most powerful darkness it has ever known. Keep reading for a deep dive into Volume 2 of Stranger Things 5, now streaming only on Netflix. 

What is Vecna’s ultimate plan?

Henry reveals in Episode 4 that he intends to reshape the world using 12 children, whom he deems the “perfect vessels” because they’re easy to control. To remake the world, Henry wants to merge Hawkins with another world called the Abyss. 

This plan requires a tremendous amount of energy, and that’s where the kids come in. When Vecna first took Will (Noah Schnapp) back in Season 1, he channeled his thoughts through the boy to amplify his power. Now he’s going to do the same with Holly (Nell Fisher), Derek (Jake Connelly), and the other children he kidnaps at the end of Volume 1. 

In Episode 5, Henry frames his sinister plan as a last resort to save the world. “An evil darkness is spreading across not just Hawkins, but the whole world, and soon it will be too late to stop it,” he tells the children in Camazotz. He compares the darkness to the “black thing” in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time — the classic novel Holly is reading throughout Season 5. Henry notes, “Just as the black thing threatened Meg’s family, so does the darkness threaten yours. But I believe I have found a way to defeat this darkness.”

After traveling “far and long, beyond our dimension,” Henry says that he’s discovered another world that is like Earth — only free of monsters and darkness. “It is the light,” he says. Like the character Meg in A Wrinkle in Time, the 12 children he handpicked have special powers. These powers are dormant and can be awakened if they all work together. When the kids channel this energy they can draw in the new world — “the light will expel the darkness” and their loved ones will be saved.  

So, what exactly is the Upside Down?

Throughout Stranger Things, our beloved Hawkins crew assumed that the Upside Down was an alternate dimension opened by Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine), where terrifying creatures like Demogorgons, Demodogs, and Demobats call home. That notion is flipped, well, upside down at the end of Episode 5 when we learn what it really is. 

“It’s not another world. It’s a wormhole,” Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) tells Steve (Joe Keery). “A bridge between two points in time and space, between our world and another.” 

What’s the Abyss?

The Abyss is an alternate dimension connected to Earth via the Upside Down, a kind of interdimensional bridge. In Episode 7, Dustin names this other world after the realm of chaos and evil in Dungeons & Dragons. 

The Abyss, not the Upside Down, is where Eleven banished Henry after eviscerating him in the Rainbow Room in Season 4. Henry would have remained lost had Dr. Brenner not forced Eleven to search for him in a sensory-deprivation tank known as “the bath.” When Eleven eventually made remote contact with the Abyss, the Upside Down was formed. Ever since, “Henry and his monsters have been using it to cross right back into Hawkins,” Dustin explains in Episode 7. 

It is the other world that Vecna plans to merge with Earth.

What is exotic matter? And what’s on the other side of that giant flesh wall?

In the 1983 film Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, rebel forces find it difficult to attack the Death Star II because it’s protected by a giant energy shield powered by a shield generator. In Stranger Things, Dustin initially believes the flesh wall surrounding the Upside Down is Vecna’s version of that — powered by Vecna’s dark magic — and that the giant sphere above the lab must be the energy shield generator. 

What he learns from Dr. Brenner’s journals is that the sphere isn’t made of dark magic after all. It’s actually composed of exotic matter, a single source of energy holding that flesh wall together. In other words, that sphere is the power source keeping the whole Upside Down intact. Destroying it would mean wiping out the wormhole, along with everything and everyone in it.

So, what’s on the other side of that massive flesh wall? Nothing. Or, as Dustin puts it, “death.”

But why didn’t the Upside Down fully collapse? 

When Nancy (Natalia Dyer) shoots at the sphere in Episode 5, she sets off a sonic blast that is absorbed by the wall and results in everything in the wall’s path being sucked into a void. At the same time, parts of Hawkins Lab start melting, turning into gray sludge, including the rooftop that Nancy and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) were standing on.

Eleven, Hopper (David Harbour), and Kali evade being pulled into the black void — unlike Steve’s cherished BMW — when Eleven creates a force field that clears a path for them to slip through a rift and back to the real world. 

Still, the Upside Down remains. That’s because the exotic matter “wasn’t completely destroyed,” Dustin notes, but it was “very clearly disturbed.” 

How does the crew plan to stop Vecna?

Defeating Vecna is the toughest challenge our heroes have ever faced, and it’s not just because he’s a walking nightmare. As Mike (Finn Wolfhard) points out, the crew must figure out how to “get 2,000 feet in the air, find our way into the Abyss, free Holly and the kids, and kill Vecna — all before our worlds merge.”

After Hopper proposes an impractical plan involving kidnapping someone to fly a helicopter, Steve comes up with a bold idea that the crew later calls “Operation Beanstalk.”

Since they can’t reach the Abyss from the tower — the only way to access that other world is through the Upside Down sky — he suggests they let Vecna draw the two worlds together and wait until the Squawk radio tower pokes through one of the rifts, so Eleven can make her move. “She does her meditation thingy, enters Vecna’s sick mind, and ambushes him,” Steve explains. That would stop the spell, halting the worlds from moving, and creating a “beanstalk” where our heroes can climb into the Abyss to rescue the kids. 

Keery, who plays Steve, thought it was “fun” that his character plays such a critical role in the final plan. “My character is usually an observer in these scenes and is usually a piece of the puzzle, but not necessarily the person who’s coming up with the plan.”

Matarazzo calls it an important moment because “Steve never really believes that he’s very smart, and I don’t think that’s true.”

To get around the issue of Eleven being too far away from Vecna, Nancy floats the idea of using the bath at Hawkins Lab in the Upside Down, which is right underneath his lair. Max then volunteers to guide Eleven through Henry’s mind since she knows it inside out, and Kali offers to follow Eleven into his mind to help her fight their brother. 

And it’s Dustin who formulates the last part of the plan: On their way out, they plant a bomb near the exotic matter, set a timer, and escape the Upside Down. When the bridge collapses, so does everything with it, including the Abyss, the Mind Flayer, and all of Vecna’s monsters. 

What does Dr. Kay want with Kali? And why is she after Eleven?

In Episode 5, Kali details how the military murdered her friends, took her captive, and shaved her head — a moment that Berthelsen asked the Duffer Brothers be acted out on camera. The Stranger Things co-creators added the head-shaving scene to the script, and co-department head of hair Brynn Berg performed the cutting of Berthelsen’s tresses in the episode. “I know this is not an easy thing to do,” Berthelsen notes. “We had to do it in one take, so it had to work.”

Kali also reveals that Dr. Kay (Linda Hamilton) kept her alive and drugged in an effort to restart Dr. Brenner’s secret government program by infusing pregnant women with Kali’s blood. Although the children in Brenner’s original experiment received their powers from Henry’s blood, they were all “pale imitations,” so Kali’s blood just isn’t working.  

“Only one of us,” Kali notes, “was truly like him.” Eleven. Dr. Kay needs Eleven to create more super-powered kids, which is why the military scientist is so desperate to find her. 

But destroying Dr. Kay’s lab along with the Upside Down is only a temporary solution. Dr. Kay will only replace her lab, Kali says, and killing her would just lead to another scientist replacing her. Kali believes that if Eleven runs away with Mike as planned, the military will eventually find her and use her blood to create more children, opening up more gates and more worlds in a vicious cycle. The only way to stop it, she posits, is for them to stay on the bridge when it blows up. They must vanish along with the Upside Down.

What happened to Max and Holly in Camazotz?

After being chased — and nearly caught — by Henry through a few unsettling memories in Camazotz, Holly and Max (Sadie Sink) stumble upon an old shaft just beyond the cave and right into the traumatic memory that keeps Henry at bay. 

In this vision, they see a frantic scientist shoot an 8-year-old Henry in the hand out of fear, believing that someone has sent the boy after him. Before he can fire off a second shot, young Henry fights for control of the gun and ends up bludgeoning the man to death with a rock. 

Following the faint sounds of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (a Deal with God)” behind a wall of boulders in that shaft, Max and Holly dig their way through and find an exit in a familiar place: the red void. Max, realizing the portal showing Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) carrying her on the other side is her way out and not Holly’s, offers sage advice. 

“Music isn’t the only way back,” Max says. “You just need something that connects you to the real world.” Something like Holly the Brave, the Dungeons & Dragons figurine that her brother, Mike, gives to her in Volume 1. 

What makes this moment special for Sink, who plays Max, is that the pair share an “intense journey” in the first two volumes of Season 5. “To pause at such a climactic point and have Max express to Holly everything that she’s picked up on about her and give her that little pep talk, it meant a lot,” Sink says. 

Does Max finally wake from her coma?

Yes! After nearly two years of being comatose, Max opens her eyes and Lucas is right at her side. 

McLaughlin recalls that just before filming Lucas and Max’s emotional reunion, the energy of the room had shifted. “I remember Shawn [Levy, the director] calling action, and then the energy switched, and then I looked into Sadie’s eyes,” he says.

When they finished the scene, “everyone was quiet. Then Maya [Hawke] and Amy [beth McNulty] started crying. Then Sadie [Sink] started crying. Then I started crying. Everyone just felt the presence of what we brought to the table.”

Wait, where did Holly end up? Is that where the children are being physically held?

After escaping Camazotz, Holly wakes up in the Abyss, the alternate dimension that’s connected to Earth by the Upside Down. Holly and the other children are entombed in the spires of what’s called the Pain Tree, where they’re being pumped with Mind Flayer particles through vines that are attached to Vecna and the giant beating heart above him. 

What Holly sees outside the Pain Tree is just as horrifying: a stormy yellow sky and a seemingly endless terrain of rocky canyons and boulders. 

When Vecna chases after Holly, she slips through a rift and falls through the sky into the Upside Down. But Vecna catches her midair before she hits the ground and returns her to the Pain Tree, placing her mind back in Camazotz. 

Do Nancy and Jonathan break up?

There are things between Nancy and Jonathan that have been left unsaid since Season 4, and they haven’t been on the same page for quite some time. But when Nancy fires a shot that disturbs the sphere, the pair end up trapped in a room rapidly flooding with gray sludge and finally have that long-awaited conversation. 

“They assume, understandably, that that’s the end,” Shawn Levy, who directed Episodes 6 and 7, says. “They end up having a [moment] filled with a level of honesty that is an all-timer of a Jonathan–Nancy scene.”

Nancy admitting she hates the band The Clash spurs Jonathan to reveal that he hates reading her articles. That opens the floodgates for even more confessions, like that Jonathan never applied to Emerson College (which Nancy already knew about) and that Nancy didn’t visit him in California because she needed space. 

In one last confession, Jonathan shows Nancy the engagement ring he’s been carrying inside a John Coltrane cassette and offers a different kind of proposal: to not marry him. 

“I tried to convince myself that this would somehow fix everything, but it was just gonna make things worse,” he says, “which is why it has been sitting like a cannonball in my pocket for the last two days. So, what do you say? Do you accept my un-proposal?” 

Nancy accepts, and it’s after Jonathan tosses the ring away that they notice the sludge has solidified. They survived, but the same can’t be said for their romance. 

Do Dustin and Steve make up?

The tension brewing between Dustin and Steve reaches a boiling point in Episode 5 when they argue over Steve’s lack of support for Dustin’s shield-generator theory. When Steve brings up Eddie (Joseph Quinn), who died in Season 4, their verbal fight escalates to a full-on physical altercation. 

“Deep down, the reason you’re so goddamned pissed is because you know the truth,” Steve tells him. “Eddie wanted to play hero, and he made a dumb call, and he got himself killed.” That sets Dustin off, and he starts swinging at Steve while Steve desperately tries to calm him down. 

It’s clear that the arguing buds still care about each other, though, when Steve attempts to traverse a giant hole in the unstable Hawkins Lab floor to rescue their friends, and Dustin begs him not to do it. “You’re always trying to get yourself killed, and I can’t let it happen again,” Dustin pleads, earning a hug in return. 

Later, when Dustin hands Steve the sphere and shield that had belonged to Eddie ahead of the final battle, Steve apologizes for the awful things he said and admits he was angry because he missed his best friend. Dustin’s offering is “like calling a truce,” Keery notes. It gives Steve a “moment of pause,” which spurs his apology. 

Matarazzo says the heart-rending exchange is a “needed moment” between the pair, allowing them to “express to each other what they’ve wanted to say for a long time.”

How does Mr. Clarke finally learn about the Upside Down?

In Episode 6, Erica (Priah Ferguson) and her “babysitter,” Murray (Brett Gelman), recruit science teacher Mr. Clarke (Randy Havens) to help build another telemetry tracker so they can find Dustin and the others in the Upside Down. 

Still out of the loop about all the supernatural occurrences in Hawkins, Mr. Clarke pinpoints Dustin’s exact location to Hawkins Lab. When Eleven uses her powers to remove the metal plate covering a rift, Mr. Clarke not only learns about the Upside Down firsthand but enters the interdimensional bridge with the crew to locate the rest of the party. 

Does Will come out to his friends?

Yes, and it's prompted by a major setback. When Will once again taps into the hive mind, he briefly takes control of Vecna — only for Vecna to boot him out, sending him into a comatose state. While physically unresponsive at the Squawk, Will’s consciousness is trapped in Vecna’s mindscape, where Vecna uses his “spy” to pry into Will’s head, with the aim of discovering Max’s physical location so that the monster can find and kill her. 

Opening up to his mother, Joyce (Winona Ryder), in Episode 7, Will explains how Vecna got into his mind and used his secrets against him. To beat Vecna, he needs to confess something not just to his mother, but to the entire crew.

“I haven’t told any of you this because I don’t want you to see me differently. But the truth is, I am different,” he says. “I’m like you in almost every way …. I don’t like girls. I mean, I do. Just not like you guys do.” Will harbored a crush on someone, he says, “even though I know they’re not like me,” before realizing that person is “just my Tammy” — a callback to Robin’s speech in Episode 4 about having a crush on her classmate Tammy. 

In Vecna’s mindscape, the monster showed Will a future where some of his friends are so worried that it makes him feel “like something’s wrong with me,” so he pushes them away. Other friends simply drift away, leaving him all alone. And while none of that had actually happened, the scary thought “just felt so real.”

After Will’s moving speech, he finds unwavering support from his friends and family. One by one, they promise he won’t lose them, and they all come together in a giant group hug. 

Will’s coming out was “something that we’d been building to for a very long time,” Ross Duffer says. “It’s important that he comes to terms with this, and once he’s able to do that, he’s heading into this final battle with a confidence and maturity that he hasn’t had before.”'

Does anyone die in Stranger Things 5, Volume 2?

Nope! While there was a close call with Steve in the Upside Down Hawkins Lab, the entire party makes it through Volume 2 alive and ready to take on Vecna in Episode 8.

While you await that final battle, stream the first seven episodes of Stranger Things 5 now. Then tune in for The Finale on New Year’s Eve at 5 p.m. PT. Find out when the last episode arrives in your part of the world here. And test your knowledge of Stranger Things with our superfan quiz.